Swann v. Board of Education: A Landmark Decision on School Desegregation

Introduction

Swann v. Board of Education was a crucial case in the history of school desegregation in the United States. The Supreme Court case in 1971, officially titled Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, dealt with the desegregation plan adopted by Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. It established court-ordered busing of students as a constitutional means of desegregating public schools, addressing the problem of racial imbalance in schools. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund brought the Swann case on behalf of six-year-old James Swann and nine other families, with Julius L. Chambers presenting the case.

Background

In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. However, because of racially segregated housing patterns and resistance by local leaders, many schools remained as segregated in the late 1960s as they were at the time of the Brown decision. Despite the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, desegregation efforts faced significant obstacles, particularly in metropolitan areas with de facto segregation. When the Supreme Court invalidated freedom-of-choice plans in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County (1968), it announced that it would examine desegregation plans to see if the “transition to unitary schools” was proceeding at an adequate pace.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Case

The case originated in the combined Charlotte-Mecklenburg County school system in 1965, when attorney Julius L. Chambers filed suit on behalf of ten pairs of African American parents. The lawsuit, named for six-year-old James E. Swann, sought to address the persistent segregation within the district's schools. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system was one of the largest and most diverse in the United States. The system included schools in downtown Charlotte and in smaller suburban communities.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, for example, in the mid-1960s less than 5 percent of African American children attended integrated schools. Indeed, busing was used by white officials to maintain segregation. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), on behalf of Vera and Darius Swann, the parents of a six-year-old child, sued the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district to allow their son to attend Seversville Elementary School, the school closest to their home and then one of Charlotte’s few integrated schools.

Initial Desegregation Efforts

In 1965, the system began implementing a federal court-approved desegregation plan that stipulated geographic zoning while permitting voluntary student transfers. The school board formulated a new plan for the coming year based on geographic attendance zones for all but 10 schools and pledged to make assignments entirely on a geographic basis by 1967-68. This plan proved ineffectual. Prior to Green the district had, under court order, adopted a desegregation plan focusing on geographic attendance zones and voluntary student transfers. However, over half the black students still remained in schools without any white students or teachers. By many measures, the school board's plan was a success, for in 1968 only two urban school districts in the entire country (San Francisco and Toledo) were more desegregated than Charlotte-Mecklenburg.

The Call for More Extensive Measures

Despite this apparent achievement, the plaintiffs sought to reopen the case, charging that the community, because of various forms of governmentally sanctioned discrimination, was one of the most residentially segregated in the nation and that only through extensive busing could the schools reach the level of desegregation required by law. After the NAACP took the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board to court for its failure to desegregate in 1968, the board drafted a new desegregation plan. The new plan relied principally on school zone gerrymandering to desegregate but left large numbers of African American students in all-black or nearly all-black schools. Consequently, a federal district court enlisted an expert, Dr. John Finger, to produce an alternative desegregation plan. Finger’s plan called for the busing of African American elementary school students in Charlotte to suburban schools.

Judge McMillan's Orders

Federal district court judge James B. McMillan directed the school board to develop a new plan that met his criteria for racially neutral schools. From April to November 1969, McMillan repeatedly ordered the board to revise the plan. In February 1970 he accepted, with minor changes, the board's plan for desegregating the secondary schools of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County through busing. The Board eventually submitted a plan rezoning neighborhoods into pie-shaped wedges, where blacks living in the center of Charlotte would be divided up and distributed to outlying, formerly white high schools. The school board's plan required busing and would achieve a black population of 2-36% in all ten of the high schools. The Court rejected the Board's plan in favor of outsider Dr. John Finger's plan. The Finger Plan required busing of an additional 300 black students, established "satellite zones" and required pairing and grouping techniques to achieve even greater integration.

In May the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed McMillan's order relating to junior and senior high schools but instructed him to review his requirements for elementary schools according to a test of "reasonableness." The school board and McMillan were unable to agree on an alternative plan, and in September the consultant's plan was implemented with the busing of approximately 43,000 students, more than double the number bused the previous year.

The Supreme Court Decision

The school board asserted that the plan was unreasonable and took the case to the Supreme Court in late 1970. Supreme Court on April 20, 1971, the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously upheld busing programs that aimed to speed up the racial integration of public schools in the United States. Although Chief Justice Warren Burger initially attempted to persuade his colleagues to reverse McMillan, the high court delivered its unanimous opinion upholding the judge on 20 Apr. 1971. Chief Justice Warren Burger rendered the opinion of the court, and its decision was unanimous.

Key Aspects of the Ruling

Writing for a unanimous Court, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger emphasized the authority of the federal courts to provide remedies for the present consequences of past de jure segregation. While recognizing that residential segregation based entirely on personal choice did not violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Burger contended that the federal courts had broad equity power whenever segregation had been sanctioned or even encouraged by governmental policy. If governmental responsibility for segregation were established, the courts would then have the authority to use busing and other appropriate tools to achieve nonsegregated schools. Although Burger wrote that every school was not required to reflect the racial composition of the school district, he nevertheless approved of “the very limited use of mathematical ratios.” The opinion indicated that courts would not be allowed continually to reorder new busing plans on the basis of changing de facto residential patterns within a region.

