Written by Russell Ellsworth Lovell II, Drake University

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When people think about the time when Black people first began to integrate America’s public schools, often they think back to the 1960s.

But history shows the first court-ordered school integration case took place a hundred years earlier, in the 1860s.

In April of 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War, Susan Clark – a 12-year-old girl from Muscatine, Iowa – became the first Black child to attend an integrated school because of a court order.

The Supreme Court of Iowa issued that court order when it made its historic ruling in a school desegregation case brought by Susan’s father, Alexander Clark. This was 86 years before the U.S. Supreme Court issued the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, which ordered the desegregation of the nation’s public schools.

In the Iowa case, a judge named Chester Cole ruled that the Muscatine School Board’s racial segregation policy was illegal. The Iowa Supreme Court was the first court in the nation to say that segregation was unlawful.