Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the majority opinion in Brown v. Board of Education. In 1954, his unanimous opinion held that racial segregation in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Warren had become chief justice only in 1953, after President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him. The Court had already heard arguments in Brown, but it ordered reargument on difficult historical and constitutional questions. Warren worked to produce a single opinion that every justice could join.
The decision rejected the legal foundation of “separate but equal” in public education, the doctrine associated with Plessy v. Ferguson. Warren’s opinion famously explained that segregated schools were inherently unequal because separation stigmatized Black children and denied them equal educational status, regardless of whether facilities appeared comparable.
Brown was a unanimous 9–0 decision, not a ruling authored by Thurgood Marshall. Marshall was the NAACP attorney who led the litigation team and argued the case before the Court. The follow-up decision, Brown II, addressed the implementation of desegregation.