Linda Brown stands outside the school the Topeka School Board would not let her attend, the year before the Supreme Court decision that abolished school segregation.
In the fall of 1950, Oliver Brown, a Black church minister, tried to enroll his daughter Linda at Sumner Elementary School, a few blocks from their home in Topeka, Kansas. But she was denied enrollment because it was an exclusively white school. Linda, aged nine, was forced to walk across train tracks—sometimes in the cold winter—to attend an all-Black school two miles away from her home. Joined by twelve other Black parents with similar experiences, the Brown family sued the Topeka Board of Education in what would become known as Brown v. Board of Education.