School desegregation

“ Finally, the temper, and prejudices, and feelings of the white taxpayers, who overwhelmingly bear the bulk of public school costs, simply cannot be discounted altogether; political realities have to be considered, and grave thought must be given, as a practical matter, to the social upheaval that inevitably would accompany massive desegregation of public schools in those areas of the South where Negro populations are greatest and traditions of racial separation are most deeply ingrained. ”

“ Perhaps desegregation does not have a single effect, positive or negative, on the academic achievement of African American students, but rather some strategies help, some hurt, and still others make no difference whatsoever. ”

“ In one city after another, North as well as South, the plain and palpable fact is that where “integration” is pushed too rapidly—more rapidly, that is, than the Negro community is prepared to [96] sustain it or the white community is prepared to accept it—a reverse action has set in. The District of Columbia offers a textbook example: Its public schools passed in eight years from segregation to desegregation to a virtual resegregation, as white families fled from mixed neighborhoods and mixed schools. ”

“ The district judge or school authorities should make every effort to achieve the greatest possible degree of actual desegregation and will thus necessarily be concerned with the elimination of one-race schools. No per se rule can adequately embrace all the difficulties of reconciling the competing interests involved; but in a system with a history of segregation the need for remedial criteria of sufficient specificity to assure a school authority's compliance with its constitutional duty warrants a presumption against schools that are substantially disproportionate in their racial composition. ”

“ In Seattle, the parties settled after the school district pledged to undertake a desegregation plan. In both cities, the school boards adopted plans designed to achieve integration by bringing about more racially diverse schools. In each city, the school board modified its plan several times in light of, for example, hostility to busing, the threat of resegregation, and the desirability of introducing greater student choice. And in each city, the school boards' plans have evolved over time in ways that progressively diminish the plans' use of explicit race-conscious criteria. ”

“ The massive desegregation of Southern schools predictably would have a catastrophic effect upon the thousands of Negro men and women who now enjoy, within their race, relatively high status and relatively good incomes as public school teachers. In many areas of the South, as I have said, attitudes are changing and softening, as white parents discover there is a level of token desegregation that is not intolerable to them. ”

“ In my view, a standard for dissolution of a desegregation decree must take into account the unique harm associated with a system of racially identifiable schools and must expressly demand the elimination of such schools.
Our pointed focus in Brown I upon the stigmatic injury caused by segregated schools explains our unflagging insistence that formerly de jure segregated school districts extinguish all vestiges of school segregation. The concept of stigma also gives us guidance as to what conditions must be eliminated before a decree can be deemed to have served its purpose. ”

“ However wide the discretion of local authorities in fashioning desegregation remedies may be, "if a state-imposed limitation on a school authority's discretion operates to inhibit or obstruct the operation of a unitary school system or impede the disestablishing of a dual school system, it must fall; state policy must give way when it operates to hinder vindication of federal constitutional guarantees." ”

“ Whatever progress toward desegregation has been made apparently, and unfortunately, derives only from judicial action initiated by those persons situated as perpetual plaintiffs below. The rights of children to equal educational opportunities are not to be denied, even for a brief time, simply because a school board situates itself so as to make desegregation difficult. ”

“ The School Board and the Superintendent of Schools nevertheless continued with preparations to carry out the first stage of the desegregation program. Nine Negro children were scheduled for admission in September 1957 to Central High School, which has more than two thousand students. ”

“ Here we are told, on the authority of the most eminent court in the world, that if one-hundred Negro pupils are put to study in one building, and one-hundred white pupils are put to study in an identical building, the first group of pupils, who have been segregated solely on the basis of race, will make up a school inherently unequal to the other. ”

“ Nor can the benefits which accrue to school systems in which schoolchildren have not been officially segregated, and to the communities supporting such school systems, be fully and immediately restored after a substantial period of unlawful segregation. The education of children of different races in a desegregated environment has unhappily been lost, along with the social, economic, and political advantages which accompany a desegregated school system as compared with an unconstitutionally segregated system. ”

“ The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law; for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the Negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of Negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial [ly] integrated school system. ”

“ Racial imbalance is not segregation, and the mere incantation of terms like resegregation and remediation cannot make up the difference.
A Because this Court has authorized and required race-based remedial measures to address de jure segregation, it is important to define segregation clearly and to distinguish it from racial imbalance. In the context of public schooling, segregation is the deliberate operation of a school system to "carry out a governmental policy to separate pupils in schools solely on the basis of race." ”

“ We cannot see why the establishment of separate institutions for the education and benefit of different races should be held any more to imply the inferiority of one race than that of the other, and no ground for such an implication exists in the act of discrimination itself. ”

“ This would demand one more subtle and unwelcome shifting of gears; it would carry the social revolution beyond the point of an uneasy “equality” of pupils in a classroom, and would [91] make the white child subject to Negro masters. The efforts of a Federal court to compel employment of Negro teachers who would preside over heavily “mixed” classrooms would be bitterly resented, and the resentment would manifest itself in wholesale withdrawals and school abandonments. ”

