Keyes v. School District No. 1

On 21 June 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the case, upholding the petitioners' claims by a 7-1 margin and rejecting the cross-petition of the respondents. The Court modified the ruling of the court of appeals to vacate rather than reverse the district court's findings with regard to the core city schools. Justice Brennan, speaking for the majority, stated that African Americans and Hispanics must be considered one group in determining the segregation of Denver's schools, and that the district court should reconsider its finding regarding the overall segregation of the Denver schools. The Court further observed that "finding of intentionally segregative school board actions in a meaningful portion of a school system . . . establishes . . . a prima facie case of unlawful segregative design on the part of school authorities." As such, the Court directed that upon review of the case by the district court, the school board would bear the burden of proving that its actions in districts other than Park Hill were not segregationist in intent, or that Park Hill represented a "separate, identifiable and unrelated section of the school district that should be treated as isolated from the rest of the district." Significantly, the Court's judgement relied on its definition of de facto as opposed to de jure segregation, first established in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971), in that it required some proof of intention to segregate in cases brought from jurisdictions that had never imposed racial segregation by statute. Justices Douglas and Powell, although concurring with the majority, argued that this distinction be dropped altogether and that segregation should be remedied regardless of the circumstances that caused it.