Southern Colleges Told to Integrate : Civil rights: Supreme Court rules Mississippi, some other states have not done enough to dismantle segregation. Justices do not spell out how to reach goal.

Thirty years after federal marshals forced Mississippi to open the doors of its best state colleges to black students, the Supreme Court ruled Friday that the state has not done nearly enough to dismantle its formerly segregated system of higher education.

Mississippi, along with the other Southern states, has an “affirmative duty to dismantle its prior dual university system,” the court declared, an obligation it said Mississippi has failed to meet. But Friday’s ruling does not spell out exactly what Mississippi or the other states must do.

In an 8-1 ruling, the court reversed U.S. appellate judges in New Orleans who said the Southern states have met their obligations if they give black and white students a “real freedom of choice” in selecting a college or university.

Operating under this policy, Mississippi’s colleges have largely maintained in fact the segregation that used to exist under law. In 1986, nearly 99% of the state’s white college students were enrolled at one of five historically white campuses, including the University of Mississippi at Oxford. Meanwhile, 71% of its black students were enrolled at one of the three historically black campuses.

Because those enrollment patterns are “traceable” to policies set by the state, the state has a duty to remedy this form of continuing segregation, the justices said.

The court ordered a federal trial judge to reopen a lawsuit filed against Mississippi officials and to take a new look at policies that have acted to prevent integration, such as admissions tests, funding levels and duplicate programs at the white and black campuses.

“That an institution is predominantly white or black does not in itself make out a constitutional violation. But surely the state may not leave in place policies rooted in its prior officially segregated system that serve to maintain the racial identifiability of its universities,” wrote Justice Byron R. White for the court.

State officials, including new Gov. Kirk Fordice, had no immediate comment and said they wanted time to study the court opinion.

Civil rights advocates praised the high court for insisting the Southern states do more to integrate their campuses. They said the decision would apply directly to similar cases involving Alabama and Louisiana and could have an impact on higher education in the 17 Southern and border states that once closed their state colleges to blacks.

“This is quite a strong statement reaffirming the principles of Brown vs. Board of Education and applying them to higher education, which the court has not done before,” said David A. Tatel, former director of the U.S. Office for Civil Rights, which had pressed for more student integration in the South.

Significantly, the court opinion stresses the value of integration over the need to bolster the historically black colleges.

The court’s decision comes at a time when some black education leaders have questioned the wisdom of demanding further racial integration if it meant drawing away black students and undercutting financial support for historically black colleges. These leaders believe some black students can better flourish in the environment of a black campus, and they seek more equal funding for such schools.

This case, U.S. vs. Fordice, 90-1205, appeared to raise the issue directly. The Bush Administration joined black activists from Mississippi in urging the high court to order the state to take further steps to integrate.

But former Howard University President James Cheek, along with other black leaders, complained directly to President Bush that the Administration’s legal stand could exacerbate a “crisis” among the small black colleges because of shrinking enrollments and funds. They urged the President, instead of seeking more integration, to seek more funding for the black colleges, fearing that the other course would drive black students into the larger, predominantly white universities.

But White rejected the notion that the state should be required to provide more money for “exclusively black enclaves.” The state “has not met its burden under Brown to take affirmative steps to dismantle its prior de jure system when it perpetuates a separate, but ‘more equal’ one,” he wrote.

In a separate concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s only black member, stressed that the ruling does not require the state to abolish its black colleges. In past statements, Thomas occasionally questioned the value of integration for African-Americans.

“It would be ironic, to say the least, if the institutions that sustained blacks during the segregation were themselves destroyed in an effort to combat its vestiges,” he wrote.

Justice Antonin Scalia dissented, saying the court has set a vague, impossible-to-meet standard for the Southern states.

“What I predict is a number of years of litigation-driven confusion and destabilization in the university systems” of the South, Scalia wrote.

In March, the justices in a 5-3 ruling made it slightly easier for public school systems to get out from under court desegregation orders. But in that ruling also, the justices could not agree on a clear set of standards to measure whether a school system had fully complied with its “affirmative duty” to desegregate.

In 1961, White, the author of Friday’s majority decision, was deputy attorney general in the John F. Kennedy Administration, which pressured state officials in Mississippi and Alabama to finally open the doors of their schools and colleges to black students.

A year later, shortly after White moved to the high court, 400 U.S. marshals and 3,000 federal troops were dispatched to Oxford to quell rioting when Administration officials gained the admittance of the first black student, James Meredith.