Eisenhower Administrations - Eisenhower and the Judiciary
Eisenhower and the Judiciary
Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren chief justice of the Supreme Court in October 1953. Warren had been attorney general of California during World War II (1939–45) and had authorized the mass deportation of Japanese-American citizens to internment camps after Pearl Harbor. He seemed an unlikely figure to become a civil rights hero, but within months of his confirmation he led an activist Supreme Court in overturning the legal basis of southern racial segregation. Eisenhower's other appointments to the Supreme Court were John M. Harlan (1955), William Brennan (1956), Charles Whittaker (1957), and Potter Stewart (1958), most of whom had reputations as moderate conservatives but who, under pressure of circumstances, made some of the most radical judicial judgments of the twentieth century in the following years.
The unanimous school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka,...
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