When it comes to the case of Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that outlawed school segregation, the focus is often on Topeka, Kansas, the home of the Brown family and the school board that it sued. But the story of the case actually had several starts, years before the case was decided and more than a thousand miles away.
In 1947, Black families in Clarendon County, South Carolina, asked the county to provide school buses for Black children, just as it did for white children. The county refused, so with the help of the NAACP, the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, 20 Black parents prepared to sue, led by Joseph A. De Laine, a local reverend and public school principal.
