Chapter 50: Fading Transmissions from a Republic of Ruins, Part I
The Sumner School
Topeka, KS
** Note: This is part I of a mini-series that I’m releasing on the blog (adapted from an immersive audio theatre piece, currently in development) about my recent road trip across the country. I managed to visit a plethora of abandoned spaces and decided to focus on writing about four of them.
The more that All-American Ruins has unfolded, the more I’ve started to realize that the overarching story isn’t about abandoned buildings at all; it’s about the ghosts that haunt a republic, spirits that wander across its underbelly. I’ve spent over five years taking adventures into America’s ruins, trying to unlock the reason that I feel so drawn to them, magnetized, why I’ve been so obsessed with this feeling of anemoia all these years.
You might say I’m concerned about the state of America’s past, present, and future and the spectres that live inside all three.
Recently, I drove across fourteen states — New York all the way to California — ultimately turning around and ending the journey in Colorado for a residency at Green Box Arts where I began to build an audio theatre piece called Fading Transmissions from a Republic of Ruins. I’ve dreamt of creating something like it since this project launched. The piece is inspired by Audium Theatre’s The Sound Hour, Simon McBurney’s The Encounter, and Carl Sagan’s brilliant book Contact, a story that really sparked the conception of All-American Ruins all those years ago.
I remember watching the movie adaptation of Contact with my brother and father when I was ten and feeling mesmerized by the opening sequence in which the audience engages with a history of radio transmissions blasting out into space — and how those signals don’t simply die, but rather, continue to echo out into the universe. The soundscape of that opening segment always struck me as deeply moving and a tad terrifying; this notion that, very simply put, radio waves never really die — that our history perpetually reverberates out into the distant unknown, across time and space, into and out of blackholes, wormholes, and the empty, vast skyscape that we call the cosmos.
As my friend Jeremiah and I caravanned across this whitewashed nation of ours, a proud hoarder of architectural litter, I started to wonder, “Is All-American Ruins, at its core, actually a story about abandoned buildings? Or, is it more so a fable about what we try to abandon — in ourselves, in our collective memory, even in the Constitution — and what refuses to stay lost?” After all, since radio waves are a form of electromagnetic radiation, traveling at the speed of light, without their own natural expiration date, then they too are like ghosts. In that, then, too, republics — much like our own, and their ruins — are also, in fact, simply just ghosts. The voices of our past, indistinguishable from extraneous noise, rising from our structural graveyards, up into the heavens.
Take the abandoned WPTF radio station in Raleigh, North Carolina. They transmitted their final signal in 1987 — incidentally, the year I was born. The building itself sits abandoned now, the ghosts of DJs like Bill Jackson still imprinted on the walls, in the windows, even coming up through the antennas that blasted his voice out into the universe for decades. “Good morning and welcome to our FM listeners, now joining us. You are listening to radio stations WPTF & WPTF-FM in Raleigh, NC…”
Or, how about Russia’s ongoing UVB-76 shortwave broadcast first attracting global attention in the early 1980s? Thought to be a Russian military station, its purpose has been speculated for years. It comes from somewhere, and every once in a while, you’ll hear a voice, spouting unintelligible Russian, of course. However, our short attention spans have resulted in a fading collective interest, the mystery and intrigue dissipating with time.
Not all transmissions come through antennas, however. Some come through courtrooms, our judicial system, or what’s left of it. Take the Sumner School in Topeka, Kansas — the scene of the crime, per se, the foundation for the story of Brown v. The Board of Education. You’d think that we’d celebrate it as a symbol of progress, the moment the United States Supreme Court abandoned “separate but equal” as a national ideology. Except ideas don’t disappear because the highest court in the land tells them to. Oftentimes, they go underground or haunt us. You see them in modern school segregation numbers that look almost identical to the late 1960s; in redlined districts that still haven’t recovered; in the funding gaps between majority-white and majority-Black schools, book bans targeting anything that mentions race, gender, science, or really, any subject that makes certain people uncomfortable, including history like Brown v. The Board of Education.
A civil rights victory, certainly, but the social reality? We’re still tuning that dial to get the frequency just right.
And therein lies the irony. The Sumner School in Topeka, Kansas? The building itself, the one that should exist as proof of progress, is abandoned now. Boarded up. A ghost of its own making. Even critical history can be tuned out like a radio signal. When I learned the depressing state of this famous building, I wondered if a visit, even to its fenced and security camera-laden outside, could help me rediscover that frequency.
***
I’m standing in front of what looks like any slightly gothic American elementary school: two stories, faded brown brick, decorative stone bas-reliefs carved across its exterior. The building, tucked just far enough off the road but still well within earshot of I-70 in Topeka, was never remodeled before its closure. The neighborhood around it has changed, but the structure itself hasn’t. Most of it dates back to 1936, during the Art Deco period.
