Student at the center of Brown v Bd. of Education has died

3rd April 2018   ·   0 Comments

By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer

Ironically, by the time the U.S. Supreme Court, in May 1954, handed down its landmark school desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, Linda Brown had already started to move in her schooling.

The court’s decision came three years after her father, Oliver Brown — with the backing and support of the NAACP and other civil-rights advocates — became the lead plaintiff in the case that instantly, once adjudicated, became one of the most important judicial decisions in American history by completely reshaping the debate of race, fairness and equality in the country.

Oliver had sued the Topeka, Kansas, Board of Education in 1951 after the school district rejected Linda’s application to attend a whites-only elementary school that she passed each day on her arduous commute — which included a tense walk through a forlorn train switching yard, a crossing across a busy commercial thoroughfare, then a ride on a city bus — when she was just seven.

“I remember a couple of days turning around and coming home crying, I was so cold,” Linda told USA Today in 1994.

But by the time the case worked its way up to Washington and onto the nation’s headlines, Linda Brown was already a student in an already-desegregated junior high school. Once the ruling came down, Linda realized how big a role she and her family had played in the nation’s most pressing, volatile and vital issue.

“It was at that time,” Brown told a reporter in 1988, “that the media began following my family. When reporters and photographers showed up at the school, my classmates wondered who they were there to see. And when I told them it was me, they wondered why.”

But Linda Brown, who passed away March 25 in Topeka at the age of 75, must be remembered not only as a name in history books and law reviews, but as a person with her own dreams, beliefs and achievements, say New Orleans scholars.

“Linda Brown is an unsung hero of the movement,” says Nikki Brown, an associate professor of history at the University of New Orleans. “Like other Black children, she followed her parents’ lead. While her father sued the state of Kansas, she went to school and carried out the Supreme Court’s mandate. This took immense courage, and I don’t think she has been given her proper due. This is a lot of pressure to put on a six-year-old’s shoulders.”

R. Blakeslee Gilpin, an assistant professor of history at Tulane University, says the civil-rights attorneys who took up the Browns’ case — which was one of several similar legal actions from across the country that were brought together as the lawsuit played out — were, out of necessity, extremely shrewd and painstaking as they looked for and selected plaintiffs who could serve as symbols of the desegregation efforts.

Gilpin says that exacting process resulted, in part, in the selection of the Browns as lead plaintiffs. He says that meticulous brilliance is what made Brown v. Board such a landmark event.

“In Brown’s case, much like [Rosa] Parks,” Gilpin says, “the insightful agitators behind the scenes were picking and choosing their litigants after truly thinking through, like grandmasters of chess, what the legal and public relations outcomes were for each possible person at the center of the case.

“In truth of course,” he added, “Brown was both a poster child and an actual person. She was an absolute necessity — a young, human face to an insidious problem. And her name is in a thousand book titles, millions of textbooks, invoked like the opening prayer of the Civil Rights Movement. In this way, we forget her and the insanely complex calculations made over decades to figure out that this was the most powerful way to challenge Jim Crow and centuries of white supremacy.”

After her passing last weekend, Brown’s hometown newspaper, the Topeka Capital-Journal, also stressed that Brown’s life was filled with aspiration and achievement from beginning to end. “The significance of the landmark court case, in which the Brown name happened to be applied, was an achievement Linda lectured on, along with other family members,” the paper stated. “While the civil rights breakthrough will be recognized as part of her legacy, it does not come close to defining the scope of the case heard by the Supreme Court, nor does it come close to portraying the life of Linda Brown.”

Born in 1943 in Topeka to Oliver and Leola Brown — her father was a welder at the time of the suit’s filing but later became a minister — Linda grew up in a diverse neighborhood and held friendships with my kids of different ethnicities, making the shock of being forced into segregated schools all the more traumatic.

She later moved to Springfield, Mo., where she attended high school, and eventually graduated from high school in Topeka before attending Washburn College and later becoming a Head Start teacher. She helped establish four libraries for preschool children and worked as a private piano tutor, utilizing a skill she honed as a girl while accompanying choirs at her father’s church. Linda Brown’s active involvement in civil rights efforts gradually heightened after Brown v. Board was issued, especially after her father died in 1961. In 1979, she and a group of Topeka parents joined the ACLU in a successful effort to reopen the Brown v. Board case — they argued that housing patterns had, 25 years after the ruling, kept Topeka schools essentially segregated – that resulted in the local school board adopting a new, comprehensive desegregation plan.

In addition, Brown and her family — especially her sister, Cheryl Brown Henderson — founded and guide the Brown Foundation, an organization that promotes and teaches about the case and its legacy.

Significantly, as tributes and memorials poured in last week after Linda’s death, her sister, Cheryl, quickly noted that the Browns were just one part of the larger Civil Rights Movement in general, and the Brown v. Board case specifically.

“The [NAACP] recruited families to stand as plaintiffs resulting in a class of 13,” Cheryl said in a statement to the Capital-Journal. “Oliver Brown was among the 13 parents recruited. Brown v. Board was never centered around one individual as repeatedly erroneously reported. There were nearly 300 plaintiffs on the roster in the lawsuit whose names were obscured by the legal abbreviation of et al.”

When she became a formal plaintiff in the landmark 1954, Linda Brown gained a spiritual link to New Orleans, which, roughly six decades earlier, served as the epicenter of the Supreme Court ruling that established the infamous “separate but equal” tenant used by white segregationists to enact Jim Crow.

As the 19th century came to a close, New Orleans mixed-race citizen Homer Plessy was encouraged — much like the Browns would be 60 years later — to serve as a test case against Louisiana’s existing segregation laws by legally challenging the East Louisiana Railroad’s strict policy of racial separation.

The case, known as Plessy v. Ferguson, was ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896, a devastating ruling that institutionalized the system of legalized segregation across much of the country — and, in so doing, set the groundwork for Linda Brown and her supporters to strike down the unjust system.

From late 19th-century New Orleans and Homer Plessy, the civil rights effort eventually led to Topeka and Linda Brown in the early 1950s. However, in the wake of Brown’s passing, scholars say that the physical, psychological, legal and historical damage caused by Plessy v. Ferguson has, in many ways, resisted the noble spirit embodied by Brown and still stands today.

When Brown v. Board was issued, noted UNO’s Professor Brown, it was greeted with spiteful defiance among Louisiana’s elected officials and other white leaders.

“They dragged their feet and came up with a ridiculous approach of desegregation one year at a time,” Professor Brown says, adding that “the door was left wide open for delaying tactics and non-compliance. Desegregation did not go well the first year, and ultimately Louisiana was the last state to completely integrate, and this was in the mid 1970s.”

The result was a painfully slow, arduous road toward integration in the Bayou State that is far from finished, almost 64 years after the Brown ruling. Tulane’s Gilpin says the residue of segregation and bigotry still clings to New Orleans and the entire country, more than 60 years after Linda Brown and her family became household names.

“As a whole, and this is a process that has proceeded glacially since Linda Brown’s father tried to enroll her in that white school, de-segregating the school system is like trying to keep up with potholes in New Orleans,” he says.

“One case and one person was never going to undo centuries of exclusion and prejudice,” he adds. “It’s hard to imagine that finding equality and justice for all will ever be realized in American education, but what Linda Brown inaugurated was agitating for that end. If our progress has stumbled and stuttered and fallen backwards at times, it is because these pot holes keep appearing, and we aren’t great at maintenance and we’re even worse at addressing the root causes.”

As Linda Brown herself told USA Today in 1994, “We can’t afford to stop now. When we sit down and look at our grandchildren being part of the system, you must fight on.”

This article originally published in the April 2, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.