When she was nine years old, she wanted to go to the elementary school near her home; she was African American and it was a whites-only school. She become the central figure in Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that overturned racial segregation in American schools. The case was filed by her father, the Rev. Oliver L. Brown, a minister at Saint Mark's AME Church in Topeka, Kansas. "Brown v. Board" was a collection of class-action suits against school segregation in several states and the District of Columbia. They were sponsored by the NAACP, and combined in a single case that advanced to the Supreme Court.
