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Earl Warren (1891-1974)
Born to a poor family in Los Angeles, Earl Warren received a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1914. After serving in World War I, he became a prosecutor and was elected Alameda County District Attorney in 1925. He was elected California’s first full-time attorney general in 1938, and expanded a California program that confiscated land from owners who had Japanese ancestry.
Warren backed Franklin Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese in 1942 and was elected Governor of California later that year. He enjoyed great popularity and was reelected twice. He was the unsuccessful Republican nominee for VP in 1948, and sought the presidency in 1952, also without success. He ultimately backed Eisenhower’s nomination, and was promised his first Supreme Court appointment.
When Chief Justice Vinson died, Eisenhower gave Warren a recess appointment so he could immediately join the Court as the new Chief Justice. He served over 15 years, accumulating one of the most liberal voting records in history. Warren announced his resignation in 1968 to allow Democratic President Lyndon Johnson to fill his position, but Johnson’s nominee Abe Fortas was filibustered and the Senate was unable to confirm him before Johnson’s term expired. Warren remained Chief Justice until Richard Nixon’s nominee Warren Burger was confirmed in June 1969.
Brown v. Board of Education (1954)
After the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, segregated public schools were the norm in many areas of the country. While in the twentieth century many states eliminated racial classifications, schools in 17 states legally required segregation of students by race until the 1950s. In 1951, the NAACP filed a series of cases challenging the constitutionality of segregated public education. Initially, they were successful on only one state (Delaware), but they appealed to the Supreme Court, which consolidated five cases for oral argument in 1953. When the Justices first met to decide the cases, they were deadlocked, and Chief Justice Fred Vinson ordered that the case be reargued later that year. However, he died before the reargument and was replaced by Earl Warren, who was strongly opposed to continuing segregation. Warren convinced three justices to change their views, which allowed him to write a unanimous decision holding that segregated public education was unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause.
These cases come to us from the States of Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware. They are premised on different facts and different local conditions, but a common legal question justifies their consideration together in this consolidated opinion. In each of the cases, minors of the Negro race, through their legal representatives, seek the aid of the courts in obtaining admission to the public schools of their community on a nonsegregated basis. In each instance, they had been denied ad