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In Warren's first session, the court outlawed school segregation (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954), setting in motion the fight for Negro rights that has dominated and rent the nation ever since. "To separate [children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race," the new Chief Justice wrote in a unanimous decision, "generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."
In the mid-'50s, the court reined in the congressional Communist-hunters, who had in their search for subversives ridden roughshod over the due-process guarantees of the Bill of Rights. In the early '60s, it enforced the separation of church and state by ending prescribed prayers in public schools, and limited the powers of government to censor books and movies, expanding the First Amendment guarantee of free speech.
In a series of decisions beginning in 1962 (Baker v. Carr), the court decreed that legislative bodies, from the House of Representatives to town councils, must be apportioned by population rather than geography or other factors favoring one man over another. The Justices sought to end rural political predominance in an urban nation. "Legislators represent people, not trees or acres," Warren wrote in Reynolds v. Sims (1964). "Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests. The right to elect legislators in a free and unimpaired fashion is a bedrock of our political system. To the extent that a citizen's right to vote is debased, he is that much less a citizen. A citizen, a qualified voter, is no more nor no less so because he lives in the city or on the farm."
Black Monday. Starting in the mid-'50s and continuing to the present, the court moved to guarantee the rights of persons accused of crimes and to require the police to pay greater heed to those rights in dealing with suspects. Last week, in the Chief Justice's final session on the bench, the court returned to where it started in 1954 by ruling that, under an 1866 law, a Negro has the same right as any white to buy or rent a house (see THE LAW).
All through the Warren years, the criticism of the court rarely ceased. White Southerners dubbed May 17, 1954—the day that Brown v. Board of Education was announced—"Black Monday." The title was subsequently applied to many another Monday, the traditional day for issuing decisions, as the court bit by bit chipped away the legal basis of white supremacy. When the court later handed down its prayer decisions, Alabama's Representative George Andrews cried: "They put the Negroes in the schools, and now they've driven God out." At one point, 36 chief judges of the state supreme courts signed a resolution deploring what they considered the U.S. Supreme Court's disregard of states' rights, and Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen nearly succeeded in getting Congress to adopt amendments that would have overturned the prayer and apportionment decisions.