A Visit To Topeka: Reflecting On Linda Brown's Legacy

I never met Linda Brown in person. But like many Americans I knew her story. And her death on Sunday reminded me that, in 1996, my NPR colleague and producer Walter Ray Watson and I spent several days in Topeka, hoping to find another layer to Linda's story and her role in the Supreme Court's historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling. I've been reporting on school segregation — and desegregation — for years and Brown's passing reminded me of this visit to the place where, in a sense, this story began. I remember driving down the tree-lined streets of the racially mixed neighborhood where Linda lived with her family in the 1950s, a mostly blue-collar and middle-class neighborhood of office workers, merchants and lawyers. The Rev. Oliver Brown, his wife, Leola, and their children lived just a few blocks from Sumner Elementary School, the whites-only school that, back then, had barred African-American kids from enrolling. Sumner Elementary was housed in a beautiful building with white