Linda Brown Thompson, who as a young girl was the student at the center of the landmark Supreme Court case “Brown v. Board of Education” that declared school segregation unconstitutional, has died in Topeka, Kansas. She was 76. Born in 1943, Brown was in 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. Brown’s father, Rev. Oliver Brown, sued the school district in 1951. The NAACP took up the case, with future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall as 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.
