Arizona judge ruled against segregation a year before landmark opinion in Brown

A year before the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education, an Arizona judge ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional.

Flashback: Carver High School, founded in 1926 on Grant Street south of downtown Phoenix, was at the center of that case.

• At the time, it was the only legally segregated high school in Arizona, according to the George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center, which now occupies the building.

Catch up quick: Three parents of Carver students filed a lawsuit against Phoenix Union High Schools and Junior College District in July 1952 after their children were denied admission to two of the district's schools the previous year because they were Black.

• One of the two lawyers who filed the lawsuit was Hayzel Daniels, the first African American to pass the Arizona bar exam.
• In February 1953, Judge Frederick Struckmeyer issued a permanent injunction barring the district from segregating Black students, writing in his opinion: "There are no second-class citizens in Arizona," and: "A half century of intolerance is enough."
• The ruling only applied to Phoenix Union and didn't affect various other segregated school districts in the state.

Zoom in: The ruling was appealed to the Arizona Supreme Court, which dismissed the case as moot that September following a vote by the school board to end segregation in the district and open its schools to Black students.

• The following May, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling, declaring school segregation unconstitutional nationwide.
• At the time, segregation was still enforced in at least a half dozen districts in Maricopa County and eight other communities in the state, the Arizona Republic reported the day after the Brown ruling.

Carver High School closed in 1954.

• A group of alumni bought the school in 1996 and turned it into a museum and cultural center.