Oral History Interview with Karen A. Hiller

Karen Hiller

ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW WITH

KAREN HILLER

TOPEKA, KANSAS

FEBRUARY 25, 2020

INTERVIEWED BY RACHAEL BLEDSAW

AUDIO FILE # BRVB022520 – KAREN HILLER

DOWNLOAD TRANSCRIPT (.docx 146kb)

EDITORIAL NOTE

This document is a rendering of the oral history interview as transcribed by the interviewer from the audio recording. Although significant effort was made to provide a verbatim transcription, for easier reading of the transcript, verbal pauses, repetitions of words, and encouraging words from the interviewer were omitted. In addition, Ms. Hiller, who reviewed the original draft of this transcript, made minor modifications to the verbatim transcript of this interview. For the original interview, please refer to the audio file.

ABSTRACT

Karen Hiller, member of the Brown v. Board/Sumner Legacy Trust and Topeka City Council member, discusses the struggles to save the Sumner Elementary School site and include it in the wider narrative of the Brown v Board of Education National Historic Site. She provides direct insight into the sale of the school to a church and the reactions and sentiments of the wider community to the sale, use, and care of the property including the pending lawsuit between the church and the community. She also talks of the site’s impact on the city of Topeka’s national identity.

PERSONS MENTIONED

Bishop Portee, Sam Brownback, Zaire Thomas, Mary Thomas, Menninger brothers, Fred Phelps, Linda Brown, Roger Brooks, Donna Rae Pearson, Sherri Camp, Sherda Williams, President [George W.] Bush, Cheryl [Brown Henderson], David Smith, Congressman Jim Clyburn.

Karen Hiller, 2020

ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW WITH

KAREN HILLER

Interviewer: This oral history interview is for the Administrative History of Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site in Topeka, Kansas. The interviewer is Rachael Bledsaw with Outside the Box, on behalf of the Midwest Regional Office of the National Park Service. Interviewed today is Karen Hiller, with the Sumner Legacy Trust. The date is February 25, 2020. The interview takes place in Monroe School at Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site, Topeka, Kansas.

Ms. Hiller, as you may know, the purpose of an Administrative History is to document the development of a unit of the National Park system, both physically and administratively. Oral histories are one way to get to information that might not otherwise be available from documentary evidence. We try to get as much information as we can, from as many different perspectives as we can, in order to craft a robust narrative of the development – of the developmental history of the park. This will be used by future park administrators to inform their decisions as they navigate future developments. However, I should inform you that not all the information we gather will be included in the final Administrative History. That depends on how the information advances our understanding of the park development. But we do appreciate that you are giving your time to share your experiences of the development of Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site to further this project.

So, to begin:

Hiller: I should probably insert a correction. The nonprofit that I lead is called Brown v Board Sumner Legacy Trust. And so, if you were wanting to find us in corporate status, or if you’re wanting to find our website or our Facebook listings, for instance, it would be BvBSumnerLegacy.org or Brown v Board Sumner Legacy Trust.

Interviewer: Okay. Thank you for that correction.

Hiller: You’re welcome. We go by BvBSLT which is kind of National Park Service style long, but it works.

Interviewer: Alright. So, to start, can you -- I do know how to spell both of them, but, for the transcription, can you spell your last -- state your full name and spell your last name.

Hiller: Karen Hiller. It’s K-A-R-E-N H-I-L-L-E-R.

Interviewer: Thank you. Alright. You are associated with the Brown v. Board of Education and Sumner Legacy Trust in what capacity?

Hiller: I am the City Council woman for the city council district, District One, which includes our downtown and all of the close-in neighborhoods, and, as such, includes both Sumner School – Sumner Elementary – and Monroe. And I got involved in creating – helping create Brown v Board Sumner Legacy, what is now BvBSLT, because, when – I was first elected in 2009, and the sale of Sumner to the church in Los Angeles occurred. The offering was made in 2008, and the actual sale occurred in February of 2009, right before I was elected. And that neighborhood had a very active neighborhood association. Sumner is in the middle of that neighborhood and is critical to that neighborhood’s decline, heart, and future welfare, in whatever order you want to look at that. And it was clear that saving and coming up with future uses and saving a building of that size and importance – but that size alone – was beyond the scope of a mixed to lower income neighborhood group. So, I worked with them to put together people from that group as well as some others who could focus just on Sumner. So, my first deep dive, really, was into that. I’ve lived in Topeka since 1974, however, and so have certainly followed the stories of this – the Brown v. Board story and that history and heritage here, and then the progression of Monroe. And to some extent, arm’s length, the decision-making process of deciding – of how the schools went. You know, I had – my children were born in 1981, 1984, and 1991, and they went through the Topeka public schools, and the closing of schools and the repurposing of schools was all happening during that time that I lived here as an adult. So, certainly followed all of that and then up through the decision of whether it would be Sumner or Monroe that became the actual national park site. And the subsequent development of, you know, the kind of, again, arm’s length, the national – the historic landmark status being bestowed on each of them and that decision. And then, of course, along the way – then, Monroe’s actual development as a national park site and all the things that were around that. My career has been in housing – affordable housing in neighborhoods, and so was very involved in that way with neighborhood associations and central Topeka neighborhoods as well. So, certainly followed the development of the area around Monroe, the decision for – of the city to kind of kick in, spruce it up a bit when the president was coming for the – and all those kinds of things. I also, personally, in what I call first gen. I was – I’m – was born and raised in Delaware, which was one of the other plaintiff states, and so I had the experience of growing up as the first – I was born a couple of months before the decision came down, and so, as a first gen going through that transition as an elementary, middle school, and high school student, was – in Delaware, one of the other states, brings it – brings it alive for me.

Interviewer: So, you were kind of associated with this whole process – granted, at a distance – kind of throughout your whole life! Right?

