Desegregation Hero Linda Brown Dies at 76

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March 26, 2018

Linda Brown Thompson, one of the children at the center of the 1954 landmark Supreme Court decision that paved the way for school desegregation, has died. She was 76.

Young Linda Brown

She was born in 1942 to Oliver and Leola Brown in Topeka, Kan. Linda was 8 and in third grade when she and her father were told that she could not attend Sumner Elementary School, five blocks from her home, because of school segregation laws. Instead, Linda had to attend Monroe Elementary School, which was open to nonwhite students, that was 20 blocks away.

Brown family

The next year, 1951, Oliver Brown sued the school district. He soon found an ally in the National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The Brown v. Board of Education case was one of four (involving 13 families in four states) that were considered as one by the U.S. Supreme Court. Arguing the case for Brown and other plaints was the NAACP's Thurgood Marshall, himself a future Supreme Court Justice.

The Court handed down its unanimous ruling in 1954, saying in part that, "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." At the time, Linda was 12.

A further Brown v. Board of Education decision a year later determined a timeline, of sorts, for the states to proceed with desegregation.

The Brown family moved to Springfield, Mo., Oliver Brown died in 1961, and Leola and the family (they had another daughter, Cheryl) returned to Kansas, where Linda attended both Washburn University and Kansas State University. She was married twice, had children and grandchildren, and had a career as an educational consultant and as a public speaker.

Older Linda Brown

Brown herself joined a suit against Topeka's school districts in 1979, arguing with the American Civil Liberties Union that the district's schools still hadn't been desegregated. A 1993 Court of Appeals decision mandated the construction of three new schools.

Linda Brown was largely out of the public eye in the last years of her life. She died in 2018, in the city in which she was born, a city with which she will long be linked.

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Social Studies for Kids
copyright 2002–2017
David White

Social Studies for Kids
copyright 2002–2019
David White