A look at the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, featuring Betty Kilby Baldwin

In the spring of 1958, Betty Ann Kilby was 13 years old and finishing up her seventh-grade year — her last year in elementary school. With the sole high school in Warren County open only to white students, Kilby — the middle of five children in her African American family — and her friends were excited about the prospect of traveling together by bus to a Berryville high school. Little did she know that a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling and her father’s concerns about his children’s safety and education would change her future and that of Warren County. When the Kilby children were barred from the school, they filed a lawsuit with help from the NAACP. Kilby, the youngest of the prospective students, was the lead plaintiff in the case.

Read Betty’s story in The Northern Virginia Daily AND watch her powerfully moving interview on Good Morning America.

Betty is the author of Wit, Will & Walls and is co-author of Cousins: Connected through slavery, a Black woman and a White woman discover their past—and each other.