History

U.S. Census Bureau History: 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka

The attorneys for Oliver Brown and his daughter Linda—George E.C. Hayes (Bolling v. Sharpe),
Thurgood Marshall, and James M. Nabrit—celebrate on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court
following the historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling on May 17, 1954.

Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Seventy years ago this month, on May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruling that racial segregation in the nation's public schools was unconstitutional. The unanimous decision partially overruled the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that had permitted segregated, "separate but equal" public facilities for nearly six decades. The ruling was a major victory for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), its chief counsel and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and the Civil Rights Movement's struggle to achieve racial equality in the United States.

The Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case originated in 1951 when the Topeka, Kansas public school system refused to allow Oliver Brown's daughter Linda attend the public school near her home because she was Black. The school close to the Brown's home was for White students only as permitted by the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson which allowed states to segregate public schools as long as they provided separate but equal facilities for Black students. Brown challenged the Topeka school board's decision because the school for Black pupils required his daughter to walk a distance before taking a long bus ride to a school 21 city blocks from her home. Brown and other Black families in Topeka, KS, filed a class-action lawsuit against the Topeka Board of Education. On August 3, 1951, the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas ruled against Brown, finding that Topeka's separate but equal public schools were constitutional. The district court found that although segregated schools may have a detrimental impact on Black students, the school buildings, curricula, and transportation for White and Black students in Topeka were of equal quality. Therefore, there was no justification to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson and end segregated public schooling in Kansas.

Brown appealed the decision supported by the NAACP and Thurgood Marshall, its then chief counsel, to the U.S. Supreme Court. The case was combined with four other similar cases heard by courts in South Carolina (Briggs v. Elliot), Virginia (Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County), Delaware (Belton v. Gebart). and Washington, DC, (Bolling v. Sharpe). The Brown v. Board of Education case was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in December 1952. In an effort to encourage the justices to reach a unanimous decision on the case and bring an end to consitutionally-protected segregation, Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter asked that the case be argued again in December 1953. Chief Justice Earl Warren supported Frankfurter, arguing that a unanimous decision ending segregation and overturning Plessy v. Ferguson was necessary because a divided court would fuel resistance to the ruling in Southern states.

On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its unanimous 9–0 Brown v. Board of Education ruling in favor of lead plaintiff Brown and associated families. Chief Justice Warren authored the decision, noting that state-mandated segregation in public schools, "generates a feeling of inferiority as to [black students'] status that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone." As a result, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that "in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."

The decision was a major victory for the NAACP and the Civil Rights Movement. As the justices anticipated, the ruling faced immediate resistance from segregationists in the southern United States that would take years to overcome. For example, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus ordered the state's Army National Guard to block nine Black students ("The Little Rock Nine") from entering Little Rock Central High School in September 1957. President Dwight D. Eisenhower deployed the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division to the city to escort the students to and from school. Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers was murdered in June 1963 after he filed a lawsuit to force the desegregation of schools in Jackson, Mississippi. In Alabama, Governor George Wallace personally blocked two Black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama vowing to support "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!" Wallace only backed down when President John F. Kennedy ordered the Alabama National Guard to intervene.

In the 70 years since the historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling, there has been significant progress made in transforming our nation and its schools, but much work still remains. As the U.S. Department of Justice noted in a 2023 blog post commemorating the 69th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, "In 2022, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that nearly 18.5 million students still attend a segregated school today. The Brown anniversary presents an opportunity to take stock of the progress made while redoubling our commitment to this work." The students, parents, and community groups who continue to work to make our nation's schools free from discrimination and provide a safe and welcoming place for all students are visible legacies of the Brown v. Board of Education decision.

