School integration and busing and the Supreme Court

DESCRIPTION: Desegregation of public educational institutions so that Black and White students have equal access to educational facilities, often through the transportation by bus of school children.

SIGNIFICANCE: The Supreme Court made school integration a major goal of American society. Many of the methods it established to pursue this goal, including busing, have been highly controversial.

In the landmark 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the doctrine of separate but equal, established by Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), was unconstitutional. Two years earlier, five cases from lower courts in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and Washington, DC, had reached the Court. In all the cases but Delaware, the lower courts had upheld laws prohibiting Black children from attending White schools. In deciding Brown, the Court decided all these cases.

The Brown decision established the principle that separate educational facilities are unequal facilities, a principle that guided US educational law regarding race. The decision did not result in any immediate changes because it was a principle, without guidelines for practical implementation. Therefore, the court followed up the first Brown decision with Brown II in 1955, when the Court ordered southern school districts to desegregate with all deliberate speed. In Brown II, the Court gave responsibility for desegregation to local school authorities. District courts were given the power to enforce the racial desegregation of schools through orders and decrees.

Even after the strict admonition of Brown II, nothing happened immediately, other than the mobilization of segregationist forces determined to resist desegregation. In 1957, the Brown decision was put to the test when then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard to escort seven Black children through an angry White mob to integrate with the all-White Little Rock Central High School. One of the most extreme examples of White defiance against orders to desegregate occurred in Prince Edward County, Virginia, in 1959. Rather than integrate their schools, the White county leaders shut down all schools, both Black and White students, for five years. White individuals who could afford it sent their children to the newly formed Prince Edward Academy. Schools reopened only after the Court ruled, in Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (1964), that it was unconstitutional for any state or local government to close public schools or to contribute in any way to the support of private segregated schools.

The End of De Jure Segregation

In the second half of the 1960s, most legally enforced, or de jure, school segregation ended. However, this did not mean that school populations were suddenly racially balanced to reflect the communities within which they were located. This first phase of school integration following the Brown decision is often referred to as “freedom of choice” or “voluntary integration” because Black and White students were regarded as free to attend the other race’s school if they so desired. Other districts had “majority to minority” desegregation policies, where a student in a racial group that made up the majority in a school could transfer to another school where members of that racial group were in the minority. Under these types of desegregation strategies, however, the overwhelming majority of White students chose to continue attending mostly White or all-White schools, while most Black students continued attending either mostly Black or all-Black schools.

At first, courts went along with the freedom of choice plans, as they seemed reasonable ways of ending de jure segregation. However, when it became obvious that meaningful integration was not going to take place voluntarily, the courts began to change their tactics. In Green v. County School Board of New Kent County (1968), the Court ruled that the freedom of choice plan followed by the New Kent County, Virginia, school board was unconstitutional. The Court noted that not a single White student had volunteered to attend the all-Black county school, thus maintaining a dual-race system. It ordered the school board to come up with a plan, such as geographic zoning, that would realistically lead to integrated district schools. After the 1968 Green decision, the courts increasingly ruled against freedom of choice plans and began to favor geographic zoning without reference to neighborhood racial concentrations as a more forceful approach to school racial integration. In 2024, on the seventieth anniversary of Brown, the U.S. Department of Education noted that, although legally mandated segregation has been abolished, unequal access to educational resources and opportunities by race exists.

Busing and Judicially Enforced Integration

During the 1970s, under the lead of the Court, the federal judiciary became much more involved in attempting to integrate schools in reality as well as in theory. Courts began to make efforts to ensure that Black and White students were actually enrolled in the same schools and did not simply have the abstract right to attend school together. The method that received the most public attention was busing. This involved moving students to where members of other races were in order to achieve racial balance. In the 1971 case, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, the Court recognized that de jure segregation (actual segregation not supported by law) in schools was linked to residential segregation because children attended schools in the areas in which they lived. The Court ruled that the practice of busing students in order to achieve desegregation was a legitimate remedy.

Not long after the Court sanctioned busing as a desegregation tool, it also made another important ruling in the area of school desegregation, in effect extending the practice of busing to systems outside the South. For the first time, the Court turned its attention northward, where racial segregation was, according to the Court, often just as widespread as it was in the South. In the historic 1973 case Keyes v. Denver School District No. 1, the Court found that Denver, Colorado, officials had been intentionally maintaining a dual school system, segregated by race. The Rocky Mountain state capital was ordered by the court to desegregate its public school system, beginning the process of school desegregation outside the South.

