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Brown v. Board of Education's Linda Brown |
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Topeka, Kansas, 1950. Linda Brown's school is five miles from home. She had to cross a railroad yard and busy boulevard to wait for a bus that would take her 20 blocks to all-black Monroe Elementary in East Topeka. Her father wanted her in the nearest public school, Sumner Elementary, just four blocks away. But Linda is black, the school is for whites only. In Topeka everything public is segregated, from drinking fountains to swimming pools.
Linda Carol Brown was seven years old when she became the center of a major court battle that would set a precedent for segregation laws everywhere. After Linda's father tried unsuccessfully to enroll her in the third grade in an all-white public school further away, he teamed up with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to fight her unfair exclusion. The NAACP filed suit, but in August 1951 a three-judge federal panel threw out the case, ruling that although segregation might be detrimental to Topeka's black children, it was not illegal, since all Topeka schools had equal facilities and programs.
This Kansas law suit, along with similar law suits from Delaware, South Carolina and Virginia, were all compiled under the heading of "Brown v. the Board of Education." The momentous decision that was made two years later is still viewed as one of the most important and significant rulings that the High Court has made in the last century.
Special counsel Thurgood Marshallargued that segregation was unconstitutional because it stigmatized African Americans, thereby denying them the equal protection guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. Chief Justice Earl Warren and a unanimous court agreed.
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