Hiller: Yeah. Civil Rights era – in the middle of that!

Interviewer: Alright. So, just discuss what is the Brown v. Board Sumner Legacy Trust and what are its goals.

Hiller: It was initially organized to save Sumner School. At this point, it – oh, there’s some more formal-sounding words in its bylaws, but, overall, it’s – especially being stuck on Sumner and not being able to get it, we partnered and assisted with maintaining it and so on, at first, with that church, but that fell apart. So – but, nonetheless, working with them and in the community here to come up with future uses, we were very focused towards those future uses being related to its heritage and so on. So, the expectation was that we would do the best to get – that we could – to get uses in there that would, as I put it, have their legs under them, that it would be self-sustaining. But looked again, with the church in L.A., and people in the neighborhood, and people around the city at first – at both – everybody wanted to see neighborhood-based uses. But, you know, we don’t need another community center. We don’t necessarily need another church, and there were certainly needs that people had. If there was entities that could go in there that could help the neighborhood then, fine, let’s get them in there to have some sort of interpretive functions in there. And so, we explored those with various sources. And then looking at something that was mission related that could actually pay the bills and ended up having been introduced to a gentleman who’s been working in diversity and inclusion activities in communities and corporate settings, both – in the context of both diversity and inclusion and innovation for his career. And looked at being able to develop with – likely with his assistance, some global interpretive activity that would be based in Sumner, that would be largely privately supported. With that, then – and then we expected to be very engaged and having Sumner as the private partner to the public national historic site in the ways that partnerships occur in other communities with national historic sites. And, therefore, looking at what we’ve simplified as a mission today –statement today as helping to – let me make sure I say it right – all of a sudden, I’m having a brain – to – helping to tell the story and advance the agenda of the Brown v. Board case and save Sumner school. And so, with Sumner being as stuck as it has been – now, by the sixtieth anniversary of Brown v. Board, we were still in communication with the church and collaboration. So, we put together a sixtieth anniversary event in partnership with the site here [Brown v. Board National Historic Site] – a big one, for Topeka, that was, of course, interpretive in nature with oral histories and a legacy – a legacy walk from Monroe to Sumner – kind of the reverse –it was a Ranger-led walk, and there’d be picnics and music and opened at least the front of the building and had volunteers that we had trained to tell the story and take people on tours around the building. I mean, even outside that building, there’s so much story to tell. But we were able to let them at least inside the lobby, and so that attracted teachers and students – Sumner was open until 1996. It was – actively as a school, so there are a lot of people in this community, still, that taught at or went to Sumner but including people that were there back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. And so that was – it was pretty special. We then did just some tours on the sixty-fourth anniversary, and then, on the sixty-fifth, we did eleven days’ worth of interpretation and celebration of the sixty-fifth anniversary using a variety of partners. The – certainly, Brown v. Board was actively involved in all of that. But we had the Mulvane Art Gallery at the – at the university. We had an art day, and they pulled three pieces out of their collection that were related and did a gallery talk. We ran tours on the – bus tours on the – both the Brown v. Board story as well as an arts and murals tour that looked at the diverse murals around town. We had – we kicked it off with a lunch in the capital for the still surviving students and teachers of the time. And the governor came and joined. And it was the Kansas African American Advisory Committee helped to do that. We had a film day at the Jay - at the historic Jayhawk Theatre. We had a documentary that the public television station did, interviewing the plaintiff-era folks, and it was fabulous, and it was introduced, publicly, here, Wednesday evening of that week. We did a symposium with the plaintiffs at the beginning of the week, telling their stories, and we did one with the – with more of a community and “What are we going to do in the future?” focus on the actual 17th. Then we had a celebration outdoors, here, at the wall with, kind of, music, hip hop, spoken word. We had a lot of fun with that. It was a lot of work. But we were the ones who have really jumped in to more affirmatively tell the stories and set some goals to move that agenda. From the sixty-fifth anniversary, we were pretty intentional about who we chose to be the facilitators for the second symposium and had them meet afterward to evaluate how that went and to talk about whether they thought there was a potential, and the right time, to move that agenda forward in Topeka, in a community-wide, very intentional way. The answer was yes. We met three times over the summer – this was just last year – and, on October 16th, that group agreed to form a new group under the auspices of BvBSLT. It – sort of independent, but we’ve already got the nonprofit, and have the website, and all that kind of stuff, and – named Topeka United: A Movement. And they are about to, on Friday, launch a Facebook page. And we are working on a website that would list – that would have an opportunity – first, an About Us, about the Topeka United group – will have a page for social compact, for people to pledge to support advancing that agenda, pledge for an action commitment – for individuals or groups to take an action commitment. It will have a page listing organizations and initiatives that exist community-wide of any size. That, of course, will be live and can continue having additions to it. We will collect the oral histories that have been done about Brown v. Board itself, particularly Topeka, in one place, or at least references to where you can find them. And then we will also have a page that will begin to collect the other videos and stories, whether – the stories, whether they are audio, video, or written. That will pair with the – with the Facebook page, which will, then, also link to our city’s – they call it Topeka 365, – but the Visitor’s Bureau site – to make sure that everything that’s happening that’s related to that agenda and this story – that there’s a one-stop shop, where people can find it and talk about it, which would be the Facebook page. But that they are also – the ones that are community-wide in nature, anyway, and appropriate for that – are also on the – on Topeka 360.

Correspondingly, when we get that going, which should all happen shortly, looking at developing partner pairs program. The idea, back to that listing of organizations and initiatives, in fact, is to – is to celebrate the – all the things that are going on and the events, because there are – it’s all over the place in this community, but it hasn’t really been pulled together, so that everybody can find it, participate it, is inspired to do their own, whatever they want to do. It’s pretty New-Age in terms of the vision of it, but just, fundamentally – and this something that I’ve learned over time – you just make a list! You know, just make list! Start there! So.

