Jasper Brown Family

Click to See Larger Image

Jasper Brown (1918-1997)

See: Dead-End Road, Deborah F. Brown (2004).

Three children of Jasper Brown, Nathan, Lunsford and Sheliah, sought transfers from the Caswell County Training School to Bartlett Yancey. Buses going to the Training School picked up the Brown children four-tenths of a mile from their home. The nearest route of a bus going to Bartlett Yancey was two and a half miles from the Brown home, and it was thought unsafe to operate two buses over the narrow road near the end of which the Browns lived. These are appropriate considerations, but the two schools were within two blocks of each other. It was admitted that there was no reason the Brown children could not ride the Training School bus and walk from that school to Bartlett Yancey.

Source: Jeffers v. Whitley, 309 F.2d 621 (1962).

_______________

Jasper Brown and His Children: The Supreme Court Said He Could

Jasper Brown took his four children to school in Yanceyville on January 22, 1963. He is black, but he took Nathan, Jocylin, Sheila and Lunsford to the white elementary and secondary school. The Supreme Court had said he could, and the U.S. Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, had said he should. It was 8:30 a.m. A crowd had gathered. An out-of-town newspaper photographer snapped the picture: Mr. Brown, wearing a topcoat and broad-brimmed hat, hurrying his children into the school.

At 9:30 a.m., a flustered Mr. Brown found the town sheriff and asked for protection from a group of white youths he said was trailing him. The sheriff refused -- said he could not act until something happened. Mr. Brown burst into Thomas Little's dry-cleaning store. "He said, 'Thomas, I'm not going to let them kill me,'" Mr. Little recalls. The businessman called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for advice and finally sent Mr. Brown home with an escort. It did not help.

At 1:30 p.m. two white youths in a 1956 Mercury forced the car carrying Mr. Brown and his escorts to a halt on a dirt road near his home. According to the accounts at the time, Mr. Brown "came out shooting." A bullet grazed the skull of young N. L. Oliver, Jr. His companion, James Nixon, was shot in the shoulder. Jasper Brown was charged, tried and found guilty of assault with a deadly weapon. He served 90 days in jail, then returned to his farm. But according to Mr. Little, "they froze him out. Whites wouldn't sell him anything -- fuel oil, supplies for his farm, anything." Mr. Brown finally gave up and moved out of town.

Source: Struck, Doug. "Southern Change: It Sometimes Gallops, Often Crawls: Racial Views Have Evolved in N.C. Town," The Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, Maryland), 22 November 1984.