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A Little Rock Reminder

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Fifty years after Dwight Eisenhower sent 1,000 soldiers to protect nine black students entering Little Rock Central High School, our country’s schools remain pitifully segregated. And as Juan Williams points out, Americans are increasingly uninterested in doing anything to battle that segregation. Our own Supreme Court is even handing down decisions that make it more difficult to integrate segregated schools. Williams writes:

The movement away from school integration is glaring. The Civil Rights Project found in 2003 that the nation’s 27 biggest school districts were “overwhelmingly” segregated with black and Latino students. Nationwide today, almost half of black and Latino children are in schools where less than 10 percent of the students are white. Those essentially segregated schools have a large percentage of low-income families and, according to researchers, “difficulty retaining highly qualified teachers.” Meanwhile, the average white student attends a school that is 80 percent white and far more affluent than the schools for minority students.

This trend toward isolation of poor and minority students has consequences — half of black and Latino students now drop out of high school.

Integrated schools benefit students, especially minorities. Research on the long-term outcomes of black and Latino students attending integrated schools indicates that those students “complete more years of education, earn higher degrees and major in more varied occupations than graduates of all-black schools.”

Justice Breyer’s dissent in the Seattle segregation case is worth re-reading this week:

Indeed, the consequences of the approach the Court takes today are serious. Yesterday, the plans under review were lawful. Today, they are not. Yesterday, the citizens of this Nation could look for guidance to this Court’s unanimous pronouncements concerning desegregation. Today, they cannot. Yesterday, school boards had available to them a full range of means to combat segregated schools. Today, they do not.

The Court’s decision undermines other basic institutional principles as well. What has happened to stare decisis? The history of the plans before us, their educational importance, their highly limited use of race–all these and more–make clear that the compelling interest here is stronger than in Grutter. The plans here are more narrowly tailored than the law school admissions program there at issue. Hence, applying Grutter’s strict test, their lawfulness follows a fortiori. To hold to the contrary is to transform that test from “strict” to “fatal in fact”–the very opposite of what Grutter said. And what has happened to Swann? To McDaniel? To Crawford? To Harris? To School Committee of Boston? To Seattle School Dist. No. 1? After decades of vibrant life, they would all, under the plurality’s logic, be written out of the law.

And what of respect for democratic local decisionmaking by States and school boards? For several decades this Court has rested its public school decisions upon Swann’s basic view that the Constitution grants local school districts a significant degree of leeway where the inclusive use of race-conscious criteria is at issue. Now localities will have to cope with the difficult problems they face (including resegregation) deprived of one means they may find necessary.

And what of law’s concern to diminish and peacefully settle conflict among the Nation’s people? Instead of accommodating different good-faith visions of our country and our Constitution, today’s holding upsets settled expectations, creates legal uncertainty, and threatens to produce considerable further litigation, aggravating race-related conflict.

And what of the long history and moral vision that the Fourteenth Amendment itself embodies? The plurality cites in support those who argued in Brown against segregation, and Justice Thomas likens the approach that I have taken to that of segregation’s defenders. See ante, at 39-41 (plurality opinion) (comparing Jim Crow segregation to Seattle and Louisville’s integration polices); ante, at 28-32 (Thomas, J., concurring). But segregation policies did not simply tell schoolchildren “where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin,” ante, at 40 (plurality opinion); they perpetuated a caste system rooted in the institutions of slavery and 80 years of legalized subordination. The lesson of history, see ante, at 39 (plurality opinion), is not that efforts to continue racial segregation are constitutionally indistinguishable from efforts to achieve racial integration. Indeed, it is a cruel distortion of history to compare Topeka, Kansas, in the 1950’s to Louisville and Seattle in the modern day–to equate the plight of Linda Brown (who was ordered to attend a Jim Crow school) to the circumstances of Joshua McDonald (whose request to transfer to a school closer to home was initially declined). This is not to deny that there is a cost in applying “a state-mandated racial label.” Ante, at 17 (Kennedy, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment). But that cost does not approach, in degree or in kind, the terrible harms of slavery, the resulting caste system, and 80 years of legal racial segregation.

The last half-century has witnessed great strides toward racial equality, but we have not yet realized the promise of Brown. To invalidate the plans under review is to threaten the promise of Brown. The plurality’s position, I fear, would break that promise. This is a decision that the Court and the Nation will come to regret.


4 thoughts on A Little Rock Reminder

  1. Last night I attended an event in Little Rock headlined by President Clinton, Jessie Jackson, the Little Rock Nine, and others. Though it was moving, I was reminded of a great book I read several years back by Gary Orfield (Dismantling Desegregation) about how U.S. schools, particularly in the South, are re-segregating. With the current SCOTUS makeup, I’m hardly optimistic about the outlook for future generations .

  2. Uh yeah, it’s too bad that’s not what Juan Williams was saying in June:

    Desegregation does not speak to dropout rates that hover near 50 percent for black and Hispanic high school students. It does not equip society to address the so-called achievement gap between black and white students that mocks Brown’s promise of equal educational opportunity.

    Could he contradict himself any more clearly? Is it possible that Fox News created an evil clone? or Is the guy just a dick?

  3. Fortunately, there will be push back the other way. If the state of schools continue to exist in such a way where it can be argued there are 2 separate systems within local areas (which is what I see in North Texas), and the result is segregated schools, why not make the legal argument. If/when re-segregation occurs, we will have to return to the central question “Can separate be equal?” While our current SCOTUS will answer with a resounding, colorblind “Yes!” they may rethink their reasoning when the poor minority masses start taking it to the streets.

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