Interviewer: So, with Sumner Elementary School specifically, just want to put – I have a few questions to focus on that, and then we’ll go back to the wider [questions].

Hiller: Sure.

Interviewer: Discuss some of the issues with the purchase of Sumner Elementary School.

Hiller: There actually is a chronology that you can find that you might want to have for your records and your report. And I’m not going to be able to name off dates and – exactly, but the city had – let’s see, it closed in ’96. Then, it needed a future use. It’s already on the A register – again, you can check the details. The school board either gave it to the city – in a couple of iterations, it ended up owned by the public library, which was getting ready to do a huge expansion and need a place to put all their stuff while they were reconstructing the library. And so, the library owned it for a number of years and stored books and other library written materials in it. When they finished their expansion and renovation and emptied all of their stuff out of it, something needed to happen. I think, by that time, it was a – in Landmark [National Historic Landmark] status. I mean, along in there – it was 2002, I think, that the Landmark status occurred for both schools. Somewhere along the way, the decision – in there, the decision was made which, between the two of them, was going to become the national park, and it was Monroe, so Sumner wasn’t going to be the national park. So, after the library left, the city ended up with it. City worked with the neighborhood association and sort of informally looked to market for future uses. Somebody besides me would have to tell you all of the things, but there was a private school, a private Christian school, that wanted it at one point. And I think Heritage Christian was the first one that got a lot of publicity and it would have been perfect for them. The neighborhood really said – was excited about that, but they don’t have a park in that whole neighborhood. And the neighborhood wanted to have – be able – you know, well, could the neighborhood use the equipment for the kids? And the answer, as I understand it, and you can check – was no. Well, I didn’t know about that. And this is folklore, perhaps, rather than fact, but our mayor at the time was Black.

Heritage Christian is an all-White school. Things kind of fell apart, however you want to throw those facts together, and so they moved on and bought a different building and set up. Then, there was a gentleman who has converted schools into housing – affordable housing. He had already done a project up – he’s – really successful company over many years. But he had taken Curtis Junior High up in north Topeka and converted it to housing. His model, to make his numbers work, was to redevelop the school building itself but also develop other property – other, like, townhomes on the property to give the – to hit the numbers. So, again, neighborhood’s involved, city’s involved, people get pretty excited.

Neighborhood didn’t want any other – there were certain strong, vocal people in the neighborhood who didn’t want further density in the middle of the neighborhood, because that really is right in the middle of the neighborhood.

Also, I don’t know how much kicked in about the historic preservation status and being able to add those on the site, because the whole site and the building are the property, so that one didn’t go. Then, there was a lady, an African American woman, whose – was - whose husband was pastor of a pretty thriving church – still is around and still pretty thriving – he’s retired but they – anyway. And she wanted to do a charter school. And she’s very engaging, very good at running around and talking to people and getting them excited about it. And, really, the idea that an African American woman would start a school for at-risk kids was very appealing to a lot of people. But she went door to door, you know. And so, you know, you go out, and there’s a lot of people that used to go to school there or – oh, there’s one gal who lives probably one neighborhood over from there who’s still mad because, I guess, when they built Sumner – think about how long ago that was – they tore down her dad or grandfather’s house or something like that.

But still very tied to Sumner and so had a lot of support but needed to raise money. I actually saw – somehow got cc-ed on some of the stuff. She couldn’t put a business plan together to save her soul. And it was just, sort of, “God will provide, trust me!” That really didn’t work. So – and what I got copied in on was – just, like, for posterity, I’ll trust your discretion here, you know. You know, one of the funders, you know, who was prospective – really great funder – and it was just, like, “Uh-oh, this isn’t quite ready to go!” So, I don’t know what all else happened, but that did not advance. She had also been a principal for the school district and had lost that position for reasons that, of course, were not disclosed.

So, whatever that – and she’s a super lady! She’s actually doing a charter school. They built a new church right next door to the original Stone Church, that their church is, and she’s actually doing a small charter school right now. But kind of with her own money in a free building, and it’s kind of working. But she didn’t – she wasn’t able to get it. They just – and I was not – I’m not privy to the inside – to the city side on all that. But, anyway, they felt like she could not prove up. And at that time, the city was requiring each of these prospects – part of the deal that they were talking about, and this could have been why that one fell apart, I don’t know – was that they had to have the building up and going within three years, or it would revert to the city. That was the deal. So, whatever – however many other deals there were – so, it gets up to, like, 2008, and the city council – there were some city council people who were like, “This is nuts!” I was not on there, but I, you know, followed that, you know, “Let’s just – we messed around with this thing We haven’t come up with anything Let’s just auction it off to the highest bidder and be done with it.” And the councilwoman and the district at the time, which I was not aware of, but I learned later, was – grabbed on to that – was in the lead. She didn’t live in that neighborhood, she lived in the nice, big-house neighborhood, but, anyway, so they did that. They auctioned it off. The only bidders were the gal that had wanted to do the charter school and this – representatives from a Pentecostalist church in south L.A. They didn’t say that, exactly. It was a couple – an African American couple who were living at the rescue mission – the homeless shelter, who – but he had a lot of experience in construction, which – think he’d done day labor, you know, whenever he could get work. Anyway, they were the two bidders. And as they bid – and I was not there; this is as the story goes, you know – it was clear that somehow somebody was backing this guy from the rescue mission. And every time the lady from Topeka went up, they were going to outbid her. So, the bidding stopped at $89,000 cash on the barrel head, and, when that was settled – and they eventually – the deed of sale – oh, and, within no time at all, the pastor from south L.A. appears, so – as the financier of this whole deal, so, in whatever order technically happened, the sale was consummated. It did not have the three-year prove up or reversion provision in it – and there might be some record somewhere of discussion about that, but it did not have it. It did have three deed restrictions in it, and those relate back, actually, to a prior arrangement that you can find – when the school was first sold. They got some historic preservation money from the state, and there was a ten-year requirement on that money. And so the three deed restrictions reflected – at least two from that earlier agreement – the three deed restrictions were that they – and that document’s available pretty easily – were that they had to allow tours, interpretive tours, understanding those might be arranged – by arrangement, based on whatever the owner’s situation was. They had to allow the neighborhood association to meet there – that was the new one – and they had to at least – you know, kind of per preservation standards – at least consult with the State Historic Preservation Officer whenever they were considering doing any repairs or improvements to the building. And also, then, at that time, the – that the building was sold, was – the paperwork was signed by the gentleman from the rescue mission, who then quit-claimed it over immediately to Bishop Portee at Southside Christian Palace in L.A., at – you know, at one closing – or there might have been a gap of a month. But anyway, they basically had a two-step closing. At which point, the city was out of it.

