Appellant
James E. Swann
Appellee
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education
Appellant's Claim
That the local public schools were not doing enough to integrate their student bodies.
Chief Lawyers for Appellant
Julius LeVonne Chambers and James M. Nabritt III
Chief Lawyers for Appellee
William J. Waggoner and Benjamin S. Horack
Justices for the Court
Hugo Lafayette Black, Harry A. Blackmun, William J. Brennan, Jr., Warren E. Burger (writing for the Court), William O. Douglas, John Marshall Harlan II, Thurgood Marshall, Potter Stewart, Byron R. White
Justices Dissenting
None
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
20 April 1971
Decision
The Supreme Court upheld the desegregation plan developed by the federal court overseeing public school integration in the district.
Significance
Swann is important for its endorsement of school busing as a means ofachieving racial integration.
In 1955, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered school districts to pursue integration "with all deliberate speed." That order was handed down in Brown v. Board of Education II, the case in which the High Court gave lower federal courts the task of developing plans to implement desegregation following the first Brown v. Board of Education case, which had been decided a year earlier. Dual school systems--one white, one black--had previously been writteninto the law, and a public that had grown accustomed to official segregationnow resisted court efforts to impose change. Resistance was most pronouncedin the South. Local officials there sometimes devised plans which appeared tobe neutral but which actually slowed the process of school integration. In Griffin v. County School Board (1964), for example, the Supreme Court was faced with a Virginia school board that closed down all of its public schools and handed out tuition grants to private schools as a means of avoiding court-ordered desegregation. Declaring that there had been too much deliberation and not enough speed, the Supreme Court ordered the public schools reopened.
In Green v. County School Board (1968), the Court struck down a "freedom of choice" plan, which ostensibly permitted students to attend either a white school or a black school, because of its failure to bring about the changes required by Brown II. It was not enough for school boards simply toremove the legal restraints keeping the races apart. Allowing students to "choose" which school they wanted to attend was not realistic. What was neededwas a system that would quickly reconstitute schools, so that the student body of each would come to resemble the larger population mix. As more and morewhite families fled the cities, busing black children out to suburban schoolsseemed the only way to achieve the racial balance required by Brown II.
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district included not only the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, but also largely rural Mecklenburg County. Twenty-ninepercent of school-age children were black, most of them concentrated in one area of Charlotte. Despite implementation of a desegregation plan in 1965, this situation remained largely unchanged. In the wake of Green, James Swann and others challenged the efficacy of this plan. Then, in 1968, the federal district court overseeing desegregation in Charlotte-Mecklenburg adopted an ambitious--and very expensive--busing program.
Supreme Court Upholds School Busing
The district court's plan proved to be highly controversial. So did the Supreme Court opinion upholding this plan. Writing for a unanimous Court, Chief Justice Burger gave qualified endorsement to the 71-29 white-to-black ratio required by the district court plan:
The district court found that the only way to approach the ideal was to bus students, and the Supreme Court agreed--again in a less than straightforward fashion: "In these circumstances, we find no basis for holding that the localschool authorities may not be required to employ bus transportation as one tool of school desegregation. Desegregation plans cannot be limited to the walk-in school."
At the time the Court handed down the Swann decision, school segregation had long been a stubborn problem. It would continue to be so, in part because of the less than ringing endorsement the High Court gave court-supervisedplans in Swann. Court-imposed busing proved to be highly unpopular, especially in the North. In the 1970s, the Court did little to promote desegregation remedies, and in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), it actually overruled a district court order that would have merged three school districts to eliminate segregation in one. Two years later, the Court's reluctance to enforce desegregation plans was made even clearer in Pasadena Board of Education v. Spangler (1976). Because racial imbalances in the Pasadena public school systems were not the result of intentionally segregationist policies, the Court reasoned, there was no obligation to remedy the situation.
Related Cases
James E. Swann
Appellee
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education
Appellant's Claim
That the local public schools were not doing enough to integrate their student bodies.
