Here is all we are told of the person who died...
She was 75. Her death was confirmed on Monday by a spokesman for the Peaceful Rest Funeral Chapel in Topeka, which is handling her funeral arrangements....We don't know what day she died, only the day the death was confirmed. We're not told how she died or where.
Linda Brown was born on Feb. 20, 1943, in Topeka to Leola and Oliver Brown, according to the funeral home. (Some sources say she was born in 1942.)We're not really even sure when she was born.
The neighborhood the family lived in was integrated. “I played with children that were Spanish-American,” Linda Brown said in a 1985 interview. “I played with children that were white, children that were Indian, and black children in my neighborhood.”We're told of the historic litigation, ordering the desegregation of schools.
Nor were her parents dissatisfied with the black school she was attending. What upset Oliver Brown was the distance Linda had to travel to get to school — first a walk through a rail yard and across a busy road, then a bus ride.
“When I first started the walk it was very frightening to me,” she said, “and then when wintertime came, it was a very cold walk. I remember that. I remember walking, tears freezing up on my face, because I began to cry.”
By the time of the ruling, Ms. Brown was in an integrated junior high school. She later became an educational consultant and public speaker....Nothing about the topics of consulting and speaking. I guess we're expected to presume she spoke about the litigation, but what did she say and what did she think? This little squib only hints:
As for her role in the landmark case, Ms. Brown came to embrace it, if reluctantly. “Sometimes it’s a hassle,” she told The Herald [in a 1987 interview], “but it’s still an honor.”What's the story there? What was the "hassle"? Is there a fear of opening up this story, because she is needed as a "symbol." I'd like to know her complicated thoughts on the subject of the honor that was a hassle — the hassle that was an honor.
Ms. Brown was married several times.Several times — not a specific number. Did the NYT not find out the number? We're there some ambiguous interludes that were maybe marriage maybe not marriage? It's all so vague — the death, the life, the person.
The funeral home said her survivors include a daughter, Kimberly Smith, although it did not have a complete list of survivors.That makes me feel very sad, as if she was used and then lost track of.
UPDATE: The NYT now has a correction: "A picture with an earlier version of this obituary was published in error. The photograph, released by The Associated Press, misidentified the woman in the image. The image showed another student, not Linda Brown."
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Highly recommend Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History episode on this.
http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/13-miss-buchanans-period-of-adjustment
"That makes me feel very sad, as if she was used and then lost track of."
Benedict Cumberbatch/Sherlock Holmes {quietly}: People have died.
Andrew Scott/Professor Moriarty: That's what people DO!
That's what leftists DO.
The name on the case, Brown v. Board of Education, isn't Linda Brown, but Oliver Brown, her father.
And yet the media serves us up wall-to-wall Hogg.
(Titus, wherever he is, would be pleased.)
Was she a child exploited for political purposes ?
Maybe she liked her privacy.
Somehow I visualize the NYTimes as having a writer develop a story. It then goes through a filter to remove any potential offensive paragraphs/sentences/words. This occurs several times at several levels. The finished product is highly sanitized story that fits the narrative.
Fact checking, OTOH, occurs 48 hours after the story is published or when some right-wing media type points out the obvious - which ever comes first.
The Supreme Court ruling was 9 to 0, so there were no dissenters that white segregationists could pin their hopes on.
That ruling marked the beginning of the end for Jim Crow.
as if she was used and then lost track of.
The poor passive little dear.
Those naughty white men will use a black women or child if no white women or children are available.
Sad? She was apparently able to live a fairly normal, non-celebrity life. Some would consider that more of a blessing than something to regret.
It reminds me of Norma McCoy. We want these people to be the symbols, the icons that we desire.
We don't want them to have mundane, flawed lives. And we certainly don't want them to be ambivalent.
as if she was used and then lost track of.
Oh no! That could never happen. People being used to advance a political agenda and then tossed aside (Sheehan). No way!!! /sarcasm
BTW: I remember Jim Crow Laws, as a child, when we lived briefly in the south for my parent's work purposes. Mississippi I think. It was very confusing for us kids who had never encountered such a concept as racism or segregation. My parents probably tried to gently explain it. I do know that we moved away quite quickly and my parents later said to us.... nope, never again.
Not even a wiki page.
Oh pity the 12 we never hear of:
"The strategy was for the civil rights group to file a lawsuit on behalf of the 13 families, who represented different states.
