Black History Month has been brimming with living legends!
A'Lelia Bundles and Cheryl Brown Henderson of the Brown v. Board of Education family
This afternoon I had the good fortune to be invited to a luncheon hosted by my homegirl Janet Langhart Cohen in honor of Cheryl Brown Henderson, whose father, Reverend Oliver Brown, and sister Linda Brown, were the named plaintiffs in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case. Today Cheryl is president of the Brown Foundation for Equity, Excellence and Research, a Topeka, Kansas organization that her website says “serves as a living tribute to the attorneys, community organizers and plaintiffs and builds upon their work to ensure equal opportunity for all people.”
We all are beneficiaries of the courage of her family, the other plaintiffs and the attorneys who argued the case.
(And why are we standing in front of a photo of General Ulysses S. Grant? The luncheon was in the Grant Suite of Washington, DC’s Willard Hotel.)
After seeing my Facebook post about Cheryl Henderson, my good friend and fellow journalist Jack White sent me a link to a 1987 Time magazine piece he’d written about the Brown family’s second challenge to segregated public schools in Topeka. Click here for the original article.
