Editing Earl Warren (section)

====''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>