On May 31, 1902, William Reynolds sued the School Board to allow his son entrance into the new Lowman Hill school claiming that the separation of children by race in the classroom violated the provision in the Kansas state constitution requiring the establishment of a uniform system of schools. His attorney also argued that the segregation law violated the rights of children under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Attorneys for the School Board argued that the school district was in compliance with the standard of separate but equal facilities for the races that had been set by the Supreme Court in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Decision. The Board also argued that they had received petitions from African American parents who wanted a school closer to their community but they had not asked for an integrated school.
The case eventually came before the Kansas Supreme Court which in March 1903 held for the Board of Education claiming first class cities were allowed to operate separate elementary schools. The court dismissed Reynolds’ suit saying that “the system of educational opportunities, advantages, methods and accommodations” in Topeka schools “was uniform, constant, and equal” whether attended “by blacks and whites commingling, or by them, separately.” Finally, the court said that Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution did not supersede Kansas law. The intent of the Amendment was not to “abolish distinctions based upon color” or force “a commingling of the races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.”

Although Reynolds lost, this case was one of the first cases to challenge the separate but equal doctrine. Future cases in Topeka demanding equality in education continued to be brought before the courts until the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark Brownv. Board of Education decision in 1954 declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional 51 years later.

The march was organized by Rev. Clarence LaVaughn Franklin, the father of singer Aretha Franklin, and Rev Albert B. Cleage. Franklin and Cleage and other organizers for the Detroit Council for Human Rights (DCHR), planned the march. Cleage originally wanted the march to be all-Black and led by Black people only. The Detroit branch of the National Association for the Advancement for Colored People (NAACP) threatened to boycott the march if the DCHR did not include local white leaders in the march.The Detroit Walk To Freedom had three goals. The first purpose was to speak out against segregation and the brutality that civil rights activists regularly experienced in the South. It also addressed concerns in the urban North, including employment and housing discrimination and de facto school segregation. The march was intended to raise funds and awareness for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The date of June 23, 1963, was chosen as it was the 20th anniversary of the Detroit Race Riot of 1943.