Attorney Charles Scott, his childhood friend, asked him to join the roster of parents who would become plaintiffs in the organization's case against the Topeka Board of Education.
In the Topeka NAACP case, parents involved were concerned that their children had to be bused many blocks away from their neighborhoods when there were schools nearby.
President Dwight Eisenhower then appointed former California Governor Earl Warren, who set a schedule for the cases to be reargued in late 1953.
He had been riding with fellow pastor Maurice Lange en route to Topeka where his wife and daughters were visiting her parents.
On October 26, 1992, after two years of work by the Brown Foundation, President George H. W. Bush signed the Brown v. The Board of Education National Historic Site Act, establishing the former Monroe Elementary School, one of the four formerly segregated African American elementary schools, as a national historic site.