Bridging the racial divide: All schools should have the tools they need
Five decades ago, third-grader Linda Brown could not attend school in her racially integrated Topeka neighborhood; the law required her to take a bus across town to attend a dilapidated school designated for blacks. Linda’s case and others like it prompted a series of lawsuits that eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education, the court decided that schools set aside for blacks were not equal in quality to those designated for whites, and that the only remedy for this inequality was to ban racial discrimination in schools.