Chief Lawyers for Appellant
Julius LeVonne Chambers and James M. Nabritt III
Chief Lawyers for Appellee
William J. Waggoner and Benjamin S. Horack
Justices for the Court
Hugo Lafayette Black, Harry A. Blackmun, William J. Brennan, Jr., Warren E. Burger (writing for the Court), William O. Douglas, John Marshall Harlan II, Thurgood Marshall, Potter Stewart, Byron R. White
Justices Dissenting
None
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
20 April 1971
Decision
The Supreme Court upheld the desegregation plan developed by the federal court overseeing public school integration in the district.
Significance
Swann is important for its endorsement of school busing as a means ofachieving racial integration.
In 1955, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered school districts to pursue integration "with all deliberate speed." That order was handed down in Brown v. Board of Education II, the case in which the High Court gave lower federal courts the task of developing plans to implement desegregation following the first Brown v. Board of Education case, which had been decided a year earlier. Dual school systems--one white, one black--had previously been writteninto the law, and a public that had grown accustomed to official segregationnow resisted court efforts to impose change. Resistance was most pronouncedin the South. Local officials there sometimes devised plans which appeared tobe neutral but which actually slowed the process of school integration. In Griffin v. County School Board (1964), for example, the Supreme Court was faced with a Virginia school board that closed down all of its public schools and handed out tuition grants to private schools as a means of avoiding court-ordered desegregation. Declaring that there had been too much deliberation and not enough speed, the Supreme Court ordered the public schools reopened.
In Green v. County School Board (1968), the Court struck down a "freedom of choice" plan, which ostensibly permitted students to attend either a white school or a black school, because of its failure to bring about the changes required by Brown II. It was not enough for school boards simply toremove the legal restraints keeping the races apart. Allowing students to "choose" which school they wanted to attend was not realistic. What was neededwas a system that would quickly reconstitute schools, so that the student body of each would come to resemble the larger population mix. As more and morewhite families fled the cities, busing black children out to suburban schoolsseemed the only way to achieve the racial balance required by Brown II.
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district included not only the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, but also largely rural Mecklenburg County. Twenty-ninepercent of school-age children were black, most of them concentrated in one area of Charlotte. Despite implementation of a desegregation plan in 1965, this situation remained largely unchanged. In the wake of Green, James Swann and others challenged the efficacy of this plan. Then, in 1968, the federal district court overseeing desegregation in Charlotte-Mecklenburg adopted an ambitious--and very expensive--busing program.
Supreme Court Upholds School Busing
The district court's plan proved to be highly controversial. So did the Supreme Court opinion upholding this plan. Writing for a unanimous Court, Chief Justice Burger gave qualified endorsement to the 71-29 white-to-black ratio required by the district court plan:
If we were to read the holdingof the District Court to require, as a matter of substantive constitutional right, any particular degree of racial balance or mixing, that approach wouldbe disapproved and we would be obliged to reverse. The constitutional commandto desegregate schools does not mean that every school in every community must always reflect the racial composition of the school system as a whole . .. We see [however] that the use made of mathematical ratios was no more thana starting point in the process of shaping a remedy, rather than an inflexible requirement.
The district court found that the only way to approach the ideal was to bus students, and the Supreme Court agreed--again in a less than straightforward fashion: "In these circumstances, we find no basis for holding that the localschool authorities may not be required to employ bus transportation as one tool of school desegregation. Desegregation plans cannot be limited to the walk-in school."
At the time the Court handed down the Swann decision, school segregation had long been a stubborn problem. It would continue to be so, in part because of the less than ringing endorsement the High Court gave court-supervisedplans in Swann. Court-imposed busing proved to be highly unpopular, especially in the North. In the 1970s, the Court did little to promote desegregation remedies, and in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), it actually overruled a district court order that would have merged three school districts to eliminate segregation in one. Two years later, the Court's reluctance to enforce desegregation plans was made even clearer in Pasadena Board of Education v. Spangler (1976). Because racial imbalances in the Pasadena public school systems were not the result of intentionally segregationist policies, the Court reasoned, there was no obligation to remedy the situation.
Related Cases
- Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
- Brown v. Board of Education II, 349 U.S. 294 (1955).
- Griffin v. County Schoolboard, 377 U.S. 218 (1964).
- Green v. County School Board, 391 U.S. 430 (1968).
- Pasadena Board of Education v. Spangler, 427 U.S. 424 (1976).
- Milliken v. Bradley, 433 U.S. 267 (1974).
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