Supreme Court Won’t Hear Desegregation Case
The fight over one of the nation’s longest-running school busing programs ended when the U.S. Supreme Court turned away a plea from black parents to keep Charlotte’s schools under federal oversight.
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system in 1970 became the first major urban district in the nation to use court-ordered busing to achieve racial balance. The high court upheld the plan in 1971.
The high court’s refusal to hear the dispute this time marked the official end of the program that bused urban students to mostly white suburban schools and suburban students to the urban areas.
A lower court ruled in September that the school system can go forward with a new student-assignment plan that does not use race as a factor.
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