How did a third-grader's walk to school end legal school segregation?

A third-grader's walk to school became the case that ended legal school segregation because her father, with twelve other families, took the school board to court, and the Supreme Court agreed. In 1951 the Topeka, Kansas, school system refused to enroll Oliver Brown's daughter Linda at the school closest to her home. Linda walked six blocks to a bus stop to ride to a segregated Black school a mile away, while a white school stood just seven blocks from her house.

The families took the case to the Supreme Court. There it joined four others, one of them from Virginia, where 16-year-old Barbara Rose Johns had led a 450-student walkout of her high school. The NAACP's chief counsel, Thurgood Marshall, argued for the families. The Kansas case was unusual: nobody claimed the Black schools in Topeka had grossly worse buildings or teachers. The question was about segregation itself.

On 17 May 1954 the Supreme Court ruled 9 to 0 for the Browns. In Brown v. Board of Education, it held that state-mandated segregation is inherently unequal, even in schools of otherwise equal quality, because of the harm it does to Black children. That reversed the logic of "separate but equal".

The ruling did not end segregation in practice. A year later, the Court told districts to desegregate "with all deliberate speed", and many Southern states and school districts took the vague wording as permission to resist, delay and avoid integration for years or decades. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, the supervisors stopped funding public schools in 1959 rather than integrate them, and the schools stayed closed until 1964.