“ If we were to read the holding of the District Court to require, as a matter of substantive constitutional right, any particular degree of racial balance or mixing, that approach would be disapproved and we would be obliged to reverse. The constitutional command to desegregate schools does not mean that every school in every community must always reflect the racial composition of the school system as a whole. ”

“ The dissent refers repeatedly and reverently to "'integration.'" However, outside of the context of remediation for past de jure segregation, "integration" is simply racial balancing. See post, at 838. Therefore, the school districts' attempts to further "integrate" are properly thought of as little more than attempts to achieve a particular racial balance.↑ . The dissent's assertion that these plans are necessary for the school districts to maintain their "hard-won gains" reveals its conflation of segregation and racial imbalance. ”

“ Moreover, as we have already noted, under the present complex conditions of our social life the common school is no longer an efficient socializing agent, even for the white children. The present school system is a failure, not only for the negro race, but also, though not in the same degree, for the white race. ”

“ Many parents, white and black alike, want their children to attend schools with children of different races. Indeed, the very school districts that once spurned integration now strive for it. The long history of their efforts reveals the complexities and difficulties they have faced. And in light of those challenges, they have asked us not to take from their hands the instruments they have used to rid their schools of racial segregation, instruments that they believe are needed to overcome the problems of cities divided by race and poverty. The plurality would decline their modest request. ”

“ The court went on to assert that the “intangible considerations” it had found to be important in graduate-school instruction apply with added force [176] to children in grade and high schools. “To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race 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.” Whatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy, said the court, “this finding is amply supported by modern authority.” ”

“ Justice Frankfurter observed more than 12 years ago:
'The process of ending unconstitutional exclusion of pupils from the common school system-'common' meaning shared alike solely because of color is no doubt not an easy, overnight task in a few States where a drastic alteration in the ways of communities is involved. Deep emotions have, no doubt, been stirred. ”

“ Accordingly, the District Court proceeded to redefine the relevant area to include areas of predominantly white pupil population in order to ensure that, "upon implementation, no school, grade or classroom [would be] substantially disproportionate to the overall pupil racial composition" of the entire metropolitan area. ”

“ The colored people everywhere are constantly clamoring for colored teachers, since the rank injustice of separate schools is forced upon them.
I would interject just here a few words on the separate-school system. Aside from the manifest injustice of setting up two schoolhouses in the same ward or district—injustice to the children in the spirit, false from every standpoint, that one child is better than another—the double expense of maintaining two [Pg 41] schools is obvious, and is sufficiently absurd to repel the sympathy or practical philanthropy of any man, Christian or Infidel. ”

“ It does not follow that the communities served by such systems will remain demographically stable, for in a growing, mobile society, few will do so. Neither school authorities nor district courts are constitutionally required to make year-by-year adjustments of the racial composition of student bodies once the affirmative duty to desegregate has been accomplished and racial discrimination through official action is eliminated from the system. ”

“ Even more important, it fails to account for the unique role of the School Board in creating "all-Negro" schools clouded by the stigma of segregation-schools to which white parents would not opt to send their children. That such negative "personal preferences" exist should not absolve a school district that played a role in creating such "preferences" from its obligation to desegregate the schools to the maximum extent possible. ”

“ Given this tenuous relationship between forced racial mixing and improved educational results for black children, the dissent cannot plausibly maintain that an educational element supports the integration interest, let alone makes it compelling. ”

“ In general, where separate schools are required, it is said that they must be equal for both races; but it has been held that it is not an unjust discrimination to build more imposing school-houses for the many white children than for the few colored children; to require the children of one race to walk farther to school than the other, or to maintain high schools for one race without doing so for the other. ”

“ Negro students are not only entitled to neutral nondiscriminatory treatment in the future. They must receive "what Brown II promised them: a school system in which all vestiges of enforced racial segregation have been eliminated." ”

“ Ten States have enacted some form of publicly funded private school choice as one means of raising the quality of education provided to underprivileged urban children. [9] These programs address the root of the problem with failing urban public schools that disproportionately affect minority students. Society’s other solution to these educational failures is often to provide racial preferences in higher education. Such preferences, however, run afoul of the Fourteenth Amendment’s prohibition against distinctions based on race. ”

“ There is, of course, no rational basis on which to treat children who seek to be educated in desegregated school districts any differently for purposes of standing than residents who seek to live in integrated housing communities. ”

“ African-American students are lagging behind white classmates in reading and math - an achievement gap that is growing in states that once led the way on civil rights. Over half of all African-American students are dropping out of school in some places. There are overcrowded classrooms, crumbling schools, and corridors of shame in America filled with poor children - black, brown, and white alike. ”

“ If one examines the context more specifically, one finds that the districts' plans reflect efforts to overcome a history of segregation, embody the results of broad experience and community consultation, seek to expand student choice while reducing the need for mandatory busing, and use race-conscious criteria in highly limited ways that diminish the use of race compared to preceding integration efforts. ”

“ It is an interest in continuing to combat the remnants of segregation caused in whole or in part by these school-related policies, which have often affected not only schools, but also housing patterns, employment practices, economic conditions, and social attitudes. It is an interest in maintaining hard-won gains. ”