Zelma Henderson

Zelma Henderson (February 29, 1920 – May 20, 2008) was the last surviving plaintiff in the 1954 landmark federal school desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education. The case outlawed segregation nationwide in all of the United States' public schools. The ruling served as a harbinger of the American Civil Rights Movement and paved the way for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed segregation in all public facilities. 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 similar cases originating from the District of Columbia, Delaware, Virginia and South Carolina under the shortened 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."

Death Zelma Henderson died in Topeka, Kansas, at the age of 88 of pancreatic cancer on May 20, 2008. She was the last survivor of the original Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case.

She was survived by her son, Donald, five grandchildren and fifteen great-grandchildren. Her husband, Andrew Henderson, died in 1971 and their daughter, Vicki, died in 1984.