Linda Brown Walks to the Bus Stop

Sumner Elementary School was three blocks from where Linda Brown lived in Topeka, Kansas. She could see it from the neighborhood. In the fall of nineteen fifty-one, she was eight years old, and Sumner School had a seat with her name on it, if only they would give it to her.

They would not. Sumner was for white children. Linda Brown walked six blocks in the opposite direction to a bus stop, rode across town to Monroe Elementary, the segregated Black school, and did this every day, in the dark when the mornings were short, while the school she could almost see from her house remained off limits.

Her father, Oliver Brown, a welder and assistant pastor, was recruited by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to be the named plaintiff in a class-action suit combining similar cases from five states. The case was argued before the Supreme Court by Thurgood Marshall. On May seventeenth, nineteen fifty-four, Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered a unanimous opinion. Nine to zero. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.

The decision was one sentence long on the core point and took years of litigation to implement. Thurgood Marshall called it a good start. The NAACP had been strategically building toward this moment for more than a decade, working through lower courts, selecting plaintiffs, building the evidentiary record that Warren's court needed to overturn "Plessy v. Ferguson" without giving segregationist states grounds for appeal.

Linda Brown Thompson died in March of twenty eighteen at the age of seventy-five, still living in Topeka. The school she could never attend is now a National Historic Site. The school she rode a bus to every morning is also preserved, and holds the interpretive center that tells the story of the families who carried the case.