Zelma Henderson - Brown V. Board of Education

Brown V. Board of Education

Hurst encountered much more blatant discrimination and segregation when she moved to the city of Topeka, Kansas, in 1940. She studied to become a cosmetologist at a segregated school, the Kansas Vocational School. She was known to be a very good typist, but could not find a clerical position in the city due to her race. She was instead offered domestic work instead, such as a housekeeper or maid.

Henderson married her husband, Andrew Henderson, in 1943. She opened her own beauty salon within her home soon after her marriage. The Hendersons had two children, Donald Henderson and Vicki Henderson, who were bused to a segregated, all black school on the other side of the city of Topeka. This discrimination angered Henderson, who had been educated in integrated schools as a child. She later told the Boston Globe in an interview, "I knew what integration was and how well it worked and couldn’t understand why we were separated here in Topeka."

Henderson became involved in the legal fight against the city's segregated schools in 1950, when the local Topeka chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) began preparing for a class action suit against the Topeka public school system. The NAACP asked 13 parents of African American public school students, which included Oliver Brown and 12 women, including Zelma Henderson, to serve as plaintiffs in the case. Henderson quickly agreed. In the case, whose full name was Oliver L. Brown et al. v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Henderson was the last et al. listed on the plaintiff's side of the original case.

The lawsuit, with Henderson as one of the 13 plaintiffs, was first filed in 1951 in the United States District Court in Kansas. The U.S. District Court ruled against the plaintiffs, citing the 1896 "separate but equal" ruling by the United States Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson.

The 1951 ruling was appealed to the United States Supreme Court after it was combined with four smiliar cases originating from the District of Columbia, Delaware, Virginia and South Carolina under the shortended case name of Brown v. Board of Education. The United States Supreme Court unanimously struck down school segregation in its decision on May 17, 1954. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for the unanimous majority decision, "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," in agreement with Henderson and the other plaintiff's original suit.

Henderson appeared in numerous events commemorating the decision throughout her life. In a 1994 Dallas Morning News interview, she told the interviewing reporter, "None of us knew that this case would be so important and come to the magnitude it has. What little bit I did, I feel I helped the whole nation."