Who was the Chief Justice for Brown v. Board of Education?

• A. John Roberts
• B. William Rehnquist
• C. Earl Warren
• D. Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Answer: (C)

The main idea here is identifying who led the Supreme Court during a landmark civil rights ruling. In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren declared that racial segregation in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. This ruling struck down the longstanding Plessy v. Ferguson philosophy of “separate but equal” in education, stating that separate facilities are inherently unequal. Warren’s leadership helped produce a unanimous decision that reframed how the Constitution protects against state-sponsored segregation and catalyzed desegregation nationwide, marking a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement.

The other names were not Chief Justice at that time: John Roberts is the current chief justice, appointed long after the Brown decision; William Rehnquist was chief from 1986 to 2005; Ruth Bader Ginsburg served as an associate justice.