You can learn more about the U.S. Supreme Court's historic Brown v. Board of Education decision and the people involved using Census Bureau data and records. For example:

• The Brown v. Board of Education case originated in 1951, when the Topeka, KS, public school system refused to enroll Oliver Brown's daughter—an 8 year-old Black student—in the school closest to her home because it was reserved for White students. One year prior, the 1950 Census counted 78,791 people living in Topeka, including 72,248 Whites and 6,228 Blacks. At that time, 96.9 percent of Topeka's children ages 7 to 13 were enrolled in school. In 2022, the Census Bureau's Population Estimates program reported that Topeka had a population of 125,464, including 85,767 people who reported they were White alone; 11,598 Black alone; 2,422 Asian alone; 997 Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islanders alone; and 951 American Indian and Alaska Natives. There were 14,330 people reporting Two or More Races and 20,487 people reporting they were Hispanic or Latino in combination with one or more races. Approximately 93.8 percent of the city's children ages 5 to 9 and 86.6 percent of those ages 10 to 14 were enrolled in school.
• The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and its chief counsel Thurgood Marshall (later the U.S. Supreme Court's first African American associate justice) are responsible for one of the most consequential legal case in United States history—Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Marshall represented Brown and 12 other Topeka families who had to bus their children to Topeka's distant segregated Black schools. The U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas ruled against Brown. Marshall appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court justices responsible for the unanimous decision in favor of the Browns on May 17, 1954, included Chief Justice Earl Warren, and Associate Justices Hugo Black, Stanley F. Reed, William O. Douglass, Felix Frankfurter, Robert H. Jackson, Harold H. Burton, Sherman Minton, and Thomas C. Clark.
• The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision overturned the court's 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling in which "separate but equal" accommodations were found to be constitutional on train cars in New Orleans, Louisiana. Homer Plessy was convicted of violating the Separate Car Act of 1890 for refusing to leave the "Whites Only" train car by Louisiana judge John H. Ferguson's in 1892 and lost his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896. More than six decades later, Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat to a White bus passenger and move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Both Plessy and Parks refused to observe public transportation segregation laws and both saw their cases argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Plessy in 1896, but Rosa Parks civil disobedience and the ensuing Montgomery Bus Boycott resulted in the high court ordering the desegregation of public buses on November 14, 1956. Learn more at our Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Movement Webpage.
• In addition to Thurgood Marshall, other attorney who represented Brown before the Supreme Court were Robert L. Carter, Spottswood W. Robinson, and Charles S. Scott. Kansas Attorney General Harold R. Fatzer and Assistant Attorney General Paul E. Wilson argued on behalf of the Topeka Board of Education. In 2021, the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns series found that there were 168,044 Offices of lawyers establishments (NAICS 541110) in the United States. These establishments employed 1,045,127 people during the pay period that included March 12, 2021.
• Twenty-six years before the U.S. Supreme Court desegregated schools with its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, then Secretary of Commerce (and future U.S. President) Herbert Hoover desegregated the Department of Commerce, including the Census Bureau in March 1928. Although the Census Bureau had been hiring a diverse workforce to work as census takers and clerks for decades. In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson allowed Secretaries to institute segregation in their agencies if they chose, leading to segregated work spaces and bathrooms in Department of Commerce buildings. Hoover's order was in response to the persistent lobbying of Washington, DC, NAACP chapter president Neval H. Thomas. Learn more about Hoover's action from the article Desegregating the Commerce Department.
• Four years before the historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the 1950 Census reported that the population of the United States was 150,697,000, including 135,215,000 people reporting they were White, 14,894,000 Black and 588,000 Other races. Among the 22,459,000 people ages 5 to 13, 18,282,000 were enrolled in school. Of the 8,518,000 ages 14 to 17, 7,189,000 attended school. Among the Non-white population, 2,277,000 of the 2,796,000 children ages 5 to 13 attended school and 819,000 of the 1,083,000 ages 14 to 17 were enrolled in school.
• Six years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the 1960 Census found that 97 percent of the nation's 3,763,972 children age 7 were enrolled in school, including 97.3 percent of the nation's 3,244,771 White and 95 percent of its 479,880 Black children. Of the 2,747,141 14-year-olds counted in 1960, 95.8 percent of the nation's 2,394,166 White and 92 percent of its 326,502 Black children were enrolled in school. Among the 2,169,874 17 year olds who were enrolled in school, 1,946,469 (76.8 percent) White and 204,387 Black (65.9 percent) children attended school.
