The civil rights icon who helped desegregate schools

In September 1950, Linda Brown and her father walked a few blocks from their house in Topeka to Sumner elementary school. Because Sumner didn’t accept black children, 7-year-old Linda had been attending a school in a black neighborhood, a long walk and a bus ride away. “I didn’t comprehend color of skin,” she said. “I only knew that I wanted to go to Sumner.” The segregated school turned her away—and Brown’s father joined a lawsuit against the city brought by the NAACP. That suit became Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case that ended with the prevailing doctrine of “separate but equal” schooling being ruled unconstitutional. Separating black children from their peers, the unanimous ruling declared, “generates a feeling of inferiority [that] may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” Born in Topeka, Brown grew up in an integrated neighborhood where she played “with children of all races,” said The Washington Post. Her father, a welder and an assistant minister at a Methodist Episcopal church, was one of 13 black parents encouraged by the NAACP to try to enroll their children in the city’s all-white schools. “Packaged together” with suits challenging school segregation in other states, their case was successfully argued by attorney Thurgood Marshall, who later became the first black Supreme Court justice. The Supreme Court’s historic ruling “paved the way for a gradual and sometimes violent integration of schools and other public facilities” across the nation. But Brown “never got the chance to attend Sumner,” said NPR.org. When the decision was handed down, she was already attending an integrated middle school. It was only in high school, while discussing segregation in history class, that she appreciated the magnitude of the case. “I thought, ‘Gee, some day I might be in history books.’” After graduating, Brown “became an educational consultant and public speaker,” said The New York Times. Her family was among those that reopened the Brown case in 1979, “to argue that the job of integration in Topeka remained incomplete,” and on the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision she lamented that segregation still existed. “The struggle,” she said, “has to continue.” As for her role in the landmark case, Brown came to embrace it. “Sometimes it’s a hassle,” she said, “but it’s still an honor.”