Editing Earl Warren (section)

===1950s===
{{see also|Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower|History of the United States (1945–1964)}}

====''Brown v. Board of Education''====
Soon after joining the Court, Warren presided over the case of ''[[Brown v. Board of Education]]'', which arose from the [[NAACP]]'s legal challenge against [[Jim Crow laws]]. The [[Southern United States]] had implemented Jim Crow laws in aftermath of the [[Reconstruction Era]] to [[disenfranchisement after the Reconstruction Era|disenfranchise]] African Americans and [[racial segregation in the United States|segregate]] public schools and other institutions. In the 1896 case of ''[[Plessy v. Ferguson]]'', the Court had held that the [[Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution|Fourteenth Amendment]] did not prohibit segregation in public institutions if the institutions were "[[separate but equal]]." In the decades after ''Plessy'', the NAACP had won several incremental victories, but 17 states required the segregation of public schools by 1954. In 1951, the Vinson Court had begun hearing the NAACP's legal challenge to segregated school systems but had not rendered a decision when Warren took office.{{Sfn|Cray|1997|pp=274–278}}

By the early 1950s, Warren had become personally convinced that segregation was morally wrong and legally indefensible. Warren sought not only to overturn ''Plessy'' but also to have a unanimous verdict. Warren, Black, Douglas, Burton, and Minton supported overturning the precedent, but for different reasons, [[Robert H. Jackson]], [[Felix Frankfurter]], [[Tom C. Clark]], and [[Stanley Forman Reed]] were reluctant to overturn ''Plessy''.{{Sfn|Cray|1997|pp=277–281}} Nonetheless, Warren won over Jackson, Frankfurter, and Clark, in part by allowing states and federal courts the flexibility to pursue desegregation of schools at different speeds. Warren extensively courted the last holdout, Reed, who finally agreed to join a unanimous verdict because he feared that a dissent would encourage resistance to the Court's holding. After the Supreme Court formally voted to hold that the segregation of public schools was unconstitutional, Warren drafted an eight-page outline from which his law clerks drafted an opinion, and the Court handed down its decision in May 1954.{{Sfn|Cray|1997|pp=283–286}} In the Deep South at the time, people could view signs claiming "[[Federal impeachment in the United States|Impeach]] Earl Warren."<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Bethune |first=Brett |date=July 2022 |title=Influence Without Impeachment: How the Impeach Earl Warren Movement Began, Faltered, But Avoided Irrelevance |journal=Journal of Supreme Court History |language=en |volume=47 |issue=2 |pages=142–161 |doi=10.1111/jsch.12295 |issn=1059-4329|doi-access=free }}</ref>

====Other decisions and events====
In arranging a unanimous decision in ''Brown'', Warren fully established himself as the leader of the Court.{{Sfn|Cray|1997|pp=287–288}} He also remained a nationally prominent figure. After a 1955 [[Gallup (company)|Gallup]] poll found that a plurality of Republican respondents favored Warren as the successor to Eisenhower, Warren publicly announced that he would not resign from the Court under any circumstance. Eisenhower seriously considered retiring after one term and encouraging Warren to run in the [[1956 United States presidential election|1956 presidential election]] but ultimately chose to run after he had received a positive medical report after his heart attack.{{Sfn|Cray|1997|pp=312–315}} Despite that brief possibility, a split developed between Eisenhower and Warren, and some writers believe that Eisenhower once remarked that his appointment was "the biggest damn fool mistake I ever made."<ref>{{cite news|last=Purdum|first=Todd S.|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/05/politics/politicsspecial1/presidents-picking-justices-can-have-backfires.html|title=Presidents, Picking Justices, Can Have Backfires|work=[[The New York Times]]|date=July 5, 2005|access-date=June 15, 2015}}</ref>{{efn|Eisenhower biographer Jean Edward Smith concluded in 2012 that "Eisenhower never said that. I have no evidence that he ever made such a statement."<ref>{{cite book|first=Jean Edward|last=Smith|title=Eisenhower in War and Peace|year=2012|publisher=Random House|page=603N}}</ref> Nonetheless, Eisenhower privately expressed his displeasure regarding some of Warren's decisions, and Warren grew frustrated at Eisenhower's unwillingness to support the Court publicly in ''Brown''. Warren was recorded in the 1957 diary of Justice Harold Burton as confiding in Burton that "[Eisenhower] expressed disappointment at the trend of decisions of Chief Justice and Brennan."<ref>[https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1997-09-07-1997250003-story.html Anecdotes are dangerous to biographers and truth Mistakes: When essential little stories are distorted, vast damage is done.]</ref> In 1961, when Eisenhower was asked whether he had made any major mistakes as president, the former president responded that "yes, two, and they are both sitting on the Supreme Court."{{Sfn|Cray|1997|pp=336–337}}}}

