His name was Oliver Brown, and he was a boxcar welder for the railroad in Topeka, Kansas.
He sued the Topeka Board of Education for segregation because his young daughter Linda couldn’t attend the all-white Sumner Elementary School near his home.
Brown ultimately won this civil rights legal battle before the Supreme Court. Lawyer Thurgood Marshall successfully argued that segregation violated the 14th Amendment
“Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”.
Regardless, it still took years and many fights before all public schools in the U.S. obeyed the law.
Particularly slow in adhering were public schools in the southern United States.
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