Interviewer: And that’s the current status of the neighborhood filing a suit, or is –?

Hiller: The neighborhood eventually filed a suit to challenge the fact that it had been ten years, and the church had still failed to meet the deed restrictions. The preservations ones, as we all know, are what they are. But the neighborhood had never been able to meet there, and there was no interpretive activity happening there. They lost in the lower court, and there is information that you can get if you want to go that deeply into it – into exactly why. There was a technicality, of course. It’s the U.S. It went to – well – and part of it was that the lower court said that the neighborhood itself didn’t have standing because – and so it was the city who had sold them that property with the deed restrictions, but the neighborhood was to be the beneficiary of those, and so you could make that legal argument about who had standing. Interestingly, the state never got involved, but it was the state who actually put those first deed restrictions on them. There were a few conferences about that subject along the way. It turns out that the state had never ever enforced the deed restrictions on anyone else. They just always put them in contracts. So, that one is on appeal again. It’s a pro-bono attorney who is taking it up. It went to the court of appeals, so it’s going – it’s – the request is to go to the – I believe, the Kansas Supreme Court. So, the idea there was to jog something loose and get something done. The church did come and roof it in between when the depositions were done and when the judge – the first judge’s decision came down. (Laughs) There were various folks from Topeka that tried to engage the people from the church in conversation when they were here. And, actually, a couple of them got a little chat out of them, but no response and one person was – went to L.A. afterward and tried to follow up. And, you know, called, and didn’t get an answer, so there really has been virtually no communication with the church since 2015. The closest we got was that the governor’s – we had been – what was it for? What was happening? Sumner and Monroe – and Sumner was to hopefully part of it, you know – when the UNESCO consideration first came down, it was, ideally, to include Monroe and Sumner and the courtroom, which is in our post office downtown. And so, the people were out for a visit – I think that’s what it was – so we’d arranged a tour through the post office and to see the courtroom and the judge’s chambers. Those are really tremendous. They’re awesome and a great piece of the story. And so, we’ve got a whole bunch of people going through because we invited other people, both so the Georgia State people could meet them as well as – it was – you don’t get a chance to go through the building that often, so. This is the inside story on it. This is how these things go. So, the reporter from the – one of the – the cameraman from one of the big TV stations that was here was so excited about it, and his next stop after he left the courthouse was to – the post office – was to go over to the governor’s office for something, and so he’s going “blah blah blah blah blah!” and our governor at the time is very much interested in preservation and – as well as the story and offered to see what he could do, and – because, at that point, Brown v. Board Sumner Legacy Trust had been designated as the bad guy because – there’s all sorts of story to tell on that. But the governor got hold – they actually answered the phone to the governor. But – I don’t know if you followed Sam Brownback’s story, but he, at that point, had become this super conservative Republican governor who decided that maybe Kansas could be the experimental – you know, could show the world how you could cut this, and cut that, and cut the other thing, and have things work out really well, and they really hadn’t. And he was fairly unpopular, but was popular in Washington and was – had a – had an appointment as the – what is he? It’s like the National – he’s our Ambassador for Religious Diversity, or something like that, all over the world. And he was to go to L.A. on a Friday, and his appointment came in on Wednesday, and he didn’t go. We were that close. So.

Interviewer: Do you know why a church in L.A. wanted Sumner school?

Hiller: We visited a lot. The bishop – we had a good relationship there, at first. We spent a little time figuring out how to approach him because, when the bishop – when they first bought it – when they came to do the paperwork, everybody in town was mad. I mean, that the other bidder hadn’t gotten it, and was very popular, and who was this guy? And so, he kind of got run out of town. He was – he was no – didn’t come off as a hero, and he didn’t like that very much. So, we spent a little time figuring out how to approach him. And basically, truthfully, said “You know what? If it was, “Get this bought or tear it down,” you know, we should be grateful. We don’t understand this, exactly, but let’s just thank him for stepping in and doing that and see if we can build a relationship.” And so, we did do that.

And he actually came out to Topeka twice to visit with us and brought a group with him each time: came in July of 2013 and again in November of 2014. And so, we asked him – I mean, on the phone and then in person, and it turns out that he – you can still find his bio from his funeral program online if you want to know the details of his background. But I want to say it was Mississippi or Alabama – was born down there, but when he was young and just first kind of getting started, he did itinerate ministry here in the Midwest. Also – and so – and his past – he’s very knowledgeable about race relations and global issues. None of us ever found out exactly how it came to his attention, but it turns out that – Zaire and Mary Thomas is the name of the couple that were at the rescue mission.

