The case started in Topeka, Kansas, a black third-grader named Linda Brown had to walk one mile through a railroad switchyard to get to her black elementary school, even though a white elementary school was only seven blocks away. Linda's father, Oliver Brown, tried to enroll her in the white elementary school seven blocks from her house, but the principal of the school refused simply because the child was black. Brown went to McKinley Burnett, the head of Topeka's branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and asked for help. The NAACP was eager to help the Browns, as it had surely wanted to challenge segregation in public schools. The NAACP was looking for a case like this because they thought if they could just expose what had really been going on in "separate but equal society” and show that that the circumstances really were not separate but equal, that they could do their best to change it. Brown and the NAACP appealed to the Supreme Court on October 1, 1951 and their case coincided with other cases that challenged school segregation in South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware. The Supreme Court first heard the case on December 9, 1952, but didn’t reach a decision. In the re-argument, heard from December 7-8, 1953, the Court requested that both sides talked about "the circumstances surrounding the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868”. The re-argument