Linda Brown, at the center of the Brown v. Board of Education case that began the long end of school desegregation, died on Sunday in Topeka, Kansas, at the age of 76.
It is Ms. Brown’s father, Oliver, whose name is attached to the famous case, although the suit that ended up in the United States Supreme Court actually represented a number of families in several states. In 1954, in a unanimous decision, the court ruled that segregated schools were inherently unequal. The decision upended decades’ worth of educational practice, in the South and elsewhere, and its ramifications are still being felt.
“I feel that after 30 years, looking back on Brown v. the Board of Education, it has made an impact in all facets of life for minorities throughout the land,” Ms. Brown said in a 1985 interview for “Eyes on the Prize,” a PBS documentary series on the civil rights movement. “I really think of it in terms of what it has done for our young people, in taking away that feeling of second-class citizenship. I think it has made the dreams, hopes and aspirations of our young people greater, today.”
The ruling overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, which established the separate but equal doctrine that formed the legal basis for Jim Crow laws. The court directed schools to desegregate “with all deliberate speed,” but it failed to establish a firm timetable for doing so. The Supreme Court would outline the process of school desegregation in Brown II in 1955, but it would take years for schools across the nation to fully comply.
Oddly, both the New York Times and the Washington Post (first two quotes) say that a more complete obituary will run later. Usually they have obituaries pre-written for notable people.
SiubhanDuinne
Thank you, Cheryl. This woman deserves a thread of her own. RIP, Linda Brown.
Patricia Kayden
Hero. May she R.I.P.
Baud
Maybe they weren’t expecting her passing. Seventy six is pretty young.
And it’s a reminder of how much the world can change in a lifetime.
RIP.
Brachiator
In a month in which we are celebrating women, Linda Brown certainly is a worthy figure. It was a hell of a weight to put on a young girl’s shoulders, and she had to deal with the publicity and fame and notoriety all her life. A biography site (not updated with the most recent information) notes that sometimes the publicity became a bit much.
She did so much for so many, so much for the entire nation. And now she can lay her burden down and rest.
Aleta
Maybe they looked at what had been written and realized it wasn’t worthy.
SiubhanDuinne
@Baud:
OH GOD, THANK YOU!!
Mary G
The Times has already acknowledged that they failed to run obituaries on any number of women and started to do so for Women’s History Month, a bit too late too late for my taste, but YMMV.
Brachiator
With layoffs and cutbacks, newspapers are not fully staffing these positions anymore.
schrodingers_cat
@Brachiator: They can get rid of some of their opinion writers, instead.
Cheryl Rofer
Here’s more, from 1979, about how Brown had to go back to court to get her children’s schools desegregated.
Mary G
Here is a good story on history.com, not so much about Linda Brown herself, but about the decision and its effects. It started off as five separate cases:
efgoldman
@schrodingers_cat:
They have the negatives
Tokyokie
The big newspapers do usually have canned obits at the ready to which a couple of paragraphs are added at the top with the news of the person’s passing. But between Linda Brown not having been in the spotlight for a while, and staff cutbacks and reassignments, I can see how her obit was overlooked until she actually died.
Villago Delenda Est
Notable white people, and some of those blah entertainment celebrity types.
Villago Delenda Est
@Brachiator: If they’re going to cut back on staff, it should be offal like Baquet, Haberhack, Douchehat, etc.
Cheryl Rofer
Man, am I regretting I put the last two sentences in the post.
Omnes Omnibus
RIP
Tokyokie
@Villago Delenda Est: The canned obits are usually written by the reporters whose purviews include the obit subject, and when a single reporter is covering beats that three reporters formerly covered, writing the canned obits is a pretty distant priority. And that’s assuming the reporter isn’t moved to a different beat a few months later. So would a reporter on the national desk been tasked with the Brown obit, or would it be one of the Supreme Court reporters? In all likelihood, because of poor communication and staff turmoil, probably neither. If you want to attribute the slight to racist attitudes, that’s probably correct, but only inasmuch as the daily news coverage reflects similar prejudices.
mai naem mobile
I don’t know if I only notice their age when its on the younger side but it seems like a lot of these pioneers seem to die in the youngish side. I wonder how much that has to do with the stress they were put under during their pioneering event. Seventy six isn’t that old anymore.
