Desegregation Remedies

Desegregation Remedies Brown v. Board of Education II (1955) held that desegregation should occur “with all deliberate speed.” Initially, some southern courts and school boards interpreted Brown to require only the elimination of race as a basis for deciding which schools children should attend (see Segregation, De Jure). That interpretation, described as “desegregation not integration,” was in some tension with the Supreme Court's concern that school boards have time to respond to the administrative and other difficulties that it foresaw.

Immediately after Brown, a variety of desegregation methods were adopted by some school boards. These included “freedom of choice” plans, in which parents selected the schools their children would attend, with the predictable result that white parents chose the previously white schools and black parents, concerned about their children's safety, often chose the previously black schools; and “one grade a year” plans, in which schools were desegregated one grade at a time, starting either in first grade or in twelfth grade. The Supreme Court intervened in the process of desegregation only once between 1955 and 1963, chastising the governor of Arkansas for interfering with the desegregation of schools in Little Rock (Cooper v. Aaron, 1958).With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, enforcement of Brown became more vigorous. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare developed guidelines to determine when schools had desegregated and were therefore entitled to Federal financial assistance. The department began to enforce these guidelines with some vigor, and the courts began to use them as measures of appropriate desegregation remedies.

In 1968 the Supreme Court in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County invalidated freedom of choice plans, saying that school boards had to adopt desegregation plans that “promise[d] realistically to work now” (p. 438). By this time, residential segregation in most urban school districts and in many rural ones had become so pronounced that simply establishing neighborhood schools would not eliminate racial disparities in individual schools (see Segregation, De Facto). In 1971 the Supreme Court in Swann v. Charlotte‐Mecklenburg Board of Education upheld a district judge's order requiring that children attend schools away from their neighborhood to achieve a rough racial balance in all the schools in the district.

Busing remedies were extremely unpopular among whites and some blacks, particularly because in many instances more black children were bused than whites and because many schools remained racially identifiable even after busing. In the South, however, busing in rural districts had been common as a result of school consolidations, and resistance to busing was substantially weaker than resistance to desegregation itself had been. In the North, however, where desegregation litigation was coming to a head in the 1970s, resistance to desegregation occurred simultaneously with resistance to busing and was encouraged to some degree by expressions of opposition to the courts by President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew.

The Supreme Court did little in the area of desegregation remedies through the 1970s and 1980s, concentrating instead on specifying the circumstances under which northern districts could be required to desegregate and those in which districts could be held to have done enough to be free of further obligations to desegregate. Milliken v. Bradley (1977) held that Federal courts could order educational improvements, such as remedial reading programs, as part of a desegregation remedy, and in 1990 the Court held that they could bar states from imposing barriers to tax increases to finance such improvements (Missouri v. Jenkins, 1990).

The Supreme Court's decisions in the 1990s dealt with the circumstances justifying courts from withdrawing from their supervision of desegregation (Board of Education of Oklahoma City Public Schools v. Dowell, 1991; Freeman v. Pitts, 1992; Missouri v. Jenkins, 1995). Some lower courts held that the Supreme Court's decisions on affirmative action barred school districts from adopting race‐conscious programs aimed at promoting integration. For all practical purposes, the Federal courts had stopped attempting to enforce desegregation by 2000.

See also Race and Racism.

Bibliography

J. Harvie Wilkinson , From Brown to Bakke: The Supreme Court and School Integration, 1954–1978 (1979).

Mark V. Tushnet