• The Census Bureau's population estimates program reported that 79,389,309 people age 3 years and over were enrolled in school in 2022, including 53,672,724 enrolled in Kindergarten to 12th grade; 16,502,237 enrolled in undergraduate colleges; 4,633,295 in graduate and professional school; and 4,581,053 in nursery or preschool. More females (40,112,604) than males (39,276,705) were enrolled in school in 2022. The majority of these students reported they were White alone (42,297,968), followed by Black or African American alone (10,812,455), Some Other Race alone (6,872,431), Asian alone (4,975,334), American Indian and Alaska Native alone (878,084), or Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone (175,402).
• The decennial census first collected education data in 1840. That year, U.S. marshals and their assistants conducting the census asked White respondents 20 years and older if they could read or write. The resulting data showed that 22 percent of Whites males and females aged 20 years and older were illiterate. Marshals also collected data about the number of colleges, universities, and primary schools in their assigned areas; the number of students at each institution; and the total number of scholars at public charge. Ten years later, the 1850 Census collected additional data on the nation's educational institutions, finding 239 colleges with 27,821 students; 80,978 public schools with 3,354,011 students; and 6,085 private schools and academies with 263,096 students. In 1850, 2,146,432 White males and 1,916,614 White females attended school, while just 13,864 "Free Colored" males and 12,597 "Free Colored" females reported attending school. Among people age 20 and older, 962,898 White and 90,522 "Free Colored" people could not read and write. Southern slave states like Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia reported fewer than 100 "Free Colored" students in 1850.
• The Census Bureau first collected data about education attainment in 1940. Among the 77.8 million Americans age 25 and older counted that year, 2.8 million had not attended school; nearly 35.9 million completed 8th grade; 10.5 million completed high school; and nearly 7.5 million completed 1 or more years of college. Among the nation's 6.5 million Black men and women age 25 and older, 646,229 reported no formal education; approximately 1.3 million completed 8th grade; 268,484 completed high school; and 199,122 completed 1 or more years of college. The Census Bureau published additional education attainment and sample data tabulations in several reports including, Educational Attainment of Children by Rental Value of Home; Educational Attainment by Economic Characteristics and Marital Status; and Education, Occupation, and Household Relationship of Males 18 to 44 Years Old.
• Did you know that decades before the founding of the nation's first Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), John Chavis was admitted to Liberty Hall University—today's Washington and Lee University—in 1799, becoming the first Black man to attend college in the United States? Alexander Lucius Twilight was the first Black student to earn a bachelor's degree after graduating from Middlebury College in 1823. Mary Jane Patterson became the first Black woman to earn a bachelor's degree when she graduated from Oberlin College in 1862.
• Founded in 1837, Cheyney University was the first and oldest of our nation's HBCUs. The school trained African American students to become teachers and later offered training in agriculture and the trades. Today, HBCUs enroll nearly 290,000 students and conferred more than 48,000 degrees. Some notable Americans who attended an HBCU include: poet Langston Hughes (Lincoln University); Vice President of the United States Kamala Harris (Howard University); Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison (Howard University); Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Morehouse College); former associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Thurgood Marshall (Lincoln and Howard universities); actor, producer, director, and screenwriter Spike Lee (Morehouse College); Civil Rights leader Ralph Abernathy (Alabama State University); aerospace engineer Lonnie Johnson (Tuskegee University); educator and author Booker T. Washington (Hampton University); NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson (West Virginia State University); sociologist and special census advisor W.E.B. Du Bois (Fisk University); and journalist and cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Ida B. Welles (Fisk University). Learn more at our Historically Black Colleges and Universities webpage.



Earl Warren (center, seated) was chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court when it unanimously ruled that "separate but equal" accommodations in public schools were

unconstitutional in its historic and unanimous May 17, 1954, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision.

Photo courtesy of the City of the Library of Congress.




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Citing Our Internet Information


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Individual census records from 1790 to 1950 are maintained by the National Archives and Records Administration, not the U.S. Census Bureau.



Publications related to the census data collected from 1790 to 2020 are available at https://www.census.gov/library.html.

Visit the National Archives Web site to access 1940 and 1950 Census records.

Decennial census records are confidential for 72 years to protect respondents' privacy.

Records from the 1950 to 2010 censuses can only be obtained by the person named in the record or their heir after submitting form BC-600 or BC-600sp (Spanish).

Online subscription services are available to access the 1790–1950 census records. Many public libraries provide access to these services free of charge to their patrons.

Contact your local library to inquire if it has subscribed to one of these services.



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