If
You Were a Supreme Court Justice . . .
The Brown v. Board of Education decision did
not dictate how schools should desegregate. Many systems did
not want to desegregate and experimented with ways to get
around the Court decision in Brown to take advantage
of the vague mandate. Many law suits were filed by minority
students, the NAACP, and the Justice Department to force school
districts to comply with the Brown decision. The law,
however, was not always clear.
As
groups or as individuals, read the following descriptions
of school segregation cases that came before the Supreme
Court of the United States after the Brown v. Board
of Education decision. Taking into consideration what
you know about the Brown case and the spirit in which
it was written, how would you decide each one? After you
discuss each case, read how the actual Supreme Court of
the United States decided the case.
Green
v.
County School Board of New Kent County (1968)
States and counties adopted many different plans to desegregate
their schools. In 1965, the New Kent County school board
adopted a "freedom-of-choice plan," which essentially
allowed students in the rural, residentially integrated
district to choose which of the two schools they wished
to attend-the formerly all black Watkins School or the formerly
all-white New Kent School. After three years of the new
plan, no whites had elected to attend Watkins and only 115
blacks attended New Kent. The black school children in this
case contended that the "freedom-of-choice plan"
in practice operated to perpetuate the racially dual (segregated)
school system. It placed the burden of desegregation on
the black children's shoulders.
If
you were a Supreme Court justice, would you rule this "freedom-of-choice
plan" constitutional?
Read
the Court's decision.
Swann
v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg Board of Education (1971)
The school
district in question was a part-urban, part-rural district
covering 550 square miles and serving 84,000 pupils in 101
schools. The school population was 29 percent black and those
pupils were concentrated in one quadrant of Charlotte. Even
after the Brown v. Board of Education decision,
more than half of the black students attended schools without
any white students or teachers. After the Green decision,
the federal district court adopted a plan to scatter the highly
concentrated black-student population by transporting students.
The plan would involve 13,000 students and require 100 new
buses at a cost of millions of dollars.
If you
were a Supreme Court justice, would you order the desegregation
of this school district through a busing system to disperse
students?
Read
the Court's decision.
Keyes v. School District
No. 1, Denver, Colorado (1973)
This was one of the first cases dealing with school segregation
outside of the South. In this case, the lower courts found
that the Denver School District deliberately engaged in
discrimination in the Park Hill section of the district
by building schools in certain areas, gerrymandering student
attendance zones, and by the excessive use of mobile classroom
units, among other things. The petitioners in the case not
only wanted the Park Hill section of the city to be desegregated,
but wanted the courts to order desegregation of all segregated
schools in the city of Denver, particularly the heavily
segregated schools in the core city area, even though there
was no evidence of a deliberate attempt to segregate students
in all-black schools there.
If you
were a Supreme Court justice, would you order the entire
district desegregated, or just the Park Hill area?
Read
the Court's
decision.
Milliken v. Bradley
(1974)
This case concerned the segregation practices of the Detroit
school district, which was the fifth largest in the nation
in 1970. Several black students and the NAACP filed the
suit against the Detroit school district alleging past and
present discrimination in the Detroit system, particularly
in the drawing of school district and attendance zone boundaries.
Lower courts found that there was discrimination and ordered
the system to desegregate. Because of white flight to the
suburbs, the Detroit school district was largely black,
making it difficult to truly desegregate. A plan was devised
to include surrounding majority white school districts in
the desegregation plan, even though those districts had
not engaged in any illegal segregation. This was believed
necessary because without their participation, there could
not be a racial balance in Detroit's schools.
If you
were a Supreme Court justice, would you approve the plan
to desegregate multiple school districts even though only
one school district had been found to have illegally discriminated?
Read
the Court's decision.
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