The Law: Desegreation: A Historic Reversal

Desegregation: A Historic Reversal

Should suburban residents be drawn into the struggles of big cities to achieve racial balance in their schools? Last week the Supreme Court answered that emotional question in the negative. In a far-reaching and bitterly fought decision that came a day after the Watergate-tapes opinion, the court voted 5 to 4 against a plan to desegregate Detroit’s primarily black school system by merging it with the mostly white systems of three surrounding counties.

As in many other big cities, the exodus of white middle-class residents to the suburbs has left Detroit with a school enrollment that is 70% black. Four years ago, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People sued to equalize the racial composition of schools within Detroit’s city limits. Federal District Judge Stephen D. Roth (who died three weeks ago at the age of 66) approved of that goal, but went even further; he ordered the busing of thousands of Detroit’s black students to classes in 53 school systems outside city limits, including such upper-class suburban enclaves as Bloomfield Hills, Grosse Pointe and Birmingham. An appeals court upheld much of the plan, and last fall the state and two threatened suburban school districts appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court.

No Power. For the majority, Chief Justice Warren Burger ruled that the original 1972 Detroit cross-district busing plan was improper because whatever the situation in Detroit itself, the school systems in the surrounding suburbs had not been accused of unlawful segregation. Concluded Burger: “Where the schools of only one district have been affected, there is no constitutional power in the courts to decree relief balancing the racial composition of that district’s schools with those of the surrounding districts.”

In sum, the ruling meant that busing from one community-wide school district to another is not a proper remedy for school segregation in Detroit or, by implication, in any other city. Burger’s opinion left one small avenue open to cross-district busing: a court could order it in cases where intentional segregation in one district leads to a “significant segregative effect in another district.” One example might be where district lines are clearly and intentionally drawn on the basis of race. Otherwise, Burger argued, school-district boundary lines should not be treated casually by judges because “no single tradition in public education is more deeply rooted than local control.”

The court was bitterly—and significantly—divided over the decision. The majority included all four of the “strict constructionists” appointed by President Nixon—Burger, William Rehnquist, Harry Blackmun and Lewis Powell—plus Potter Stewart, an Eisenhower appointee. They were heatedly opposed by the court’s four remaining Warren-era holdovers—William Brennan, Byron White, William Douglas and Thurgood Marshall. White, Douglas and Marshall filed dissenting opinions. Marshall, the court’s only black member, described the ruling as “a giant step backward” for the court in the desegregation area. “In the short run,” he wrote, “it may seem to be the easier course to allow our great metropolitan areas to be divided up each into two cities—one white, the other black—but it is a course, I predict, our people will ultimately regret.”

By its decision the court seemed to draw a line on the extent of its longstanding social commitment to school desegregation. That commitment began with the Warren Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education to overturn an 1896 ruling approving the notion of “separate but equal” treatment of blacks. Ever since then, the court has steadily upheld a federal antisegregation drive that spread from the South to the North, from clear statutory discrimination to subtler varieties.

Split Votes. Until the last of the four Nixon appointees took their seats on the high bench in 1972, school-desegregation rulings since Brown were unanimous—reflecting the Warren Court’s concern for presenting a united front in such a socially explosive area.

The court’s unanimity began to crack with split votes in 1972 on attempts to re-juggle school-district boundaries. The first hint that the balance might decisively tip came last year. By a 4-to-4 vote, the court rejected an appeals court’s plan to join Richmond with two suburban school systems for purposes of desegregation; because the vote was a tie, it established no clear precedent.

Justice Powell, a former chairman of the Richmond school board, withdrew from that case. His vote in the Detroit decision last week effectively broke the pattern of steadily expanding antisegregation efforts that the court had woven in decisions over the past 20 years.

Aside from Detroit, the city most immediately affected by the ruling is probably Louisville, where a federal judge last week ordered city and suburban school districts merged to facilitate desegregation; an appeals court may well use the Detroit case as grounds to overturn the order. Cross-district busing cases are also being pressed in Indianapolis, Atlanta, Wilmington, Del., Hartford, Conn., and a number of other cities. School officials in those communities will now have to look inside their districts for solutions to racial imbalance.

Other important busing plans — notably the 20,000-student shuffle that will take place next fall in Boston — will be unaffected because city lines will not be crossed. Says Boston College Law Professor Leonard Strickman: “The suburbs have been let off the hook from participating in the attempt to solve the education problems of the cities on which they rely so heavily.”

Gaining Control. Ironically, the court’s turnabout comes at a time when some blacks have been voicing doubts of their own about the value (although not the justness) of school desegregation.

A number of black parents now believe that their best immediate prospect for higher-quality education is not cross-district busing, but gaining administrative control of inner-city school systems.

A recent poll in Atlanta, for instance, showed that the city’s blacks oppose busing by a 2-to-1 margin. Says Mrs. Leroy Woodward, an Atlanta school-board member: “I’ve always thought it was insulting to blacks to say that they would do better if they could just sit next to a white child at school. What we need are better schools.”

In Detroit, that is more easily said than done. Its school system — the nation’s fourth largest, with 290,000 students and an annual budget approaching $300 million — is virtually bankrupt.

The products of its overcrowded, under staffed classrooms show up poorly when measured against national achievement norms: last year only 5% of fifth-graders and 6% of sixth-graders scored above average. Cornelius Golightly, black president of the Detroit school board, echoes Justice Marshall’s concern:

“There are not enough middle-income people in Detroit. Integration is only meaningful if there are enough people to integrate. The decision is a step backward. It deprives the people of Detroit and the children of the nation of what essentially could have been a short cut to integration. The decision means that we will not use the schools as a means for integrating society.”

That is not wholly the case; previous court rulings on the necessity of racial balance within the schools of a community still stand as strongly as ever.

But for the first time in two eventful decades, the court has signaled that there is a limit to how far the Judicial Branch should go in advancing the goal of racial equality.