ABSTRACT
The border state of Kansas provides an environment to analyze racial segregation practices in a geographical area that had no prehistory of slavery. It is much easier to understand why the Deep South maintained and justifi ed a system of segregation with its preexisting institution of slavery-one oppressive practice was built on the ruins of the other. But it is much more diffi cult to understand why racial segregation, though limited, became the “status quo” in places like Topeka, Kansas, which had no history of African American enslavement.
