At age 13, Doris Faye and her twin sister Doris Raye were plaintiffs in a lawsuit to desegregate schools in Hearne, a small town between Houston and Dallas, Texas. In September 1947, Doris Faye and Doris Raye, accompanied by their parents, attempted to enroll at a white junior high school in Hearne. In their elementary years, the girls had attended local public schools but after graduating, their parents found that the Blackshear building that housed their junior high and high school was uninhabitable.
The school building had burned down the year prior, only for the school board to have the structure poorly rebuilt using railroad ties and old tires. The twins’ father C.G. Jennings worked with the Hearne NAACP to file a lawsuit that fall to desegregate the schools, listing both Doris Faye and Doris Raye as plaintiffs.
After garnering support from the local branch and other outraged black parents, the lawsuit was realized in just a few short months. In the spring of 1948, Thurgood Marshall agreed to argue the case. Although the lawsuit was unsuccessful, it was the first case Marshall used to create the foundation for the success in Brown v. Board.