Earl Warren delivered the Supreme Court’s unanimous opinion in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
Warren became chief justice in 1953, after serving as governor of California. In Brown, he wrote that racial segregation in public schools was inherently unequal, overturning the legal foundation of segregated education established by Plessy v. Ferguson.
The ruling combined five related cases from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and Washington, D.C. The decision specifically addressed public-school segregation rather than every form of racial discrimination.
A common mix-up is attributing Brown’s legal argument to Warren alone. Thurgood Marshall and other NAACP attorneys developed and presented the litigation, while the justices reached the unanimous constitutional ruling.