Apparently, Mary’s dad was one of his deacons – one of his close advisors at the church in L.A. Now, I – still, that seems like an awful long shot, but it came to his attention. And what he said – now there were people who thought he was sort of a charlatan and just somebody who was being opportunistic, and then there were people who thought he was legit. I’m on the group B here. I was impressed with every one of the people in the group. I liked them. You know, you kind of get the eyeball to eyeball thing, and he just said, “I learned about it,” and he had a pretty thriving, by all reports, anyway, church – a fair amount of cash rolling around, or whatever. He said, “People don’t understand – if people in Topeka don’t understand that that story is global and that not just Monroe, but Sumner, are global beacons, I couldn’t let that go. We needed to save that building.” That’s the short version, and, you know, we learned a lot after that about how he ran his business and what his experiences has – had been, in doing missionary ministry in Africa, and so on. And those all keyed into how he actually made decisions and did things. But – or what his view – what his view was of what would be done – I mean, for us, it was, you know, you had all these people that wanted to do community things, and we needed to get the legs under it, and, you know, for him it was, “Get that auditorium fixed up; let’s start having services and events here!” you know. (Laughs) He’d gone to L.A. after his term here, which, I think – I think I’ve got this in the right order – his itinerate ministry thing – but he went to L.A. thinking he’d become an actor. And then got the call and decided to be a pastor instead. So. But you know – but he was in his mid-eighties by the time he bought this building. And his structure at the church had always been very – he made every decision in that church. He had a tight group of just, like, three advisers who were his people who he consulted with on things, but he, alone, made decisions. He signed every check; he made the decision on every penny that was spent. But, at that point, he was old enough that he – you know, he needed naps, and he’d forget, and he’d miss – he’d lose the mail, you know, and you had to kind of loop around and catch up on things and so on. So, things were literally and figuratively just slowing down for him. And so, the idea of somehow – you know, he had the vision of – he – his vision was to have just this hopping place full of good Christian people who were having services and doing wonderful things for the community, but it was kind of unformed, and it – the best we could tell, they had never had a grant. They had this vision of raising money like other people do with government grants and private support, but it became clear, pretty soon, that he had no idea how to do that and that the closest they’d ever had was, they’d run a – run a day care center – or an after school program, I guess, out of the church for a year or two with, I think, probably some federal money that, you know, I – hopefully, it went just fine, but those things can kind of come and go. And that that – so, the experience of how to – they’d hired somebody – after they bought the building, they hired somebody to do a proposal for our city’s historic preservation money, and it was pretty nicely written except that the content of exactly what they were going to do with the building was pretty slim. (Laughs) They had nice pictures and nice stuff about the building, but they – I wrote the grant. You know, we met in 2014, that second meeting in part just to try and come together again. We’d kind of realized what the pace was going to be at that point, but it was like, “Well, if – you know, we’ll do whatever we can to at least get the building mothballed so that it doesn’t deteriorate. But we are limited, in terms of asking for money, and certainly raising money, because we don’t own it. So, we will partner with you, we will get volunteers in here to help do this, but, at a certain point, it – something would have to change.” And we brought them together in 2014 because it was – like, we, at this point, had written a grant to the state, but the state requires that you prove up – you got to have – you got to do what you said you were going to do. You’ve got to finalize your whole construction plan within thirty days, update your plan, and nail it, and you have to have enough money to pay for everything. You have to have enough cash flow to pay for everything yourself. You have to get it done. You’ve got to turn in your reports, and you get reimbursed. And so, again, I’ve described the structure. It was like, “Okay, you come, and we’ll talk about future uses of the building so that we’re still syncing up, but we’ll also work on how this grant’s going to go, because, if we get it, we got to manage it.” And we had a partnership – we had a formal and general partnership agreement with them, and we had a partner – a signed partnership agreement just for that grant. But, when things fell apart – you know, he apparently had had somebody else trick him or fraudulently sign his name to something in L.A. that had caused great expense, legal issues, and so on. And so, he was – and his advisors as well – were very concerned. You know, at one point, his number – I was talking directly with his number one guy, and he said, “Well, you know, there is a big problem, and it had to,” – he said, “I probably should let him tell you himself.” So. And that never – it just never worked out. So, I don’t know exactly what it was, but there was a fear of that, and so, somehow, something flipped over a line. And there was this fear that, you know – so he’d also signed that he would put the match money up, and so we’d said, “We’ll set up an account. We’ll – but you need – we need the cashflow for the whole thing to make this work. We don’t have any money!” And, somehow, some switch flipped in there, and he lost confidence. And so, we didn’t get the grant. We wrote back and said – a couple of neighborhood guys and I went to the thing, and we said, “You know, what we figured out is that everybody who did get the grant” – we’d never applied before – generally it takes two or three times in Kansas to get money. But they thought, since it was Sumner, maybe we’d have better luck with the team. We didn’t get it, and when we went and watched, we saw that everybody else had used volunteers and bake sales or whatever – just hustled stuff together however they could to get their buildings mothballed. And what got funded – you know, they – we – they had a little deal where everybody who got funded kind of talked about their story and so on, and you can learn that. And it was like, “Uh-oh, well, maybe we better just get this thing mothballed ourselves then, and then apply again next year.” And so, I’ve done that. I was involved in saving the Buchannan School, which was one of the other all black schools, and so we put non-profits in there, and it’s in the middle of the neighborhood, too, and so, “Been through that,” so, we were like “Yeah!” So, we’d lined up six weeks’ worth of volunteers. We knew – we’d had all these volunteers to help with the sixtieth anniversary. They were gung-ho. They were passionate about Sumner, you know, and we were all already to go, and said, “You just give us that same seventeen thousand bucks, and we’ve got a roofer who will do it for materials only, we’ve got a tuck pointer who may not charge at all, but, otherwise, it might just be materials. We’ll get the volunteers to fix the windows,” and, at that point, there was vandalism, and, you know, “We’ll fix all that.” It just shut down. So, that was – and then, he passed away that November. He went to Africa. It was – that was Spring, like, April, and then he went to Africa again in August and passed away. He was just tired when he came back – never really recovered and passed away in November. That was it for Sumner.