With Brown's name happening to alphabetically top the list of plaintiffs, the case would come to be known as Brown v. Board of Education and be taken to the Supreme Court."
She made a hell of a big splash. Our self righteous politicians were suddenly faced with a new reality that black children were actually citizens with equal rights. The same eminent legal scholars sitting on the SCOTUS had buried them alive 60 years earlier in Plessey v. Ferguson...because.
Then the Supremes accidentally discovered the 14th Amendment. Amazing how easy it had been to lose a Constitutional right with just one SCOTUS voter suddenly pretending that they cannot read.
And about my Second Amendment rights to arm myself. If the this SCOTUS forgets how to read and buries me, they better have an escape plan.
When my dad died we made no mention of his military service. You could assume he served since he was buried in a veterans cemetery, but we thought it would be wasted lines about something that was only three years out of his life. He was more than a veteran. As a matter of fact, being a veteran didn't rate higher than his time in the CCC, where you can still see his teams work in western Arkansas, and the Columbia Gorge.
I felt sorry for Ringo when he was Knighted. The Prince said he was a famous person in the Beatles band. What a sad tribute. Which is to say, everything he's done since then is unworthy of mention. He did a lot of good with his money that benefited society.
Thank you for writing this. I had a similar reaction after reading other articles re her passing. While I realize her father was the lead plaintiff, I would have liked more info regarding her life because this case was so important for our time and so many people.
Yes, too bad she was forgotten.
But, here are some words that are also forgotten: I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
Content of their character? Not a chance, now it's their color of their skin, weird sexual perversions, two x chromosomes, and other bullshit.
My, have we fallen. What would MLK Jr say to all of this?
What upset Oliver Brown was the distance Linda had to travel to get to school
Isn't this ironic?
Given that the end result of "desegregation" often resulted in students (of all races) being bused or otherwise forced to attend schools that were far from their home areas in order to balance then desired racial composition of the school..... it seems rather like Karma coming back to kick you in the ass.
Forcing kids to spend hours on buses, taking them away from their neighborhoods, friends and families..... moving them around like pieces on a game board without any consideration of their feelings because people just want to be "fair".
Yeah. That worked out well.
Is this Althouse mimicking Drudge, conflating two separate articles together? The current Children's Crusade is yet the latest of a long line of using "victims", real or imagined, for political gain. The point is not that so little is published about her life but that she was just one more person used for a cause. If we agree with the cause, then she is a symbol for good, that's all.
Brown essentially destroyed black educational excellence - children were bused. Imagine the outcry if teachers had been bused.
"Given that the end result of "desegregation"
Which, of course, did not occur as "Affirmative Action" quickly followed.
Now we have Black Lives Matter and "Black Girls Solidarity."
The NPR radio blurb didn't mention her husbands but did say she worked in education. I mean really it was the NAACP & her parents who brought the lawsuit and were the drivers of the change/story, right?
From NPR
Eventually Brown became an educational consultant and public speaker.
When asked about her role in the historic case she told NPR it was her father who deserved the credit but added, "I am very proud that this happened to me and my family and I think it has helped minorities everywhere."
As a mother of two children who had attended racially diverse schools, she said, "By them going to an integrated school, they are advancing much more rapidly than I was at the age that they are now. ... And I think that children are relating to one another much better these days because of integration."
"Is this Althouse mimicking Drudge, conflating two separate articles together?"
It's the phenomenon that I've noted in the past with the tag "This blog has a theme today." Sometimes the ordinary process of finding things to blog and putting them next to each other creates an appearance of a pattern. This one just happened.
I do sometimes write a post after another post because the material in one led me to something else and I break it out as a separate post, but I think I tell you when I do that (or it's obvious).
Occasionally, after I see a theme happen, I look for additional things in the theme to make some more posts. If I were doing that, you'd see the "This blog has a theme today" tag.
Thank you Rick Turley for the Malcolm Gladwell episode - absolutely first rate.
Plaintiff's counsel often have good cases, but need a plaintiff.
The Plaintiff, or class representative, has no active role.
Anyone similarly situated could have served in the same way.
That's normal.
Linda Brown was not obliged to be an icon, a saint or a statue in the town square. She was not obliged to cure polio, bring peace to the Mideast or walk on the moon. She was obliged to live her live under the laws of the land and exercise the rights our founding documents say our Creator has endowed us under. If she contributed to the defense of those rights and nothing else in her life, she did enough.
