Nine years before he successfully argued the Brown v. the Board of Education case that led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s desegregation of public schools, Thurgood Marshall argued a similar matter in Hillburn.

As chief counsel for the NAACP, Marshall visited Rockland to press for the integration of the Main School, the facility for white students, and the Brook School, a four-room wooden structure for children of color. That school had no library, gymnasium or indoor bathroom.

The Hillburn case didn’t have to go to the Supreme Court. In 1943, New York’s commissioner of education ordered the Brook School closed and that all children attend the Main School. His action was based on Marshall’s petition. Marshall would go on to become the first black U.S. Supreme Court Justice.

The two cases come to mind because the last surviving member of the original landmark Brown case — which centered on the segregation of schools in Topeka, Kan. — has died.

Zelma Henderson was 88. She died May 20, six weeks after a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, according to various news reports.

The Associated Press said that as a child in the 1920s and ‘30s, Henderson had attended desegregated schools in the rural western Kansas town of Oakley, where her parents farmed. She was disgusted when she learned that her own children would be required to attend segregated schools in Topeka, and signed on to the Brown litigation on behalf of her children in 1950.

“I wanted my children to know all races like I did,” Henderson told the AP in 2004. “It means a lot to a person’s outlook on life. No inferiority complex at all – that’s what I wanted for my children as far as race was concerned.”