v. Board of Education, which arose from the NAACP's legal challenge against Jim Crow laws. The Southern United States had implemented Jim Crow laws in aftermath of the Reconstruction Era to disenfranchise African Americans and segregate public schools and other institutions. In the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court had held that the Fourteenth Amendment did not prohibit segregation in public institutions if the institutions were "separate but equal." In the decades after Plessy, the NAACP had won several incremental victories, but 17 states required the segregation of public schools by 1954. In 1951, the Vinson Court had begun hearing the NAACP's legal challenge to segregated school systems but had not rendered a decision when Warren took office. By the early 1950s, Warren had become personally convinced that segregation was morally wrong and legally indefensible. Warren sought not only to overturn Plessy but also to have a unanimous verdict. Warren, Black, Douglas, Burton, and Minton supported overturning the precedent, but for different reasons, Robert H. Jackson, Felix Frankfurter, Tom C. Clark, and Stanley Forman Reed were reluctant to overturn Plessy. Nonetheless, Warren won over Jackson, Frankfurter, and Clark, in part by allowing states and federal courts the flexibility to pursue desegregation of schools at different speeds. Warren extensively courted the last holdout, Reed, who finally agreed to join a unanimous verdict because he feared that a dissent would encourage resistance to the Court's holding. After the Supreme Court formally voted to hold that the segregation of public schools was unconstitutional, Warren drafted an eight-page outline from which his law clerks drafted an opinion, and the Court handed down its decision in May 1954. In the Deep South at the time, people could view signs claiming "Impeach Earl Warren." Other decisions and events In arranging a unanimous decision in Brown, Warren fully established himself as the leader of the Court. He also remained a nationally prominent figure. After a 1955 Gallup poll found that a plurality of Republican respondents favored Warren as the successor to Eisenhower, Warren publicly announced that he would not resign from the Court under any circumstance. Eisenhower seriously considered retiring after one term and encouraging Warren to run in the 1956 presidential election but ultimately chose to run after he had received a positive medical report after his heart attack. Despite that brief possibility, a split developed between Eisenhower and Warren, and some writers believe