Interviewer: Okay. What were your first impressions of Brown v. Board when you first became associated with it?

Hiller: When you say Brown v. Board, do you – you mean this site?

Interviewer: Yeah. Sorry.

Hiller: Beautiful, well done, empty. (Laughs)

Interviewer: How do you think the public perceived the park when it first opened, and how has that changed?

Hiller: (Pause) Beautiful, well done, empty. (Laughter) There just hasn’t – you know, and well done in terms of depends on how deep a dive you do, but – I mean, the building is beautiful. They did a wonderful job of renovating it, but also the heating and cooling system was very state of the art, very brilliant in terms of minimizing expenses and intrusion in the building. I mean, they just did a great job with it. But, often, it’s pretty quiet, yeah. So. That also inspired us, of course, with BvBSLT to say, “Oh my gosh, if, somehow, this synergy of having other activities in the community and having Sumner – if what we’re missing is the other leg of the story, we just have to do this.” So.

Interviewer: And that leads us beautifully, actually, to: do you see any parallels to the early days of efforts to get this site going that you saw with Sumner Elementary?

Hiller: (Pause) Different times, you know, and certainly it was different with both buildings coming up, then. Now, one done and one rotting. I mean, as the story goes, it’s a challenge to do every single one of these buildings. I mean, if all you’re doing is just raising money, it’s hard. But then you add the interpretation and the stories and, you know, for – certainly, part of the challenge that we faced and said, “We want to tackle this,” is that – and this is for Topeka. As far as I’m concerned, this story, Civil Rights – Civil War to Civil Rights, is Topeka’s heart. I mean, this is Bleeding Kansas here. We’re talking about everybody who came here came for opportunity – for freedom and opportunity – whether it was the Pentecostalists in their – the white Pentecostalists in their covered wagons, African Americans after the Civil War, Mexicans coming up on the railroad, the mental health – the Menninger brothers who opened a mental health – a world class mental health center. And they – both they, as shrinks, as well as their patients, were welcome here. Gay people moved here to get – people moved away from the coasts for freedom and opportunity. Gay people settled here and had jobs and families without any hassle for years until we had Fred Phelps. And I always throw in even the hippies, you know, came to find a place for freedom and opportunity. That’s who we are. And so, I think some of the challenge with – not so much these buildings and that history, but the overall interpretive stuff is that it’s an unfinished agenda. You know, to own it. And other cities are doing that now. We did our intercity trip to Montgomery in the fall, you know, where you take a pretty difficult story and you say, you know, “We’re not going to varnish it anymore. We’re going to dive into that. We’re going to talk about it, and we’re going to –” and, in Montgomery, they’re doing that. In Topeka, as we talked about, it was like, “You know what– we can do this. Why not here? If we’re going to – if we’re going to take this all the way down the line and do it right, why not here? It’s Topeka. It’s the home of Brown v. Board.” So, that – you know, so, by the time we started trying to save Sumner, you know, we are plugging in in 2009. We are way down the line with all that stuff. And there was also – I’m – and I don’t say this negatively at all, but the Brown Foundation was there. And their choice was to really focus on the plaintiffs, and Linda especially, because she was part of the family, and it was Brown, for crying out loud, and it’s Brown v. Board and all that. And with that – and that being the private partner for so long, just telling the story and going around the country and telling the story was what they did well. And they did it well. But the community engagement for interpretation and doing – they also would do speakers, bring in speakers. That was what they did. But that wasn’t helping to address the issues, advance the agenda, or really engage the whole community in embracing that story. And I – and I don’t say that – that’s fine, that’s just how it was. But, when we came in at – in 2009 – or 2011, I guess, is when we started really working on Sumner, we were way down the line with these issues. And looking back – and as a city – I mean, I mentioned what I did about our heart, but, truthfully, this city had gone through, in 2008, a process of Heartland Visioning. It had been stuck for fifty years. The air base pulled out in 1970, and nothing had happened since – you know, forty years, at that point. Now, it’s fifty. You know, no growth, no direction, just sort of there. Always a nice place to raise a family, but just there. No economic development, no population growth, just there. And so, it was like – so, with – in 2008, Heartland Visioning came in and polled people from all over the community. I give the then-head of the Community Foundation credit for kind of getting that going. It’s a – you know, kind of like, “What are we – who are we, and what do we want to be when we grow up?” That kind of thing. And you begin saying, “Well, we should do this, and we should so that.” And you develop pillars, and you develop volunteers, and you say, “All right!” And it was very successful. But one of the things you do in the part of that is [unintelligible] “We don’t have a, like, slogan or logo or anything like that,” you know. “Who –?

We’re the capital city. Okay, that’s good, but, you know, what else? What’s our heart? What’s – you know, what’s something we could hang our hat on about who we are?” And they couldn’t come up with anything. And a – and a year or two later – by this time I was on the council – they said, “Well, that’s kind of silly.

