The Fifties

by David Halberstam

By this time a number of cases challenging the right of states to segregate their schools, including one filed in (of all unlikely but highly segregated places) Topeka, Kansas, had worked their way through the judicial process and had reached the Supreme Court. The Kansas case had been filed in 1951 by a black welder named Oliver Brown, who objected to the fact that his eight-year-old daughter, Linda, had to go twenty-one blocks by bus to a black school when there was a white school only seven blocks from her house. Brown, a mild, religious man, was hardly a local radical: He had tried hard to register his daughter at the all-white Sumner School but finally decided to sue the local school board. The case was filed under the title Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. In the South, the concept of separate but equal had always been a sham: It might have been separate, but it never was equal.