Busing was unpopular in many areas. In Boston, White parents and their children overturned and burned buses that were to carry Black children to all-White South Boston schools. Other non-Deep-South communities ordered by the courts to bus as a means of forcibly integrating students included Seattle, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Louisville, Austin, Dallas, Dayton, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis. Though the response was not quite as violent as in Boston, busing often met with opposition in these communities.

Another method of active integration aimed at reducing the effects of residential segregation was school redistricting. This version of redistricting involved redrawing school attendance areas to produce a mixture of students of both races. In some ways, school busing was the right hand of redistricting because some redrawn districts could be quite large, requiring that students be transported long distances to their new schools. Yet another related court-sanctioned method was pairing or clustering schools and distributing students among them with the goal of achieving racial balance. Federal support for desegregation is conducted through the Magnet Schools Assistance Program, which funds eligible districts seeking to reduce racial isolation and attract diverse student bodies.

White Flight and the Limits of Busing

Some experts argue that forced desegregation by the courts was counterproductive. Parents who either opposed desegregation or desegregation by the methods sanctioned by the courts had two options. First, they could leave the public school system, as the early segregationists had done, and enroll their children in private schools. Second, they could leave urban school districts, which tended to contain large numbers of Black children, for suburban districts in which White residents were clearly the majority population. There is some debate about the extent to which White suburbanization was a result of white flight from urban schools, rather than a population shift occurring for other reasons. Nevertheless, throughout the 1970s, American urban school districts grew increasingly poor and more heavily Black demographically, while suburbs around them grew increasingly prosperous and White demographically. The federal courts were aware of this trend and, in several instances, intervened to merge predominantly White and Black school districts that they contended were the result of deliberate, de jure segregation.

The Court was drawn into the issue and acted for the first time to limit efforts at integration in Milliken v. Bradley (1974). This case dealt with the Detroit, Michigan, school district, which was already majority Black-enrolled by 1970. Both the lower federal courts and the court of appeals ruled that it was impossible to integrate Detroit’s schools without taking into account the surrounding majority White metropolitan area. Therefore, they ordered that the Detroit district be merged with the fifty-four predominantly White districts surrounding the city, in effect creating a “super district.” On appeal, however, the Court ruled that because there was no evidence or legacy of intentional de jure segregation in the governmental actions creating the surrounding White districts, there was no obligation to dissolve those districts. From 1974 on, school desegregation efforts were limited to within school districts.

School officials in many districts, trying to satisfy court desegregation orders, began to question when they would be considered integrated and thus freed from court supervision. In the Green case, the Court suggested that school systems had achieved this goal when discrimination had completely vanished. In Swann, the Court elaborated by adding that once desegregation was achieved, school systems would be freed from judicial oversight and the continual racial balancing act, provided that any subsequent racial imbalances in schools were purely demographic and not discriminatory in nature.

Though there had been some activity in district and appellate courts on this issue, the first important Supreme Court decision on unitary status was not handed down until 1991. In the case of Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell (1991), the Court overturned a lower court’s ruling and declared that the Oklahoma City school system was at last “unitary.” The Court disagreed with the appellate court ruling, which stated that a district could be under court-ordered desegregation for an “indefinite future.” Instead, it declared that once a system had achieved unitary status, it no longer needed court approval for student assignment policies provided it did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment equal protection clause. In the 2020s, federal courts released school districts from desegregation orders by declaring them “unitary,” including several long-running cases that were formally ended in 2025 and 2026.

The second major Court decision regarding unitary status was handed down a year later in the 1992 case of Freeman v. Pitts. This case involved the large Atlanta suburban district of DeKalb County, Georgia. The school district filed for unitary status in 1988, which a district court declared had been achieved in the areas of student assignment, transportation, facilities, and extracurricular activities. The district court maintained, however, that the DeKalb County school district needed to do more work in the area of teacher and principal assignment before it could be declared unitary in these two areas. An appellate court overturned the lower court’s decision, saying that the school district must be unitary in all six areas before it could be granted any measure of unitary status. The Supreme Court overturned the court of appeals ruling, stating that a district could be declared unitary on a piecemeal basis. Moreover, it reiterated its position in the earlier Swann decision that a school district could not be held responsible for racial imbalances caused by demographic factors beyond a school board’s control.

Into the twenty-first century, the Court continued to rule and refine its views on the issue. In Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007), the Court ruled that voluntary desegregation plans that used race as a factor in student assignments violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina (2023), the Court ruled race-conscious admissions programs violated the Equal Protection Clause, challenging affirmative action.

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