Refusal Shows Extent of High Court’s Shift on Race

The Supreme Court, turning away appeals from civil rights lawyers, let stand a ruling Monday in a closely watched Dallas case that blocks the building of public housing units in mostly white neighborhoods.

Over the last decade, the justices have restricted sharply the use of race-based affirmative action. In the Dallas case, those restrictions were used for the first time to halt the integration of public housing.

Although not a final ruling, the outcome shows how far the federal courts have shifted over the last two decades on matters of race and desegregation. In the 1960s and ‘70s, federal judges often intervened in Southern cities to order desegregation.

In Dallas, officials acknowledged a “sordid” history of blatant racial segregation that extended into the 1980s in the city’s public housing authority. Yet, when an integration plan was proposed, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals intervened at the behest of white homeowners and stopped a move to put two 40-unit public housing buildings in north Dallas. Most of the roughly 300 residents were expected to be black.

Speaking for the appeals court last year, Judge Edith Jones called the integration order an unconstitutional “race-conscious remedy.” A prominent conservative, Jones was interviewed by former President Bush as a finalist in 1990 for the Supreme Court nomination that went to David H. Souter.

Civil rights lawyers from Dallas, joined by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Washington, urged the high court to take up the case and to reverse Jones’ opinion. They argued that the only way to remedy a policy of racial exclusion is to use race as part of the cure.

But the justices denied the appeal Monday without comment.

The case (Walker vs. City of Mesquite, 99-296) is not over, however. It returns to a trial judge in Dallas to find other ways to reduce housing segregation in the city.

The white homeowners who objected to the new public housing suggested that integration could be achieved by giving rent subsidies to low-income African Americans who now live in west Dallas.

A lawyer for the Dallas housing authority said he doubts that would work. “It’s very difficult for these families to find rental housing at all. And what they can find tends to be in the black neighborhoods,” said Joseph Werner, an attorney for the housing authority.

Michael Daniel, a civil rights lawyer who worked on the discrimination lawsuit, said that racial attitudes still are the main obstacle for achieving integration.

“There’s been incredible opposition to putting those folks in the predominantly white areas,” Daniel said. “It’s not the housing. It’s the people in the housing.”

On Monday, the high court turned away a series of appeals but did not hand down any written rulings. In other cases, the justices:

* Refused to hear a challenge to Maryland’s policy of closing public schools on Good Friday (Koenick vs. Felton, 99-816). A retired teacher said that the policy violates the Constitution’s separation of church and state. The state’s lawyers said that high absenteeism on Good Friday persuaded them that closing the schools made sense.

* Turned away a discrimination complaint from prison inmates in Alabama who are HIV positive and are separated from other inmates (Davis vs. Hopper, 98-9663). They said that the segregation violates the federal anti-discrimination law for people with disabilities. The Justice Department and state officials said that prison managers are entitled to make such decisions for safety and health reasons.

* Refused to revive a lawsuit brought by 16 former employees of a California psychic hotline who accused ABC television of violating a federal eavesdropping law (Sussman vs. ABC, 99-840).