Linda Brown Girl from Kansas

“Linda Brown was a normal girl from Kansas dreaming of going to school and having a successful life but she only had one problem, she was an african women living in the south in the 1940s. She was the oldest of three sisters. The problems began for the Brown family when they tried to enroll her in a nearby elementary school called summer elementary but were denied due to race.The brown family then decided to sue along with many other african american families starting one of the most important court cases in american history.

Linda Carol Brown was born February 20, 1943 in Topeka Kansas to Oliver and Leola Brown. Oliver Brown was a welder and pastor at St. Mark’s A.M.E Church and was well respected by the locals. The reason that he wanted his daughter to go to summer elementary was because it was much closer to them instead of her walking six blocks just to get to the bus stop to go to the segregated black school. The Brown family was however not alone in this as other families were also tired of the segregation of public schools.

Before Brown v. Board of education there was another court case that used to defend segregation in public schools called Plessy v. Ferguson. This court case solidified that term “Separate but equal”. This caused more laws to be passed that prohibited African Americans from going into certain shops and were not allowed to drink from the same water fountain these laws were called jim crow laws.

After Oliver’s daughter was not allowed to go to summer elementary he filed a lawsuit that claimed that this was a violation of his fourteenth amendment. In 1952 is when multiply similar court cases came to the supreme court all with the same intent so the supreme court combined all these court cases into one and called it Brown v. Board of education. Thurgood Marshall was the chief attorney for the plaintiffs. Thurgood at that time was also the head of the NAACP legal defense attorney and the head of the educational fund.

In court the chief justice Earl Warren was appointed after chief justice Fred M. Vinson died. On may 17 1954 the decision was made and Earl Warren wrote that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” The court also stated that the plaintiffs were being “deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.”

The impact that this court case had was monumental and gave not only African Americans but other minority groups basic rights that they had being missing for decades. They had to suffer for six decades of jim crow laws which prohibited many of their rights as human beings. This also spared another case in 1976 called Runyon V. McCrary which ruled that private schools deining admission because of race was unconstitutional. This court case is also consider to have caused the upcoming laws and acts that helped Africans Americans justice such as the civil rights act of 1964 and soon to be followed by by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.”

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