School segregation

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In 1956, a memo for the Seattle School Board reported that school segregation reflected not only segregated housing patterns but also school board policies that permitted white students to [p. 808] transfer out of black schools while restricting the transfer of black students into white schools. ”

“ These figures arouse the South’s critics, but another fact contributes more significantly to their exasperation: The people of the South, white and Negro together, continue to dwell amiably side by side. Except where hired missionaries from the NAACP can stir up a lawsuit, agitation for an end to school segregation ranges from small to nil. The Southern States have put these past eight years to good use in pouring a fortune into equalization of Negro school facilities. ”

“ 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 Association chose to concentrate its efforts on a gradual, relentless attack against segregation through the courts. Believing that education was an all-important factor in society, it decided that school desegregation should become the major target. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 political climate of a Federal administration anxious to achieve integration, the immense resources of a lavish school budget, the cultural amenities freely available to all children as an adjunct to learning, the absence of racial discrimination in employment, the untypically high incomes and job status of many Negro families. It is entirely reasonable to assume that pupils in the Washington schools, as a group, should not be merely average, or slightly above average; they should in fact lead the entire country. ”

“ Because these are class actions, because of the wide applicability of this decision, and because of the great variety of local conditions, the formulation of decrees in these cases presents problems of considerable complexity. On reargument, the consideration of appropriate relief was necessarily subordinated to the primary question—the constitutionality of segregation in public education. We have now announced that such segregation is a denial of the equal protection of the laws. ”

“ Liberty under law extends to the full range of conduct which the individual is free to pursue, and it cannot be restricted except for a proper governmental objective. Segregation in public education is not reasonably related to any proper governmental objective, and thus it imposes on Negro children of the District of Columbia a burden that constitutes an arbitrary deprivation of their liberty in violation of the Due Process Clause. ”

“ School districts, from habit and conviction, will carry it along without aid of state statutes. To eradicate segregation by judicial action means two generations of litigation.
It is apparent that our decision does not end but begins the struggle over segregation. Representatives of the Negros contend with great force that if to enter white schools is a right at all it is a present and personal right and that deferred belief may be a denial of rights to those pupils who meanwhile pass school age. ”

“ Ferguson was written. We must consider public education in the light of its full development and its present place in American life throughout the Nation. Only in this way can it be determined if segregation in public schools deprives these plaintiffs of the equal protection of the laws.
Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The influence that this segregation has upon school facilities for both races should not be overlooked. The separation of the two races in the schools is to be viewed as the settled policy of the South. Here, then, is a farming community in which there are only a few Negroes. What sort of a separate school will be maintained for their children? Probably they are unable to support a good school, even should they so desire. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If we cast aside chimerical theories and look to practical results, it seems to us it must be conceded that separate schools for colored children is a regulation to their great advantage.... The fact that the two races are separated for the purpose of receiving instruction deprives neither of any rights. ”

“ If public education is to have the support of the people through their legislatures, Judge Parker said, “it must not go contrary to what they deem for the best interests of their children.” The plaintiffs’ expert witnesses had testified that mixed schools would benefit children of both races by exposing them to democratic opportunities in community living. Defense witnesses, on the other hand, had testified that mixed schools would result in friction and tension. ”

“ No law or court order requires them to integrate; no law or court order requires them affirmatively to take any action. True, if a point is made of it, and formal complaint of discrimination is filed, local school officials must then yield to the principles laid down by the Supreme Court; they can yield voluntarily, or they can go through the motions of a predictable court proceeding, but they cannot deny the child by reason of his race the right to attend any public school under their supervision. ”

“ Use of official authority to coerce public school officials in maintaining the segregation line intact has been a comparatively easy matter. To move against private educational institutions which served as focal points of disaffection or threatened to lower the segregation barrier is more difficult. One such recent effort by Governor Timmerman and a compliant State Board of Education bared a vicious form of official infighting. ”

“ Conant paints a grimly realistic picture of a Negro child’s life in the urban slums of the North, where the child may live six flights up in a tenement offering “one filthy room with a bed, a light bulb, and a stink.” It is after visiting such tenements, and inspecting the schools attended by slum children, that he grows impatient “with both critics and defenders of public education who ignore the realities of school situations to engage in fruitless debate about educational [100] philosophy, purposes, and the like: These situations call for action, not for hair-splitting arguments.” ”

“ Other Federal programs, such as the highway and urban renewal programs, which involve massive displacement and relocation, also have had the effect of intensifying residential segregation.
'The point we are making is that the current situation we face, in which most minority group children attend school in isolation from children of the majority group, is not accidental or purely de facto. ”

“ The various tests now being administered in school systems across the country are as fair and objective as competent psychologists and educators can make them; and the bleak, undeniable fact, confirmed repeatedly in school districts both North and South, is that colored children regularly [89] score at lower levels than the white children of their communities. Thoughtful students of the difficult problem before the South will comprehend what the evidence means in terms of the real and practical obstacles to welding together white and Negro schools in rural areas below the Potomac. ”

“ The amended complaint thus was not a new cause of action but merely part of the same old cause of action arising out of the continued desire of colored students in Prince Edward County to have the same opportunity for state-supported education afforded to white people, a desire thwarted before 1959 by segregation in the public schools and after 1959 by a combination of closed public schools and state and county grants to white children at the Foundation's private schools. ”

“ The Committee presented further evidence that these low teacher expectations for minority students are prevalent in the Boston school system, and that this prevalence is a vestige of the long years of segregation in the Boston school system. Given these connections between student achievement, teacher expectations for students, and the impact of years 821*821 of segregation on these teacher expectations, the achievement gap itself is a current and lingering effect of discrimination. ”