To reach her all-black school in Topeka, Kansas, Linda Brown had to walk between train tracks for six blocks to get to the school bus stop. She had to leave home at 7:40 a.m. to get to the Monroe School by 9.

But on the first day of third grade in 1950, her father Oliver Brown took her in a different direction that avoided the tracks. He took her to the whites-only Sumner School, which turned them away.