Who is Linda Brown?

The Civil Rights Movement is described as beginning variously in 1955, 1957, 1960 or on the occasion of a specific event. This allows teachers some flexibility in planning curriculum. For years I have situated my Movement curriculum in the ten year period between 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott and 1965, the Selma March, with flashbacks to slave resistance and the Underground Railroad. Last year, because of the 50th anniversary of the Brown Decision, I pushed back a year to 1954 and there I saw, as if for the first time, the seven year old figure of Linda Brown. Linda Brown's father filed the suit which, joined with others, became the Supreme Court Case that ended segregation in public schools "with all deliberate speed."

But who is Linda Brown? I could find very little information about her but I soon realized that what little I knew was more than enough to present my students with another powerful figure of resistance. Linda Brown was a second grader in Topeka Kansas who had a long and dangerous walk to her all Black school even though a new school for white students was close to her home.

My Linda Brown curriculum is grounded in that long walk. First graders see injustice as soon as they hear about the many blocks, busy street crossings and railroad tracks that Linda and her sister had to navigate twice a day.

A chant grew up in my classroom, quite spontaneously and without my direction, "Linda Brown, Linda Brown, Linda Brown, Linda Brown, Linda Brown, Linda Brown, Linda Brown, Linda Brown."

We continue to chant Linda Brown's name in appreciation, celebration, and invocation, before we begin our exploration of Movement stories. Last year we designed a bulletin board display of children's drawings and words under the heading, Thank You Linda Brown. Children created texts and images of their school lives which they felt were possible because of the Brown Decision.

This year my colleague Cheryl Sutter and I decided to frame our year long study of the Movement as 'From Linda Brown to Sheyann Webb.' Cheryl's fourth graders and my first graders heard the story of Linda Brown together. I created an imaginary dinner table dialogue between Linda and her father. Every child had a script. I read the part of Linda Brown and all the students, as a chorus, read the part of Linda's father. Cheryl and I often find it provocative to have adults take children's parts and children take adult parts. We want our students to consider that Linda in some way influenced her father to take extraordinary action.

After the reader's theatre we asked first and fourth graders working as partners to create maps depicting Linda Brown's walk to school. The maps are powerful documents whose colors, shapes, scale and detail make clear both the difficulties and the senselessness of Linda's long walk. One map shows Linda at the railroad crossing. An enormous black locomotive is racing toward the tiny but firmly standing figure of a little girl. Another map depicts the new school, just down the block, as brightly colored with an extensive playground, while Linda's school, at the far corner of the map, looks dingy, drab, small and is set in a bare dirt yard. These maps demonstrate children's vivid understanding of injustice from a child's point of view.

I hope to involve my students in actual walks where we take the long way round to get to a place nearby in order to help us all internalize the illogic of the situation. Linda Brown's walk reminds me of the other long walks that are part of the history of oppression in our country. Walking is one compelling way for students to experience the physical dimension of struggle.

Lesson developed by Maggie Donovan