In December 1959, a teenager at Austin High School in Knoxville put her name on a federal lawsuit against her own school board, and the case would carry all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Josephine Goss Sims, the named plaintiff in Goss v. Board of Education of the City of Knoxville, Tennessee, died on July 15, 2026, at 82.

The suit was filed in U.S. District Court on behalf of Josephine and her brother Thomas A. Goss, through their father and next friend, Ralph Goss, together with fifteen other Black students and their own families. It challenged a Knoxville school board plan that redrew attendance zones under a claim of desegregation but let students transfer back to their old, formerly segregated schools if a new assignment would make them a racial minority there, a provision that threatened to undo the rezoning almost as soon as it took effect.

The district court approved the board's plan in 1960, and the case moved through the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals before it reached Washington. There it was argued alongside a companion case out of Davidson County, Tennessee, and on June 3, 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 9 to 0 that letting students transfer schools based on which race would be in the majority there violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The transfer provision, the Court held, ran against the desegregation Brown v. Board of Education had already ordered, according to Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute. Josephine Goss was still a teenager when the ruling that carried her family's name reshaped how Knoxville, and school districts nationwide, were allowed to draw their lines.

News of her death was confirmed by WATE 6 On Your Side, which reported that the Beck Cultural Exchange Center, the Knoxville institution devoted to preserving African American history, announced her passing. The center wrote, "Her legacy reminds us that lasting change is often achieved through the courage of ordinary people who choose to stand for what is right," and added, "May her life continue to inspire us to pursue justice, preserve history, and build a future worthy of her sacrifice."

Josephine Goss Sims was a teenager when she let her name stand for a fight bigger than one school year, and it took the highest court in the country to settle it in her favor. Six decades later, Goss v. Board of Education is still the case law students of school desegregation study when a district tries to redraw its boundaries in a way that quietly restores the color line it was supposed to erase, and the Beck Cultural Exchange Center now holds her story among the histories it was built to keep.