Let’s pull together a hundred people that are leaders and stuff them in the library in the big room for five hours, and surely, they can revisit this, and we’ll come up with who we are and what our heart is. Couldn’t do it. And about five years later – four or five years later, they bring in a guy that’s an – that’s an urban – the – downtown Topeka were wanting some more ideas on what they could do with downtown and bringing spirit, so they bring in Roger [Brooks], and he’s, like, an image and marketing guy. And he said, “This is what we do.” So, first, you have to figure out who you are, you know. “So, we’re going to do a survey – all these people, and find out what’s special about Topeka, and sometimes it’s something that’s not really particularly developed, but we’ll figure it out. It’s always there, you know.” So, he does all this stuff, and he says, “And what you – what you don’t do is say, ‘We’re just a great place to live,’ and you don’t say, ’We’re an event city.’ You come up with something, and, even if it’s aspirational that you got to grow into those shoes, that’s what you do.” Okay. He gets done, and he got pages and pages – I mean, they kept everybody’s – that online survey, and you could check off boxes and fill in blanks and all that stuff. And he goes, “Well, you know, just not quite seeing anything.” And we’d said – because I’d been – I’m involved in this, and – “Well, this is our heart.” “Oh no, that can’t be.” And we said, “Well, what do you mean? Salem’s the witch trials and stuff like that. Why can’t we be Freedom and Opportunity for Everybody, or something?” Nah-nah- nah-nah-nah. So, he walks out, and it’s not even tentative. He says, “You just - you’re an event city. You really have a lot of events and you could do more events.” And we’re like, “Didn’t you tell us at the beginning that we couldn’t be that?” Anyway, off he goes. We have a new plaza downtown that we’re about to open, and we’re duly doing events, and we’re doing a good job of it, but – so that has – that has brought even more focus to this. If this is who we are, and this is our heart? Why is it that we can’t embrace that and run with it? We are, just now – the gals that did the tours for us were engaged to do a tract with the African American travel writers and Donna Rae [Pearson] and Sherri [Camp]. Sherri’s on our Board, and they’re both at the library. They’ve been engaged to do tours! You know, we’re working on our Visitor’s Bureau to, like, do tours all the time because, after all, you know, they still are kind of stuck in the mold of being a destination marketing group instead of a tourism group, and – changing directors of that right now, and so we’re working on it. And they just now committed that they would send their tourism – their lead tourism gal to Atlanta with Sherda [Williams – Superintendent of Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site in Topeka]. And with – and we got the guy from planning for the historic district to all go to the UNESCO convocation, so we’re loading them up here, trying to get them to meet other people and do it. So, I ran with that a little bit, but, hopefully, that’s useful. Sorry. I’ve been living this for ten years, so.

Interviewer: Yeah. You’ve touched on a few, but looking directly at the Brown v. Board of Education site, were there any delicate or difficult situations regarding development or administration of this site in particular?

Hiller: Well, I wouldn’t – I don’t know about the site. I know the city got involved and really helped spruce up the neighborhood, the environs, if you will, when it was time to have Governor – President Bush come and actually inaugurate the site or whatever that term was. What was that, 2005?

Interviewer: Dedication?

Hiller: Yeah, which was 2005. Which was also the fiftieth. Must have been 2004, because it was the fiftieth anniversary of the case as well. There were a lot of community events there and so on. I’m sure you’ve gone into it otherwise that that kind of limited focus of the Brown Foundation became problematic in time. And people had a hard time handling that, but I think we’re working our way out of it. You know, we, as BvBSLT – I mean, the thought is, there’s room for all of that. You know, we’re wanting to develop community at this point – I mean we’re very late comers, but, you know, Cheryl’s still out – is really looked at as a resource all around the country. She makes a wonderful presentation. She’s well networked. And so, to continue doing that, it just – we needed – we needed the interpretation. There was just a void in working on the interpretation. And I don’t know how much that relationship kind of slowed the site itself from developing programming and other relationships along the way, you know. Again, we’re just, in a – in a – in a most collegial way, hoping to break through that with the things we’re doing now.

Interviewer: You’ve mentioned a few changes that the park has gone through. Discuss – if you could just discuss a few ways – a few more of this site in particular, when you first became aware of it and associated with it, how has it changed, how do you think it’s improved, or how do you think it –

Hiller: If you don’t have the proceedings, I would encourage you to get – I got invited to be part of a focus group. When – and it was probably around 2012 or ‘13, they were – they were looking at developing their interpretive programming. And I think David Smith was the superintendent at the time. I have to say – and I said then and have said many times since then, I think that was probably the best constituted focus group I have ever been in in my life. They had – and I’ve been in a lot of them, but they had – there were twenty or thirty people. I mean, not a huge group but very representative of the plaintiff days, of community people – it was a very representative group. And then the staff kind of said, “All right” – there might have been a facilitator. I don’t remember. Probably, because it’s Park Service, right? But it was, like, “Well, what should we do in terms of interpretive programming? Here’s kind of what we’ve been doing. What do we need to focus on to get people here and help tell the story?” Right? And what emerged out of that – and – was that the group said, “You know, you really have three different groups of prospective visitors. And they each are coming for different reasons, and you almost need to have this sort of tic-tac-toe board of how you would do that.” And so, it was out of the group that – well, what the staff was able to tell us was that they really had very few local visitors. That they were travelers. And that – but that, of the travelers, they were coming from around the U.S., and they were international. And so, part of the reason – I think that they – what they were looking for when we met was, “How do we engage more local people in this site?” So, out of that was, “You know, we really have these three different groups. Let’s split that up and talk about different kinds of interpretive activities and different ways to reach each of these different – three different –very different groups.” And I thought the group did – that the process went really well in that way. And it was – I think it was eye opening for all of us who were there, to go – have the “Ah-has” of, you know, this is different when you’re talking about attracting local people, either because it’s their heritage – their heritage, but also because they want their school kids to understand this story and to move the agenda forward. Nationally – and – but there’s a different way that you would reach out to a local group because they’re right there and had – so focusing on that. But then, nationally, to say, “That’s our national heritage, and that’s why people are coming.” But it’s part of a bigger story, and so being a national park helps with that because you’re kind of on the list, you know, with the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval and a sign on the interstate so people can turn off. But then, internationally – and I – by this time, they – we were already involved with the beginnings of the relationship with the church in L.A, – maybe it was even 2013 – and had – were, ourselves, becoming so much more aware that Brown v, Board, and Monroe, and Sumner, were global beacons. That, you know – and so part of that discussion was how nobody in town realized how special we were, you know. And, obviously, that city council who just sold off Sumner to the highest bidder, what were they thinking? You know? And giving the bishop credit, you know. It all kind of started to loop together for me and for those of us that were really immersed in the story as well as trying to add Sumner in and engage people in the community in really embracing this story. And, you know, even from just an economic development sense, if this is – if this is what we’ve got to offer, and we’re not capitalizing on it, what a shame! You know, we need people who want to live here and people who want to visit – that we’d like to have come visit. And if this what we have to offer, and we’ve been stuck for fifty years, why aren’t we doing this kind of thing? And now, of course, in the country, it’s – there’s such a focus on diversity and inclusion and so on, and Topeka has always kind of half-way taken it for granted. But, you know, the whole country is finally, sixty-five years later, as we talked about last year, coming to terms with the fact that, “So, okay, it’s been sixty-five years, an entire lifetime. How we doing?” And kind of exploring that and saying, “If it were that important, maybe we’ve got a little more work to do.” So, that – I, personally, have a study – or have copy of that study. I think my memory of when those lightbulbs just kind of went off as we went through it may be a little sharper than it appears in that – in that report of the interpretive plan that resulted. But it was – it was really quite an experience. So, I share that one, and you can ask me the question again if I didn’t really answer what you wanted.