Brown life matters.
But not as a, you know, person.
If she contributed to the defense of those rights and nothing else in her life, she did enough.
She was either important enough to cover fully, or not important enough for an article. Neither is a comment on her life, but of the writers and editors at the NYT.
"It's all so vague" You don't want to tarnish no symbol.
Do you think the NYT will cover the death of Cindy Sheehan? Stormy Daniels? David Hogg? Mattress Girl?
Of course not. The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.
"Brown essentially destroyed black educational excellence - children were bused. Imagine the outcry if teachers had been bused."
Blacks received a much better education before school desegregation because they were taught by their fellow blacks who believed in the students, black teachers who wanted to lift up the black race and demanded the best from them. Blacks had made great progress moving into the middle-class in the fifties but it all was destroyed, partly by desegregation and even more so by LBJ's great society. It's a shame, shame on LBJ and all the sorry-ass ignorant liberals.
"That makes me feel very sad, as if she was used and then lost track of."
Yes. I noticed the same omissions in her obits. From another source, I learned that her father Oliver Brown, who was the motive force behind her participation, died at age 42. He was a machinist for the Acheson, Topeka and Santa Fe RR and died of heat stroke. A unexpected sudden death. What impact did this have on his daughter?
Blacks received a much better education before school desegregation because they were taught by their fellow blacks who believed in the students, black teachers who wanted to lift up the black race and demanded the best from them.
Most Black kids today are taught by Black teachers in schools run by Black administrators governed by Black school boards.
Most Black kids today are taught by Black teachers in schools run by Black administrators governed by Black school boards.
Who instruct them in the victim ideology that has done so much to make their lives hell.
Brown v. BOE also (1) ended up destroying urban education across America; (2) hastened the expansion of suburbs and the dreaded suburban / commuting lifestyle; (3) led directly to the elimination of most testing for employment (b/c it resulted in racial disparities); which (4) caused employers to require a college degree for jobs that didn't really require one; (5) resulting in far too many people in college who shouldn't have been there and thus watered down, and now useless, college degrees.
Looking back, the "unintended consequences" of the decision are some of the primary causes of societal decay today.
So this is a pretty sorry effort after that whole “We haven’t been fair to women in the obituary pages “ thing.
John Hawks posts hard so I don't have to!
(Who remembers that ad?)
I'm reading "Linda Brown, Symbol of Landmark Desegregation Case, Dies" in the New York Times, and there is almost nothing in it about the individual Linda Brown. Does "symbol" say it all?
It says everything the NYT - house organ of the left - thinks you should care about.
So in other words the Board of Education was right?
If she had remained in her old school she might have met a nice young buck and had a fulfilling life birthing them babies and making them pancakes.
Unintended consequence are a bitch.
"Blacks received a much better education before school desegregation because they were taught by their fellow blacks who believed in the students, black teachers who wanted to lift up the black race and demanded the best from them. Blacks had made great progress moving into the middle-class in the fifties but it all was destroyed, partly by desegregation and even more so by LBJ's great society. It's a shame, shame on LBJ and all the sorry-ass ignorant liberals."
I would be interested in seeing something less anecdotal about educational and economic attainment for proof. Curious, are you a believer in separate, but equal? Should we have kept the lunch counters separate? Can you be middle class if you have to ride in the back of a bus or go to the "Coloreds Only" bathroom? Should blacks be able to stay in hotels with white folk?
Yes, there may have been negative consequences to Brown, but there is so much more positive than this type of judgement:
"Who instruct them in the victim ideology that has done so much to make their lives hell."
In fact this descion lead directly to all of our problems with immigration. If blacks had stayed with their time honored traditions of being maids and laboreres we would not have imported all of these greasy Mexicans. There would have been full black employment and stabile families.
Instead we have to pretend that they belong in college. Sure a few genetic sports might but instead they are all forced into college where they major in weed, protests and fucking fat white girls.
Atticus Finch has a lot to answer for let me tell you!
I imagine langford peel is a progressive. If there were a way to bet on it, I think I'd make some money.
Left-wing and full of hate, why does this describe so many people? Why does this describe so many people in academia?
langford peel is a Moby. He is here to make racist comments in order to make the general commentariat look racist.
Maybe he should head back to the Daily Stormy or Stormy Front, where he will be more comfortable.
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