Meanwhile, many Southern politicians expressed outrage at the Court's decisions and promised to resist any federal attempt to force desegregation, a strategy known as [[massive resistance]]. Although ''Brown'' did not mandate immediate school desegregation or bar other "separate but equal" institutions, most observers recognized that the decision marked the beginning of the end for the Jim Crow system.{{Sfn|Cray|1997|pp=290–291}} Throughout his years as chief justice, Warren succeeded in keeping decisions concerning segregation unanimous. ''Brown'' applied only to schools, but soon, the Court enlarged the concept to other state actions by striking down racial classification in many areas. Warren compromised by agreeing to Frankfurter's demand for the Court to go slowly in implementing desegregation. Warren used Frankfurter's suggestion for a 1955 decision (''Brown II'') to include the phrase "all deliberate speed."<ref>{{cite journal|first=Robert L.|last=Carter|title=The Warren Court and Desegregation|journal=[[Michigan Law Review|Mich. L. Rev.]]|volume=67|issue=2|date=December 1968|pages=237–248|jstor=1287417|doi=10.2307/1287417|url=https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4901&context=mlr}}</ref> In 1956, after the [[Montgomery bus boycott]], the Supreme Court [[Browder v. Gayle|affirmed a lower court's decision]] that segregated buses are unconstitutional.{{Sfn|Cray|1997|p=320}} Two years later, Warren assigned Brennan to write the Court's opinion in ''[[Cooper v. Aaron]]''. Brennan held that state officials were legally bound to enforce the Court's desegregation ruling in ''Brown''.{{Sfn|Cray|1997|pp=345–348}}

In the 1956 term, the Warren Court received condemnation from [[right-wing politics|right-wingers]] such as US Senator [[Joseph McCarthy]] by handing down a series of decisions, including ''[[Yates v. United States]]'', which struck down laws designed to suppress communists and later led to the decline of [[McCarthyism]].<ref name=":6">{{Cite web|url=https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/43mam8fk9780252037009.html|title=UI Press {{!}} Robert M. Lichtman {{!}} The Supreme Court and McCarthy-Era Repression: One Hundred Decisions|last=Lichtman|first=Robert M.|website=www.press.uillinois.edu|language=en|access-date=September 19, 2019}}</ref><ref name=":4">{{Cite web|url=https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1370/earl-warren|title=Earl Warren|last=Pederson|first=William D.|website=www.mtsu.edu|language=en|access-date=September 15, 2019}}</ref> The Warren Court's decisions on those cases represented a major shift from the [[Vinson Court]], which had generally upheld such laws during the [[Second Red Scare]].<ref name=":6" />{{Sfn|Cray|1997|pp=320–322, 329–333}} That same year, Warren was elected to the [[American Philosophical Society]]. In 1957, he was elected to the [[American Academy of Arts and Sciences]].<ref>{{Cite web |title=Earl Warren |url=https://www.amacad.org/person/earl-warren |access-date=January 10, 2023 |website=American Academy of Arts & Sciences |language=en}}</ref>