Brown v. Board of Education

About the Author

Earl Warren was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1891. He was a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and of that university's law school. Warren served in the U.S. Army during the First World War as an officer in charge of training troops deploying to France.

Warren began his legal career in California in 1920 as a prosecutor with the Alameda County district attorney's office. In 1925 he was appointed district attorney to fill a vacancy. Elected district attorney in his own right the following year, he would remain in that office until his election as California's attorney general in 1938.

Warren was a product of the California Republican politics of the Progressive Era. As district attorney and as attorney general he was generally supportive of reforms in the criminal justice system, such as with his willingness to extend due process rights and legal representation to defendants in criminal cases. These were generally not required at the time by the federal courts, which by and large were not applying most of the criminal defendants' rights provisions of the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments to the states. Warren was also somewhat ahead of the times in his attitudes toward African Americans. He considered appointing a black attorney to the attorney general's staff in 1938.

Ironically enough, anti-Asian bias probably helped propel Warren to the national stage. Warren shared the anti-Asian sentiments that were common among whites on the West Coast in the early part of the twentieth century. Near the beginning of his career he was a member of an anti-Asian group, Native Sons of the Golden West. As attorney general in the winter and spring of 1942, Warren was a leading advocate of Japanese internment, at first advocating internment only for Japanese aliens but later supporting the internment of Japanese Americans as well. His support for Japanese internment doubtless aided Warren in his gaining election as governor of California in 1942. Warren would run for vice president on the Republican ticket with Governor Thomas Dewey of New York in 1948.

Warren was appointed chief justice by President Dwight David Eisenhower in 1953 to replace Chief Justice Frederick M. Vinson, who had died in office. Warren's entire tenure as chief justice was marked by controversy, beginning with the decision in Brown and continuing until his retirement from the Supreme Court in 1969. Under Warren, the Court dealt with some of the most contentious issues in postwar American life, including school desegregation, reapportionment, the rights of criminal defendants, birth control, and the right to privacy, among others. Warren's critics charged that he extended the reach of the Court into areas unauthorized and unintended by the Constitution's framers and that he and his allies on the Court often employed dubious legal reasoning. Warren's supporters responded by noting that the Court under his direction was a vital force in making equal protection and the Bill of Rights living principles for millions of Americans. Later on as chief justice, at the direction of Lyndon B. Johnson, Warren would head the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, often referred to as the Warren Commission. Warren died in 1974.