udents in the county attended school in twelve buildings worth $673,850. These buildings had far superior facilities. Teachers in the black schools received, on average, salaries that were one-third less than teachers in the white schools. In addition, the county provided free school buses for whites but failed to provide them for blacks. These circumstances led blacks in Clarendon County to sue to create equal schools. In the case, Briggs v. Elliott (1950), the United States district court in South Carolina ordered equal funding of black schools but refused to mandate racial integration of the schools.Meanwhile, in Delaware, Virginia, Kansas, and the District of Columbia, other cases emerged in the early 1950s that challenged the legality of racially segregated schools. These cases were consolidated into one case that became known as Brown v. Board of Education, named after the lead plaintiff in the Kansas case, Oliver Brown. Brown filed the suit against the Topeka Board of Education on behalf of his daughter, Linda Brown. At age seven, Linda Brown had to travel one hour and twenty minutes each morning to her segregated school for black children. If her bus was on time, it dropped her off at school a half hour before the school opened. Her bus stop was six blocks from her home, across a hazardous railroad yard, and her school was twenty-one blocks from her home. Linda Brown's white friends attended a local school only seven blocks from her home. They did not have to ride a bus or fact dangerous crossings to reach their school. Oliver Brown argued that he wanted the same conditions for his daughter.The Supreme Court heard arguments in the Brown case in 1952, but the justices did not decide the case that year. Political divisions on the court ran deep, and the weak leadership of Chief Justice Frederick Moore Vinson made a decisive ruling unlikely. The court scheduled reargument in case for 1953, but Vinson died before argument...
