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/* Brown v. Board of Education */ add
Although many justices were convinced, Warren spent some time after this famous speech convincing two holdouts for segregation to sign onto the opinion. The first holdout, Justice Vinson, died during this initiative. The second finally decided to drop his dissent to what was by then a moderate opinion backed by the remaining six justices.
Liberals consider Warren's final opinion a political masterwork, not just for his political gamesmanship, but for his general writing, making use of dubious social science research to draw legal conclusions, and laying the groundwork for forced racial busing. The very first case put Warren's leadership skills to an extraordinary test. The Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP (a small, primarily white legal group separate from the much better known [[NAACP]]) had been waging a systematic legal fight against the "separate but equal" doctrine enunciated in [[Plessy v. Ferguson]] (1896) and finally had challenged Plessy in a series of five related cases, which had been argued before the Court in the spring of 1953. However the justices had been unable to decide the issue and asked to rehear the case in fall 1953, with special attention to whether the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause prohibited the operation of separate public schools for whites and blacks.<ref> See [http://americanhistory.si.edu/Brown/history/index.html Smithsonian, “Separate is Not Equal: Brown v. Board of Education’’]</ref> While all but one justice personally rejected segregation, the self-restraint faction questioned whether the Constitution gave the Court the power to order its end. The activist faction believed the Fourteenth Amendment did give the necessary authority and were pushing to go ahead. Warren, who held only a recess appointment, held his tongue until the Senate, dominated by southerners, confirmed his appointment. Warren told his colleagues after oral argument that he believed segregation violated the Constitution and that only if one considered African Americans inferior to whites could the practice be upheld. But he did not push for a vote. Instead, he talked with the justices and encouraged them to talk with each other as he sought a common ground on which all could stand. Finally he had eight votes, and the last holdout, Stanley Reed of Kentucky, agreed to join the rest. Warren drafted the basic opinion in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and kept circulating and revising it until he had an opinion endorsed by all the members of the Court.<ref> For text see [http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=347&invol=483 BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)]</ref> The unanimity Warren achieved helped speed the drive to desegregate public schools, which mostly came about under President [[Richard M. Nixon]]. Throughout his years as Chief, Warren succeeded in keeping all decisions concerning segregation unanimous. Brown applied to schools, but soon the Court enlarged the concept to other state actions, striking down racial classification in many areas. Congress ratified the process in the [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]] and the [[Voting Rights Act of 1965]]. Warren did compromise by agreeing to Frankfurter's demand that the Court go slowly in implementing desegregation; Warren used Frankfurter's suggestion that a 1955 decision (Brown II) include the phrase "all deliberate speed."<ref> Robert L. Carter, "The Warren Court and Desegregation," ''Michigan Law Review,'' Vol. 67, No. 2 (Dec., 1968), pp. 237-248 [http://www.jstor.org/pss/1287417 in JSTOR]</ref> The Brown decision of 1954 marked, in dramatic fashion, the radical shift in the Court's--and the nation's--priorities from issues of property rights to civil liberties. Under Warren the courts became an active partner in governing the nation, although still not coequal. Warren never saw the courts as a backward-looking branch of government. The Brown decision was a powerful moral statement clad in a weak constitutional analysis; Warren was never a legal scholar on a par with Frankfurter or a great advocate of particular doctrines, as was Black. Instead, he believed that in all branches of government common sense, decency, and elemental justice were decisive, not stare decisis, tradition or the text of the Constitution. He wanted results. He never felt that doctrine alone should be allowed to deprive people of justice. He felt racial segregation was simply wrong, and Brown, whatever its doctrinal defects, remains a landmark decision primarily because of Warren's majestic interpretation of the equal protection clause to mean that children should not be shunted to a separate world reserved for minorities.
====Reapportionment====
Warren's priority on fairness shaped other major decisions. In 1962, over the strong objections of Frankfurter, the Court agreed that questions regarding malapportionment in state legislatures were not political issues, and thus were not outside the Court's purview. For years underpopulated rural areas had deprived metropolitan centers of equal representation in state legislatures. In Warren's California, Los Angeles County had only one state senator. Cities had long since passed their peak, and now it was the middle class suburbs that were underepresented. Frankfurter insisted that the Court should avoid this "political thicket" and warned that the Court would never be able to find a clear formula to guide lower courts in the rash of lawsuits sure to follow.
Conservatives angrily denounced the "handcuffing of the police."<ref>Ronald Kahn and Ken I. Kersch, eds. ''The Supreme Court And American Political Development'' (2006) [http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0700614397/ref=sib_books_pg?ie=UTF8&keywords=miranda%20%26%2334%3Bcrime%20rates%26%2334%3B&p=S04N&checkSum=%252FyIgYm2ybgibk6P%252BM%252FG9LcucFd6ieUBSkCM%252FVsFiLs0%253D online at p. 442]</ref> Violent crime and homicide rates shot up nationwide; in New York City, for example, after steady to declining trends until the early 1960s, the homicide rate doubled in the period from 1964-74 from just under 5 per 100,000 at the beginning of that period to just under 10 per 100,000 in 1974. After 1992 the homicide rates fell sharply.<ref> Thomas Sowell, ''The Vision of the Anointed: Self-congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy'' (1995) [http://books.google.com/books?id=ISTtFtcIkKAC&pg=PA29&dq=homicide+%22warren+court%22&lr=&num=30&as_brr=0&ei=BvhqSNuHHpOkiwHp99SCBg&sig=ACfU3U2Pv3ET0J8J_NHq2uTqH_GJxcCbDw online at p. 26-29]</ref>
===First Amendment===
The Warren Court's activism stretched into a new turf, especially First Amendment rights. The Court's decision outlawing mandatory school prayer in Engel v. Vitale (1962) brought vehement complaints that echoed into the 21st century.<ref> See [http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=370&invol=421 ENGEL v. VITALE, 370 U.S. 421 (1962) ]</ref>
