Warren, Earl (1891–1974)

Earl Warren was the 14th Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and served in office from 1953 to 1969. In 1954, he wrote the opinion for the unanimous ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, outlawing segregation by race in public schools. The ruling declared that mandatory or permissive segregation was unconstitutional. Although there was significant public dissent over the issue, school districts would be required to reform their policies and practices in order to comply with the Court's decision, thus beginning the desegregation of public schools in the United States.

Earl Warren was born March 19, 1891, in Los Angeles, California. His father was of Norwegian descent, and his mother was a Swedish immigrant. Warren went to school in Bakersfield, California, and attended the University of California at [Page 932]Berkeley. At Berkeley, he earned an undergraduate degree in Legal Studies and his Juris Doctor in 1914. He was admitted to the California bar that same year. He worked for a private law firm and enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1917 for service in World War I. He was a first lieutenant and was honorably discharged in 1918. He served as a clerk of the judicial committee of the California State Assembly, deputy city attorney for Oakland, and deputy district attorney of Alameda County in California. As his reputation spread for being tough on crime and sensitive to the rights of the accused, he was appointed district attorney for Alameda County, where he served three 4-year terms from 1925 through 1939. Warren married Nina P. Meyers, a Swedish widow, in 1925 and they had six children.

In 1938, Earl Warren was elected Attorney General of the State of California. He led anticrime efforts and cracked down on illegal offshore gambling. Following the United States' entry into World War II, Warren supported the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent to relocation camps, a move for which he would later express regret in his memoirs. In 1942, Warren was elected governor of California. He was a popular governor, and was reelected twice.

Warren ran on the Republican national ticket as the vice presidential candidate for Thomas Dewey in 1948, and in 1952 lost the Republican presidential nomination to the eventual winner, Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1953, President Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Eisenhower wanted a conservative justice, but instead got a liberal justice: The Warren-led court was to make decisions directly affecting social progress in the United States. During Warren's term as Chief Justice, his Court ruled on controversial issues such as civil rights cases, separation of church and state, and protection of individual rights.

Earl Warren took over a Court whose members were divided between a more active role for the Court and those who supported judicial restraint. In 1954, one of the first cases for the Warren Court was Brown v. Board of Education, which turned out to be a landmark case dealing with banning segregation in public schools. In the 1950s racial segregation in schools was common, and most schools attended by Black students were inferior to those attended by Whites. The existing Plessy v. Ferguson ruling allowed “separate but equal” school systems for Blacks and Whites.

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