Name Oliver Brown | ||
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Oliver L. Brown (August 19, 1918 Springfield, Missouri – June 1961, Springfield, Missouri) was the "Brown" in the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education. The Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, who, besides Mr. Brown, included Ms Barbara Johns who was only 16 when she organized a student revolt at her badly-underfunded high school.
This decision overturned the separate but equal doctrine that had been used as the standard in Civil Rights lawsuits since the Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896, in effect declaring it unconstitutional to have separate public schools for black and white students. The decision is considered a major milestone in the Civil Rights Movement.
Brown was a welder in the shops of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, an assistant pastor at St. Mark's A.M.E Church. Brown's daughter Linda, a third grader, had to walk six blocks to her school bus stop to ride to Monroe Elementary, her segregated black school one mile (1.6 km) away, while Sumner Elementary, a white school, was seven blocks from her house.
Brown was only 42 when he died of a heat stroke in Springfield, Missouri in 1961. In 1988, the nonprofit Brown Foundation for Educational Equity, Excellence and Research was founded by Topeka community members to honor Oliver Brown and to preserve the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement. His daughter Cheryl Brown Henderson works with the foundation. On October 26, 1992, after two years of work by the Brown Foundation, President George H. W. Bush signed the Brown v. The Board of Education National Historic Site Act, establishing the former Monroe Elementary School as a national park.