Desegregation pioneer Linda Brown has died

Linda Brown, the child at the center of the 1954 landmark U.S. Supreme Court case to desegregate public schools, died Sunday. She was 75. Her father, Oliver Brown, tried to enroll her in a nearby public school in Topeka, Kansas, but was told Linda had to attend a school miles away. The NAACP sued on the family’s behalf, and the case joined with others from Delaware, South Carolina, Virginia, and the District of Columbia for a hearing before the high court. Attorney Thurgood Marshall, who went on to become the country’s first African-American Supreme Court justice, argued the case for the plaintiffs. On May 17, 1954, the high court ruled unanimously that school segregation denied African-American children the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. Brown and her sister, Cheryl Brown Henderson, founded the Brown Foundation for Educational Equity, Excellence and Research in 1988. “Linda was a spiritual Christian woman that loved not only the Lord, but she loved her family and took on the responsibility of what Brown v. Board of Education meant to her,” Carolyn Campbell, a longtime friend, told CNN. “Her legacy will be that she shared all of her life with all of us.”