Background
"It was a cold and bitter wind that blew Linda Brown into the history books years ago. She was 7 years old and had to walk six blocks in the worst of winter, then wait for a bus to take her 2½ miles to school...
There was another school just four blocks away from her home in Topeka, Kans., but Sumner Elementary was for white students only. One bright winter morning, her father, Oliver, pastor of St. Mark's A.M.E. Church on nearby Harrison Street, took his daughter's hand and tried to enroll her in Sumner. "I sat on a stool in the office while Daddy talked with the principal," says Linda, who was quickly turned away because segregation was then legal in Kansas and 17 other states. "I could feel tension coming from Daddy's hand and his face looked very stern on the way home."
Linda Brown's name led the list of complainants in a case that ranks among the most momentous in American jurisprudence. In its 1954 landmark decision, Brown vs. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation was against the law." (http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20095153,00.html)
There was another school just four blocks away from her home in Topeka, Kans., but Sumner Elementary was for white students only. One bright winter morning, her father, Oliver, pastor of St. Mark's A.M.E. Church on nearby Harrison Street, took his daughter's hand and tried to enroll her in Sumner. "I sat on a stool in the office while Daddy talked with the principal," says Linda, who was quickly turned away because segregation was then legal in Kansas and 17 other states. "I could feel tension coming from Daddy's hand and his face looked very stern on the way home."
Linda Brown's name led the list of complainants in a case that ranks among the most momentous in American jurisprudence. In its 1954 landmark decision, Brown vs. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation was against the law." (http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20095153,00.html)
"The extension of civil rights today means not protection of the people against the government, but protection of the people by the government.... We must make the federal government a friendly, vigilant defender of the rights and equalities of all Americans. And again I mean all Americans."
-President Harry Truman, addressing the annual convention of the NAACP, June 1947, Brown v. Board of Education A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy, James Patterson
-President Harry Truman, addressing the annual convention of the NAACP, June 1947, Brown v. Board of Education A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy, James Patterson
