Linda Brown, who kicked off the Warren Court's string of revolutionary rulings, dies in her mid-70sLinda Brown, who as a child resided in Topeka, Kansas, is best known as the "Brown" in the Supreme Court case now known as
Brown v. Board of Education. Prior to her lawsuit, the 1896 Court ruling
Plessy v. Ferguson had established a precedent regarding application of the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause: segregation was legal, but only if the separate facilities were equal in every way.
In practice, the separate facilities were not equal, and a number of logistics problems in the city of Topeka's segregated elementary school system (a CNN obituary specifically cited the fact that the black school was two miles away while one of the white schools was closer to home) prompted Brown's father and four other families to sue the city school district over the policy. In 1954, the Court, under chief justice Earl Warren, issued a decree declaring that any separate facilities were "inherently unequal" and declared segregation in public accommodations to be unconstitutional.
While in Topeka, the process of integration went fairly smoothly (the middle and high schools of the city were already integrated), the ramifications of the edict were met with far more hostility elsewhere, especially in the southern United States. Over the next 15 years, resistance to the ruling would be widespread in the South, and a number of attempts at resistance and workarounds would ultimately be met with failure, often at the hands of another Warren Court ruling.
Beyond the specific issues brought about by the
Brown case, Warren's broad interpretation of equal protection, first imposed in
Brown and fleshed out by associate justice William Brennan, would have far-reaching ramifications in later court rulings. It would be used to outlaw anti-miscegenation laws in
Loving v. Virginia in 1967, dramatically altered the nature of state legislatures in
Reynolds v. Sims by taking away fixed-district representation, allotted the court power to tax by proxy in
Griffin v. Prince Edward County and, by way of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and a series of court rulings, imposed the rulings on most private businesses, even if they didn't operate across state lines and were not subject to the Commerce Clause. After Warren's death, Brennan would even extend the clause to illegal aliens in
Plyler v. Doe, even though they did not meet the 14th Amendment's requirement that the persons in question be born in the U.S.
Brown herself would go on to college and be married three times. She did not consider herself a major historic figure but did speak openly about her role in the ruling throughout her life; not much else about her personal life beyond that is known.
There is some dispute about exactly when she was born, either in 1942 or 1943, and thus her age at death is uncertain.
Obituary from the Topeka Capital-JournalBrown v. Board of Education on Wikipedia