The architecture is — for lack of a better term — creepy, starting with the bas-reliefs of children that line the edges of the entire building. In some contexts, the unique method is beautiful, carvings of stone where the images rise slightly from the surface, like a painting trying to step forward. Here, in the context of America’s civil rights history, though, it’s unsettling: cherubic faces with no pupils or emotion, arranged in triumphant, glorified poses — and yes, though you can’t really tell, it’s exceedingly likely that they’re all white. Above the largest panel of carvings, three young girls stand together. And on the south wall, guarding the old schoolyard, hovers a saintly-looking woman posted up in the same style. They look proud.
The grounds are completely overgrown. The only signs of life are the four security cameras, each one aimed at one of two remaining front entrances. Ring doorbell cameras tacked directly on the door in no particular order. On the south side, a rusted fence runs the perimeter, woven with brittle fall weeds and dried vines. The adjacent lot is nothing but dirt, gravel, cracked asphalt — a playground swallowed up by the sinkhole we call time.
You wouldn’t know it by looking at it, but Sumner is one of two famous primary schools in Topeka. But unlike the Monroe School — the site that in years after its closure attracted history buffs and tourists to the story behind Brown v. The Board of Education — the Sumner School, despite having been designated a National Historic Landmark in 1987 — again, the year I was born — rarely gets mentioned even though it played a direct role in the case. In an interview conducted in the 1980s, Linda Brown (the daughter of Oliver Brown, the plaintiff whose name alphabetically appeared first on the law suit) discussed the pertinence of the piece, stating:
“At the time the suit was filed, Topeka was partially integrated. There were integrated neighborhoods, there were integrated high schools, integrated junior high schools. The only schools in town that were not integrated were the elementary schools, and this was the reason that the suit was instigated. [The group of plaintiffs] were concerned about the distance that the child had to go to receive an education. My father believed very much in right, and he felt that it was wrong for Black people to have to accept second-class citizenship and that meant being segregated in their schools, when in fact, there were schools right in their neighborhoods that they could attend — and they had to go clear across town…”
It was the Sumner School that refused to admit nine-year-old Linda Brown even though it was only a few blocks from her house in the Westboro neighborhood of Topeka. The Sumner School sits at 330 Southwest Western Avenue; the Monroe School sits 21 blocks away.
“I remember the walk as being very long at that time. In fact, it was several blocks up through railroad yards and crossing a busy avenue… I remember walking, tears just freezing up on my face because I began to cry because it was so cold… many times, I had to turn around and run back home.”
To deepen the already ironic story, the Brown family home — once at 511 West First Street — is now just a connector off I-70. The house was demolished when the interstate went through in the late 1950s, only two years after the Brown v. The Board of Education decision. By then Linda was already well past elementary school; she never even got to see just one day in a Sumner classroom.
Today, I’m gawking at the front of the building again more than five years after I first stumbled on it during a solo road trip in the COVID summer of 2020, months before I published my first All-American Ruins blog post. Initially, Iwasn’t particularly curious about Sumner.
It wasn’t until I realized it was abandoned that I felt the weight of its history. A building that caused such a ruckus, which set off a national transformation, now sits fenced, boarded up, and ignored. I was emailing with a local historical society, and even they called it an “eyesore.” (Apparently, some Christian church in California owns it now, and they’re not very communicative about their plans for the building.)
What still gets me is how something so monumental boiled down to something so basic: here’s a kid who just wants to attend the school closest to her home, a familiar place that doesn’t require surrendering precious time to walk an hour instead of a few minutes, all because of her dark skin. Over the years of producing this body of work, I’ve acknowledged that, sometimes, demolishing a painful structure can feel healing — like the Broward Women’s Prison, which housed serial killer Aileen Wuornos along with many others, including hoards of people failed by the systemic racism this country was built upon, a history that you cannot rewrite, no matter how hard you try.
Then, there are buildings like the White House, structures many Americans cling to, collectively, as symbolic, patriotic, architectural heirlooms. There’s even a lawsuit now, yet another launched against the current regime. The recent demolition of the East Wing feels devastating to some while others, some of the descendants of the Indigenous people whose land was stolen and replaced with a giant white house, might shrug and say, “So what? That patch of green was ours first.”
Seeing the Sumner School still standing here, however, boarded up, fenced off, covered in security cameras, makes me feel equal parts sad and vindicated, as though I’m right to see the irony in all of this. I don’t know if it should be demolished or not. Maybe?
Linda Brown, who passed away in 2018, would be well into her 80s now. I found a childhood photo of her recently; she looks so sweet, so sensitive, so deeply human. Listening to the wind hum through the fence and the old brick, I can’t help but feel that her story still lingers around here on this quiet city block. Not in the bas-reliefs or the architecture. In the silence.
In what wasn’t allowed to happen.
