Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas

In Topeka, Kansas, on February 20, 1943, a black girl named Linda Brown was born.

When still a child in the early 1950's, her father, Oliver Brown, was required to drive Linda to an all-black school five miles across Topeka, when an all-white school, the Sumner School, was a few blocks distant from Oliver's home.

Oliver was angry. An assistant pastor at St. John African Methodist Episcopal Church, he joined the NAACP and other plaintiffs to file a lawsuit against Topeka's Board of Education, challenging the law that separated white students from black students in that city's schools.

By 1952,...