It was 1950 when a young girl, age 9, Linda Brown, walked into Sumner School, an all-white elementary school in Topeka, KS with her father, Rev. Oliver Brown, who was requesting her and other black families' children in the area to be enrolled there.
With the help of the NAACP, Rev. Brown would later file a lawsuit against the school board in 1954 for denying his daughter and the other children of black families enrollment to the school, making it a landmark case in the U.S. Supreme Court, Brown v. Board of Education: the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Brown and the 12 other plaintiffs in the case, forcing local schools to desegregate their facilities.
Brown, who died in Topeka, KS Sunday afternoon at age 76, was the young icon in the center of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case which would be the precursor to desegregating American schools throughout the United States.
Unfortunately Brown did not ever attend Sumner school by the time the decision came out from the U.S. Supreme Court; many schools remained segregated years after until nine black students enrolled at an all-white high school in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957, they had to be escorted onto the campus by federal guards.
In fact a desegregation plan for Topeka Unified School District 501 was approved in 1993 by Federal Judge Richard Rogers, due to the persistence of Brown, who was a mother of two who in 1979 filed another lawsuit against Topeka schools for not following through with a desegregation plan.
Brown will be remembered for her contribution to changing the dynamics of American schools and its history; Black history remembers this young icon of change as a symbol of bravery, determination and valor for the greater good of all.