Civil Rights Figure. She was the student at the center of the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education that declared school segregation unconstitutional. She was in the third grade in 1950 when she was denied admission to an all-white elementary school in her hometown of Topeka. She lived 20 blocks from her segregated school, but just five blocks from the all-white school. Kansas schools at the time were segregated by state law. Her father, Rev. Oliver Brown, sued the school district in 1951. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took up the case, which was combined with segregation suits against school districts in other states when it came before the Supreme Court. Future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall was the lead attorney for the NAACP. In a unanimous ruling in 1954, the court declared school segregation an unconstitutional violation of the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection under the law. The ruling, written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, struck down the "separate but equal" doctrine that had served as the basis for segregation of public facilities since the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson.

Civil Rights Figure. She was the student at the center of the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education that declared school segregation unconstitutional. She was in the third grade in 1950 when she was denied admission to an all-white elementary school in her hometown of Topeka. She lived 20 blocks from her segregated school, but just five blocks from the all-white school. Kansas schools at the time were segregated by state law. Her father, Rev. Oliver Brown, sued the school district in 1951. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took up the case, which was combined with segregation suits against school districts in other states when it came before the Supreme Court. Future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall was the lead attorney for the NAACP. In a unanimous ruling in 1954, the court declared school segregation an unconstitutional violation of the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection under the law. The ruling, written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, struck down the "separate but equal" doctrine that had served as the basis for segregation of public facilities since the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson.

Bio by: Eireannach