Court Sets Aside Desegregation Order

Revisiting the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case that outlawed school desegregation in 1954, the Supreme Court on Monday set aside a lower court order demanding that the Topeka, Kan., school district take further steps to end racial imbalances in its classrooms.

The high court’s action clears the way for an end to 38 years of federal court supervision of the district in matters pertaining to race, school lawyers said.

The move was signaled three weeks ago when the justices, in a lengthy opinion, reversed a mandatory busing order imposed on a suburban Atlanta school system. Even a dramatic and growing “racial imbalance” in a school district that was once segregated by law is not reason for undertaking mandatory busing, they said.

In that decision, and a similar one in an Oklahoma City case, the conservative court said it is time for federal courts to remove themselves from close supervision of school districts that were once officially segregated.

“Federal supervision of local school systems was intended as a temporary measure,” said Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. Desegregation orders were “not intended to operate in perpetuity,” he said.

On Monday, the high court applied that rationale to set aside a pending desegregation order in the Kansas school system, where official segregation first began to unravel four decades ago.

In 1951, a group of black parents in Topeka challenged the school board’s policies of racial segregation as unconstitutional. The lead plaintiff was Oliver Brown, a lay minister and a welder on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad. At that time, all the black pupils in the Kansas capital were assigned to four all-black schools, while white children were assigned to 18 exclusively white schools.

Brown’s daughter Linda had to travel 25 blocks to attend an all-black school, even though a new elementary school was only four blocks from her home. It was reserved for whites.

On May 17, 1954, a unanimous Supreme Court used the case of Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka to strike down official segregation in the public schools. In one sense, everything changed in Topeka. The all-black schools were eliminated, and all children were assigned to the school nearest their homes.

But in another sense, little change resulted, according to some civil rights lawyers. In 1986, more than half of the city’s black students were concentrated in four of 26 elementary schools, they said. Linda Brown, now a grandmother, had a grandson enrolled in a school where more than 70% of the pupils were black or Latino.

“There remain black schools and white schools in Topeka, and they are the result of school board action and inaction,” said Christopher Hansen, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who represented black parents.

Based on this evidence of stark racial imbalances, a federal appeals court in Denver ruled in 1989 that the Topeka school district had not eliminated the “vestiges” of the old segregated system. It ordered school officials to take further steps to integrate its faculties and classrooms, including possible forced busing.

But the Supreme Court blocked that ruling Monday. In a brief order in the case (Board of Education vs. Brown, 89-1681), the justices granted an appeal filed by school lawyers and declared the appeals court “judgment is vacated.” Instead, the justices ordered the Denver-based judges to reconsider the case in light of the Atlanta and Oklahoma City rulings.