SiubhanDuinne
@Brachiator:
Can’t link because of stoopid iPhone, but there was once a great MTM episode in which Mary and Rhoda stayed up all night, getting increasingly coffee-buzzed and punch-drunk, updating obits in the WJM files. One of the subjects died that night and was subjected on-air to the irreverent treatment Mary and Rhoda came up with at 3:00 a.m.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Seems like we all remember the men, but women often have a way of fading into the background. Or maybe we thrust them into the background. How many people know the names of the girls who went into the school in Little Rock all that time ago? I don’t.
Cheryl Rofer
@mai naem mobile: I’ve wondered about the stress the Parkland students are under. On the one hand, it’s great to see them bloom and lead where their elders have dropped all the balls, and to give them their time in the sun. But we adults have to step up too. Voting is essential, but it’s not enough. We have to participate, but not in a way that throws shade on the students. I hope they’re getting some rest after Saturday’s marches.
Villago Delenda Est
@Tokyokie: When you have a habit of hiring only inbred (figuratively) Ivy League types, well, these things happen. Which is why the Vichy Times as an institution needs to go the way of slavery.
WhatsMyNym
@SiubhanDuinne: A family friend has already passed the 100 mark and still lives at her home. My mother is in her early nineties.
Brachiator
@Villago Delenda Est:
You don’t see as much of that at WaPo, the NYT and other major papers as you did in the past. And at the LA Times a couple of the more notable writers who regularly did obits were people of color. Dean Baquet, executive editor of the NY Times is black. It’s up to you if you want to brand him a race traitor. He was, however, a crappy editor at the LA Times, and is a crappy editor at the NYT, but that ain’t got nothing to do with his race.
BTW. Baquet was fired from the LA Times in part because he refused to cut newsroom jobs.
Jay
@Villago Delenda Est:
https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/policy-and-politics/2018/3/15/17113176/new-york-times-opinion-page-conservatism
“The people who support Trump have been embedded in a hermetically sealed right-wing media bubble for so long that they only know liberals as horrific caricatures and only experience politics as a war to save white Christian culture from its sworn enemies. They are exposed to endless lies and conspiracy theories designed to keep them in a frenzy, convinced that antifa is around the corner and Sharia law is imminent.
>snip
“The most popular voices of the right-wing base are simply not engaged in the same undertaking as the New York Times. That makes hosting them on the opinion page rather fraught.”
Brooks et al are Imaginary Republicans and conservatives. The Party and the “conservatism” they write about hasn’t existed in decades, they are completely irrelevant to the Movement, they only exist to preserve an illusion and engage in “whataboutism” and “bothsiderism”.
If the FTFNYT Opinion pages actually wrote about real Republicans and real conservatives these days, they would scare the living shit out of the few remaining Old White Guys who buy the paper.
Brachiator
@Cheryl Rofer:
Didn’t a few of them appear on the Sunday pundit shows? I don’t know whether any of that was pre-recorded. Like Linda Brown, some of them may take a deep breath and prepare themselves for a lifetime of activism. I certainly wish them well.
mai naem mobile
@Cheryl Rofer: I try and pick out some disaffected people I know and work on them to go out and vote. I see people who are too wrapped up in their genuinely busy lIves who don’t put too value in voting. It’s a slow process because you have to do it subtly not hit them with a ton of info like you’re hitting them with a 2×4.
rikyrah
She changed everything. The whole world changed because of her case. Thank you.??
Brachiator
@Villago Delenda Est: BTW, the NYT has a series called “Overlooked.”
The obit which popped up for March 21, was for Ruth Wakefield, a white woman who invented the chocolate chip cookie. While this is quite an achievement, I hope they do better with other notable women.
