Join history aficionado, Ralph Buglass, on February 2nd at 7:00 p.m. as we begin our celebration of Black History Month. One of the first successful legal challenges to school segregation occurred right here in Montgomery County in 1937. Civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall sued Montgomery County School Board and Superintendent Edwin Broome for equal pay on behalf of Willian B. Gibbs, principal and teacher at Rockville Colored Elementary School.
This little-known legal case has been called the first step in Marshall’s legal battle to have separate schools for white and black children declared unconstitutional. It took seventeen years before Marshall, the lead attorney, argued and won Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark decision before the Supreme Court. This illustrated talk details this remarkable local story and its national significance. Spoiler alert: his victory came at a tremendous cost to William Gibbs.
Presenter Bio: Ralph Buglass is a retired communications professional, Montgomery County native, and graduate of Winston Churchill High School. He earned a BA in American history from Cornell University and an MA in journalism from American University. Ralph has been a volunteer docent at the restored one-room Kingsley Schoolhouse in Clarksburg, an experience that sparked a deep interest in the early days of public education in Montgomery County. He was the 2014 recipient of a national service award from the Country Schoolhouse Association of America for his volunteer work.
Ralph is a frequent speaker for Montgomery History on a variety of local history topics and a volunteer researcher for Peerless Rockville, the nonprofit historic preservation organization for Montgomery County’s seat of government. In 2020, with Peerless Rockville, he co-authored Images of America: Rockville, a pictorial history of the city’s 250 years. He taught lifelong learning courses at American University, Johns Hopkins University, Montgomery College, and Frederick Community College.