New York: Linda Brown, whose father objected when she was not allowed to attend an all-white school in her neighbourhood and who thus came to symbolise one of the most transformative court proceedings in American history, the school desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education, died on Sunday in Topeka, Kan. She was 75.

Her death was confirmed on Monday by a spokesman for the Peaceful Rest Funeral Chapel in Topeka, which is handling her funeral arrangements. He did not specify the cause.

It is Brown's father, Oliver, whose name is attached to the famous case, although the suit that ended up in the US Supreme Court actually represented a number of families in several states.

In 1954, in a unanimous decision, the court ruled that segregated schools were inherently unequal.

The decision upended decades' worth of educational practice, in the South and elsewhere.

Cheryl Brown Henderson, Linda's sister and the founding president of the Brown Foundation, an educational organisation devoted to the case, recalled her parents and others being recruited to press a test case.

"They were told, 'Find the nearest white school to your home and take your child or children and a witness, and attempt to enroll in the autumn, and then come back and tell us what happened,'" she said in a video interview.