Women like activist Yuri Kochiyama, for example.
efgoldman
@Brachiator:
mrs efg, as a yout’ learned the toll house cookie recipe at Wakefield’s long-gone Toll House restaurant, in Whitman MA (Condos on that land now)
Chyron HR
@Jay:
“Stop slandering my chosen people!” – Bernard S., Burlington VT
efgoldman
@Chyron HR:
“Go fuck yourself.” – efg, Cumberland RI
Shana
@SiubhanDuinne: I remember that episode! What a great show that was.
raven
Great quote by Eugene Robinson seem germane:
Jay
@raven:
He hasn’t gone back on his word. ICE just deported a 2 Tour US Military War vet to Mexico.
He just hasn’t been able to get much of anything done that doesn’t rely on an Executive Order, like burning DACA.
He hasn’t stopped trying.
raven
@Jay: Who got popped with a POUND of blow!
Ruviana
@Baud: @mai naem mobile: It’s the NYT so bear that in mind but here’s an article about the stress and some early deaths of activists, including Erica Garner, Eric Garner’s daughter who died late last year.
Jay
@raven:
2lbs, which was Treason Tribbles current Economic Advisor’s weekly habit.
Brachiator
@efgoldman:
That is actually pretty cool.
Tokyokie
@Villago Delenda Est: I don’t disagree. I worked with NYT managing editor Joe Kahn back when he was a rookie reporter in Dallas, but even though he was inexperienced, we all knew he would be shooting up the career ladder, not necessarily because of his ability, but because of his pedigree. He just KNEW he was destined for better things. His father was a co-founder of Staples, he holds a fistful of Harvard degrees, and he speaks fluent Mandarin. Don’t get me wrong, I like him, even if I found him to be overly earnest — we’d often stay late discussing Asian politics — and I considered him a good foreign desk hand, but I’d never have imagined he’d wind up running the nation’s premier newsroom. One of my copy desk colleagues had majored in Eastern European languages or some such and speaks fluent Russian and Polish, but that guy’s father was middle class and he got his bachelor’s at the University of Kansas, so he was never going to achieve the level of journalistic career success that Joe was always confident of achieving.
efgoldman
@Brachiator:
Especoally When she bakes
J R in WV
@efgoldman:
Bless you, EFGoldman!! You are a true leader of our people!!!
schrodingers_cat
@raven: Processing of most applications to USCIS has slowed to a crawl.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
Please forgive what may be a dumb question: is the little girl in that iconic Norman Rockwell painting Ms. Brown?
Cheryl Rofer
@West of the Rockies (been a while): I was trying to remember that earlier, so thank you for encouraging me to look it up. The answer to your question is no. The little girl in the Rockwell painting is Ruby Bridges walking to the William Frantz Public School in New Orleans on November 14, 1960.
Big Jim Slade
Malcolm Gladwell has an excellent podcast about the case – the decision created a much bumpier road than it should’ve:
http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/13-miss-buchanans-period-of-adjustment
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@Cheryl Rofer:
Thank you, Cheryl!
rikyrah
@West of the Rockies (been a while):
No. It’s Ruby Bridges.
Julia
I purchased a wonderful photo a few years back, by Carl Iwasaki for Life magazine, that featured Linda Brown and her sister walking to school through the Santa Fe Railyards in Topeka. They are pictured from the back, holding their lunch sacks. It was very meaningful to me, having grown up in Topeka. Both Carl Iwasaki and Linda Brown have now passed away…RIP. There is an interesting National Historical Site honoring the landmark case in Topeka, if anyone is ever through there.
BruceJ
“It would take years for the nation to fully comply” how about, 64 years and counting…the school district where I went to school back in the 60’s and 70’s is STILL under a deseg order from the courts.
Jim
For the record, the Brown v Board suit was brought by several plaintiff groups; “Brown” was first alphabetically, so her name was attached to the overall case. Another of the groups came from Farmville VA. It was the only student-led group; the others (including Brown) were led by parents of students. The head of the Farmville group was student Barbara Rose Johns:
http://www.motonmuseum.org/biography-barbara-rose-johns-powell/
The Moton Museum in Farmville honors the group, and is well worth a visit if you’re in the area. There’s also a funky furniture store, Green Front, in town that can take up part of your day.