Unanimity and Underlying Disagreements

The unanimity masked deep disagreement on the Court. We now know that the decision, written by Chief Justice Burger, was the subject of intense negotiation among the justices and would prove to be the last time the Court ruled unanimously on a desegregation case. When Burger circulated his very grudging affirmation of McMillan that limited future action and action in other areas by the Court, he met strong resistance. Douglas, Harlan, Brennan, and Marshall all demanded revisions and circulated suggestions for alternate drafts. Burger revised the opinion five times, each time making a stronger affirmation of McMillan and incorporating the language of Harlan, Brennan, Stewart, and others into it. After the fifth draft, Justice Black threatened a dissent if the opinion was made any stronger an affirmation, and so a sixth and final draft was created that was close to what Justice Stewart had composed after the first conference.

The ambiguities of the Swann decision resulted from strong disagreements and extensive negotiations among the justices. Because Burger had first argued against the busing plan in conference, some justices were angry when Burger chose to write the official opinion in the case. Swann’s emphasis on the de facto/de jure distinction meant that most southern schools had the affirmative duty to achieve integration. Elsewhere, federal courts would have the authority to order busing remedies if there was a finding of some governmental involvement in promoting segregation, as in Keyes v. Denver School District No. 1 (1973).

Impact and Aftermath

The significance of Swann is difficult to overstate. Because busing became almost synonymous with desegregation, the case in some ways overshadows Brown v. Board of Education, which famously did not define desegregation. In fact, throughout the entire history of desegregation the Supreme Court never precisely defined what the word meant. Swann is also the most successful example of judicially mandated metropolitan desegregation. However, by giving birth to busing it also eroded political support for desegregation, which contributed to the federal court’s withdrawal from the issue.

Initial Reactions and Long-Term Adjustments

Even this decision did not immediately end the case, as McMillan and the school board continued to disagree over annual adjustments to the pupil assignment plan. At first the effort to desegregate the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools divided the races and provoked significant unrest, but in time many residents began to take pride in their relatively peaceful and successful adjustment to new social relationships. In 1974 students from West Charlotte High School invited their peers from the embattled Boston public schools to observe how Charlotte had dealt with the challenge of integration; some observers have linked the city's growth and prosperity in the 1980s to the school board's continued commitment to fully integrated schools. The case also showed African Americans and middle-income whites that they too could influence the political process, and in 1977 a biracial coalition won a referendum to replace the long-standing practice of at-large city council elections with a system based on representation by districts.

Opposition and Political Implications

Immediately following Swann, large majorities-75-90 percent-of white parents consistently expressed opposition to forced busing. Black parents also came to oppose busing. For a few years in the mid-70s and early 80s, support for busing crept above 50 percent for black parents, but by the mid-80s stable majorities of 55-60 percent opposed it. This opposition not only led to substantial white flight from school districts under busing plans but also prompted some middle-class “black flight” as well.

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Busing also had broader political implications. In Detroit, a district court judge consolidated all the metropolitan districts into a single district with large-scale busing. George Wallace rode a wave of animosity to that plan to an overwhelming victory in the 1972 Michigan Democratic Presidential Primary. That political backdrop was clearly looming over the Supreme Court’s 1974 decision in Milliken v. Bradley, which ruled that suburban school districts could not be compelled to participate in a desegregation remedy if they did not contribute to the constitutional violation. Instead, judges presiding over school desegregation cases had to rely on compensatory educational programs and magnet schools to create some integration in their districts. Thus, almost as soon as the court sanctioned busing, it began limiting its use.

Later Developments in Charlotte-Mecklenburg

However, due to the booming economy of the city in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Charlotte experienced a rapid immigration from the Northeast and the Midwest, which resulted in a decline of the acceptance of busing. In 1992, in response to these complaints, CMS created a managed choice plan to reduce the number of students being bused. This new choice plan revolved around magnet schools, making one-third of the schools in Charlotte-Mecklenburg either magnets or partial magnets, and each magnet had a quota of black and white students that were allowed to attend.

In 1997, a parent, William Capacchione, sued the school system when his daughter was denied entrance into a magnet school for the second time based on her race. While the school system opposed the end of busing, Judge Robert D. Potter declared the mandate of a unitary system had been met and lifted the court order on mandatory busing by race or ethnicity. The new assignment policy which was adopted in the fall of 2002 was known as the “School Choice Plan.” This new choice plan divided the city into four large attendance zones based on neighborhoods. Students were allowed to choose to stay at their neighborhood "home school," or they could rank their top three choices of any other school in CMS; however they would only receive free transportation to their home school or any of the magnet schools in the district. If families chose their home school as their first choice, they were guaranteed that school; otherwise they were entered into a lottery that gave available spaces in overenrolled schools. If people did not choose a school, they were immediately placed into their home school. In 2002, the decision was abrogated. The plaintiffs in Belk v.

The Supreme Court's View on Equitable Power

In 1977 the Supreme Court said in Dayton Board of Education v. Brinkman that the equitable power of federal courts to restructure the operation of local school boards is "not plenary" and may be exercised "only on the basis of a constitutional violation". Quoting post-Brown cases like Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Milliken v.

Criticisms of Busing

In later decades, court-ordered busing plans were criticized not only by whites but also by African Americans, who often charged that busing harmed African American students by requiring them to endure long commutes to and from school.

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