Linda Brown, the main plaintiff in the famous, groundbreaking Brown vs.
Board of Education case, passed yesterday at the age of 76 in Topeka, Kan.
Back in 1952, the little girl’s father, an assistant pastor, sued when a
school rejected her application to attend. The landmark case went all the
way to the U.S. Supreme Court and effectively ended segregation in American
public schools. The Kansas case wasn’t the only one facing the highest
court in the land; similar cases from Delaware, South Carolina, Virginia
and the District of Columbia were also on the dockets. By 1954, the court
unanimously voted to strike down the concept of “separate but equal.”
According to the seven judges, segregated schools violated the 14th
Amendment of equal protection under the law.
“I just couldn’t understand,” Brown told NPR 19 years after the milestone
decision. “We lived in a mixed neighborhood but when school time came I
would have to take the school bus and go clear across town and the White
children I played with would go to this other school,” she said. “My
parents tried to explain this to me but I was too young at that time to
understand.” In the same interview, Brown’s mother, Leola Brown, said she
and her husband tried their best to help their daughter understand why she
wasn’t allowed in the school. She broke it down in simple terms: “It was
because her face was Black. … and she just couldn’t go to school with the
White races at that time.” She said, “Her daddy told her he was going to
try his best to do something about it and see that that was done away.”
Recalling the day her father first walked her by the hand to Sumner School,
Brown said,”I remember him talking to the principal and I remember our
brisk walk back home and how I could just feel the tension within him.”
When they got home, she said, her parents discussed what had gone on “and I
knew that there was something terribly wrong about this,” Brown said. By
the time the Supreme Court handed down its decision Brown was in junior
high school and it was her mother who gave her the good news. “She was very
happy,” her mother said. Brown never got the chance to attend Sumner. The
family had moved out of the neighborhood during the lengthy case. But her
mother said her younger daughters attended integrated schools, and one of
them went on to become a teacher within the Topeka school district. Even
after the Supreme Court decision segregation in public schools continued
for years. When finally nine Black students enrolled at an all-White high
school in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957, they had to be escorted onto the
campus by federal guards.