Interviewer: No, that was – that was fine. We’re really just down to the last two questions. And these are a little more personal, but, regarding the work that you’ve done for Brown v. Board, meaning this site, what have you done that you are most proud? Or what do you believe is the most effective thing that you’ve done?

Hiller: Oh, I think we busted the whole thing open with the sixty-fifth anniversary.

Including – and I don’t know how your interviews have gone, but, you know, as we – we’ve really had a great relationship all along. But I guess the National Park Service is fairly structured, so it’s always, “Well, we don’t have somebody to do this,” or, “We can’t do that, and we can’t do the other thing. And we don’t have enough this or that.” And we just did it. There were four volunteers that put that sucker together! And so, they were like [stunned face]. Kind of blew them away that if you decide that it’s really important to do it, you just do it. It can work.

And, again, they were great partners, but they kind of, like, “Whew! Wow! So. And we – again, I’ve discussed a little bit earlier – were very hopeful that we can build that into a community really embracing and growing in a variety of ways by capturing that story and owning it a little more.

Interviewer: I think you’re right. Is there anything that I have not asked you wanted to talk about?

Hiller: Well, obviously I’ve been living this for the last ten years, really in depth. And it’s been my lifetime. It’s – another thing that has emerged recently that I imagine you know about is that I got a call because we’d written a grant to the National Trust for Historic Preservation about interpretive stuff about Monroe and Sumner that hadn’t been funded, but my name was on it. Congressman Clyburn, from South Carolina, had reached out to the National Trust for Historic Preservation – are you aware of this?

Interviewer: [negative noise]

Hiller: Okay – to see if there could be some kind of consortium put together amongst the five states. And we’re like, “Why not?” And, interestingly enough, again, they had made one round just into the individual states and then came and visited with us – more than just the folks here at Monroe – on the second round, here in October of 2019. But there isn’t really much happening in the other four states, either. It’s fractured, but we’re starting to pick up – now, again, I went to school in Delaware. My sister, knowing I’m involved in this, but otherwise just totally randomly, sent me an article that it turned out was written in 2008 of when they closed Claymont High School, which was the integrated high school in Newcastle County, Delaware, that was in the middle of the case. And the angst, and the neighbors, and the people talking. And so, this prospect, from an inter – from a – both an interpretive point of view and “Is this a way we can connect and grow,” like sister cities or something like that? Would having us with our five very different stories from before and where we are now, you know – we have two schools. Claymont’s is torn down – the one in – that the folks in Congressman Clyburn’s town in South Carolina – the Black school building is gone. And so, they don’t have those structures. And so, it – you know, it’s a new dimension for us to explore, you know. We’ve got them both and most of the Black element, and we saved most of the schools. And they were all beautiful. We know that that’s different about us than the others. But this – it’s another whole dimension of exploring relationships and story and being able to bring it back. You know, the idea of – we just got – Sherda sent me one yesterday, and it was somebody who was talking about Loudon County, Virginia – and – that they had kind of tackled some stuff there. And I’m just, like, “Well, even though we said we’re not going to do a symposium this year, we should have her come! This will be great!” You know, to just – just opening up all the ways that we can grow and – you know, part of what we’re doing with the – with the Topeka United and with the work that – you start to look around about how does change really occur? It’s not – just because you won the lawsuit or passed the Civil Rights Act doesn’t mean everything’s – you know, we’re there yet, so we can just go on and live, and it all works. So, you know, looking back at these fifty years, or sixty-five years, depending on which one you’re looking at, and at least for us, just saying there’s more to it than that. You can’t just go sit in a – this – hear a great speech and go, “That was good. I learned something there,” or read a book, the way we adults – we all learn is, we have to experience something. And so, building relationships and growing, which is, you know, we – as we’ve started moving forward with this, and then you sit back and go, “That’s just nuts! Why are we even trying?” But – and when you tie that back to Monroe, the fact that people along the way took the – you know, all the things that happened all way back then, but then took the time to save Monroe. I mean, of the five states, we’re the only one with a National Historic Site. Really? You know? And so, it’s pretty special what we’ve done, and it’s a beautiful place, but there are – there are a lot more things we could do.

Interviewer: Thank you. I’m going to go ahead and stop the recording now.

END OF INTERVIEW