Linda Brown: the black schoolgirl whose lawsuit led to desegregation of schools in the US dies at age 76

Linda Brown, who as a schoolgirl was at the centre of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that rejected racial segregation in American schools, died in Topeka, Kansas, Sunday afternoon. She was 76.

Her sister, Cheryl Brown Henderson, confirmed the death to The Topeka Capital-Journal.

 

Who was she?

The short version according to the The Skimm: “In 1950, her father tried to enrol her in an all-white school. The school said ‘she’s not welcome here.’ So her dad filed a lawsuit. Four similar cases eventually joined the Brown case and made it all the way to the Supremes. The court ruled that segregated schools were ‘inherently unequal,’ and instructed schools around the country to desegregate.“

 

The longer version:

(NPR) – The 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education, involved several families, all trying to dismantle decades of federal education laws that condoned segregated schools for black and white students. But it began with Brown’s father Oliver, who tried to enrol her at the Sumner School, an all-white elementary school in Topeka just a few blocks from the Browns’ home.

The school board prohibited the child from enrolling and Brown, an assistant pastor at St. John African Methodist Episcopal Church, was angry that his daughter had to be shuttled miles away to go to school. He partnered with the NAACP and a dozen other plaintiffs to file a lawsuit against the Topeka Board of Education.

By 1952 the US Supreme Court had on its docket similar cases from Delaware, the District of Columbia, South Carolina, and Virginia. They all challenged the constitutionality of racial segregation in public schools.

Two years later the court unanimously ruled to strike down the doctrine of “separate but equal.” The justices agreed that it denied 14th Amendment guarantees of equal protection under the law.

“I just couldn’t understand,” Linda Brown told NPR 19 years after the milestone decision.

“We lived in a mixed neighbourhood 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 at the time.

“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 neighbourhood 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’s 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.

 

For more on this story, visit the NPR website.