Young girl at center of Brown v. Board case dies

Wish to go to school with white friends undid segregation.

Linda Brown wanted to go only to the Sumner School. But she was black, and the Topeka, Kan., elementary school four blocks from her home was segregated, open to only white students.

“I didn’t comprehend color of skin,” she said later. “I only knew that I wanted to go to Sumner.”

Brown, a third-grader who simply wanted to avoid a long walk and bus ride and join her white friends in class, went on to become the symbolic center of Brown v. Board of Education, the transformational 1954 Supreme Court decision that bore her father’s name and helped overturn racial segregation in the United States.

Peaceful Rest Funeral Chapel in Topeka said Brown, who used the name Linda Brown Thompson, died Sunday. Additional details were not immediately available. The Topeka Capital-Journal, which confirmed the death with her sister Cheryl Brown Henderson, reported that she was 76.

The most famous Supreme Court case in American history bore Brown Thompson’s last name almost by chance. Topeka, a city that was less than 10 percent black at the time of the case, had integrated high schools and had begun integrating its middle schools.

Her father — the Rev. Oliver Brown, an assistant minister at St. Mark’s African Methodist Episcopal Church — was just one of 13 plaintiffs who sought to ensure the city fully integrated the rest of its schools.

He was recruited by the NAACP, which had organized four other class-action lawsuits challenging high school segregation in South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware and the District of Columbia. According to the Brown Foundation, which promotes the history of the case, Oliver Brown was named the lead plaintiff “as a legal strategy to have a man at the head of the roster.”

Packaged together, the suits were successfully argued by an NAACP legal team led by Thurgood Marshall, who later served as a Supreme Court justice. The court unanimously ruled on May 17, 1954, that school segregation violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

“Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect,” the court said in its ruling, which overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine that had stood since the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson.

The decision paved the way for a gradual and sometimes violent integration of schools and other public facilities, although many schools in the South — and even in Brown Thompson’s hometown — were not fully integrated for years.

“I feel that after 30 years, looking back on Brown v. the Board of Education, it has made an impact in all facets of life for minorities throughout the land,” Brown said in a 1985 interview for “Eyes on the Prize,” a PBS documentary series on the civil rights movement. “I really think of it in terms of what it has done for our young people, in taking away that feeling of second-class citizenship.”