Linda and Terry Lynn Brown; Carl Iwasaki/The LIFE Images Collection
On the steps of the Supreme Court, Nettie Hunt explains to her daughter, Nikie, the meaning of Brown v. Board; LOC
Plaintiffs in Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County.
Linda Brown, age 9, walks past the Sumner School in Topeka, in 1953.
May 17, 1954: In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court rules the “separate but equal” doctrine of segregation unconstitutional.
Linda Brown, who died earlier this year at 75, was seven years old when her father Oliver enrolled her at the Sumner School for the fall semester of 1950. Linda was entering the third grade that fall, and her mother Leola recalled later that “her daddy told her he was going to try to do his best to do something” so that Linda could attend this school, so close to home, alongside “the white children [she] played with.”
The Browns lived in an integrated neighborhood in Topeka, and the Sumner School was only a few blocks down the street — and, like many of the elementary schools in Topeka, and Kansas’ other large cities, it was all-white.
Oliver Brown, for whom Brown v. Board of Education was named, was both a railroad welder and a pastor. Linda remembered later the walk home after the Sumner School turned her away, how she “could just feel the tension within him.” But Oliver did not fall into a historical legal fight by accident; and, though his name was the one that labels the case for history, he was not an individual crusader, Linda explained, he was simply “like a lot of other black parents here in Topeka at that time,” frustrated and ready to fight for his child.
He and Leola were one pair of Topeka parents who served as plaintiffs in an NAACP class action lawsuit to dismantle the state’s longstanding elementary school segregation. The first parent to volunteer herself on behalf of her child was Lucinda Todd, the mother of another seven-year-old. There were nineteen children and thirteen plaintiffs in all, all of whom enrolled their children in nearby segregated schools, and all of whom were denied, and they were nineteen among thousands. In 1950, Topeka’s school districts operated eighteen schools for the twenty percent white residents and four for the remaining eighty percent.
Outside Kansas and across the country, similar suits were underway. When Brown reached the Supreme Court it had merged with those suits. Brown now included not only Linda Brown and the children of Lucinda Todd and Lena Carper and Sadie Emmanuel and Marguerite Emmerson, but also Harry Briggs of Summerton, South Carolina; Rosa Bell Davis of Prince Edward County, Virginia; the Bollings of Washington, D.C.; Ethel Belton of Claymont, Delaware; and dozens of others.
In Hockessin, Delaware, bus routes would not even stop to pick up Sarah Bulah’s daughter, Shirley, and take her to the Bulahs’ “separate but equal” school — a one-room brick a quarter the size of the nearby whites-only school.
On May 17, 1954, the Warren Court handed down the unanimous decision that “in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.” “Separate but equal” had justified the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision and six cases in the field of public education since. “Separate but equal” had served as the legal basis for segregation in not only public education but every facet of public life for half a century, and it “[had] no place.” Such separation, at least in education, was “inherently unequal.”
It was not so much, wrote Warren in the opinion, the tangible differences between individual schools, though they demonstrably existed. The Court considered that the act of separation itself “generates a feeling of inferiority…. in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” Thurgood Marshall, later Justice Marshall, had argued that “segregation thus necessarily imports inequality.”
Brown empowered the nascent national civil rights movement—it had seemingly destroyed segregation’s legal foundation; Warren hoped that the court’s unanimity would leave no room for doubt. But the furious cultural and political war over desegregation that followed split political parties. It took place in courtrooms and outside them, involved luminaries like Thurgood Marshall and people like the Browns who were “like a lot of” their neighbors. White extremists rampaged; white moderates demurred. Segregation evolved.
By the time the Brown decision was handed down, four years after Linda Brown was turned away at Sumner, Linda was attending an integrated junior high school. Leola reported: “She was very happy.”