WASHINGTON—Linda Brown only wanted to go to the Sumner School. But she was black, and the elementary school in Topeka, Kansas, four blocks from her home was entirely white.

“I didn’t comprehend colour of skin,” she said later. “I only knew that I wanted to go to Sumner.”

Brown, a 9-year-old in search of a nearby place to learn, went on to become the central figure of Brown v Board of Education, the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned racial segregation in U.S. schools and helped launch a new phase of the civil rights movement. She died Sunday at 76, the Peaceful Rest Funeral Chapel of Topeka told the Associated Press.

The case known as Brown v Board was actually a collection of class action suits that battled school segregation in South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware and the District of Columbia. All were sponsored by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and packaged together in a single case that advanced to the Supreme Court.

Cheryl Brown Henderson, Linda’s sister and the founding president of the Brown Foundation, an educational organization devoted to the case, recalled her parents and others being recruited to press a test case.

“They were told, ‘Find the nearest white school to your home and take your child or children and a witness, and attempt to enroll in the fall, and then come back and tell us what happened,’ ” she said.

In an interview with the Miami Herald in 1987, Linda Brown remembered the fateful day in September 1950 when her father took her to the Sumner School.

“It was a bright, sunny day and we walked briskly, and I remember getting to these great big steps,” she said. “I remember the steps being so big and I was so small.”

The school told her father no, she could not be enrolled.

“I could tell something was wrong, and he came out and took me by the hand and we walked back home,” she said of her father. “We walked even more briskly, and I could feel the tension being transferred from his hand to mine.”

On May 17, 1954, the court unanimously ruled that racial segregation violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, overturning the “separate but equal” doctrine that had stood since the 1896 case of Plessy v Ferguson. “Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect,” the court pronounced in its ruling.

The decision paved the way for a gradual and sometimes violent integration of schools and other public facilities across the United States.

“I feel that after 30 years, looking back on Brown v the Board of Education, it has made an impact in all facets of life for minorities throughout the land,” Brown said in a 1985 interview for Eyes on the Prize, a PBS documentary series on the civil rights movement. “I really think of it in terms of what it has done for our young people, in taking away that feeling of second-class citizenship. I think it has made the dreams, hopes and aspirations of our young people greater, today.”

At the time of the decision, Brown said she was just happy she could attend Sumner, which still tried to bar her admission on the day the Supreme Court ruled in her favour.

By the time the Supreme Court ruled, Brown was in junior high school. She later became an educational consultant and public speaker. As for her role in the landmark case, Brown came to embrace it, if reluctantly.

“Sometimes it’s a hassle,” she told the Miami Herald, “but it’s still an honour.”

Brown was not truly the “Brown” of Brown v Board. The case was filed by her father, Rev. Oliver Brown, an assistant minister at Saint Mark’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, who died in 1961.

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Peaceful Rest Funeral Chapel of Topeka said funeral arrangements are pending.

Kansas deputy education commissioner Dale Dennis said Brown’s legacy was felt not only in Kansas but across the United States. The effect she had “on our society would be unbelievable and insurmountable,” he said.

With files from the New York Times and The Associated Press