Green v. County School Board of New Kent Co. | |
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Argued April 3, 1968 Decided May 27, 1968 | |
Full case name | Charles C. Green et al. v. County School Board of New Kent County, Virginia et al. |
Citations | 391 U.S. 430 ( more ) 88 S. Ct. 1689; 20 L. Ed. 2d 716 |
Case history | |
Prior | 382 F.2d 338 (4th Cir. 1967), cert. granted, 389 U.S. 1003. |
Holding | |
New Kent County's freedom of choice desegregation plan did not comply with the dictates of Brown v. Board of Education and was therefore unconstitutional. | |
Court membership | |
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Case opinion | |
Majority | Brennan, joined by unanimous |
Laws applied | |
U.S. Const., amend. XIV |
Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, 391 U.S. 430 (1968), was an important United States Supreme Court case involving school desegregation. Specifically, the Court dealt with the freedom of choice plans created to avoid compliance with the Supreme Court's mandate in Brown II in 1955. [1] The Court held unanimously that New Kent County's freedom of choice plan did not adequately comply with the school board's responsibility to determine a system of admission to public schools on a non-racial basis. The Supreme Court mandated that the school board must formulate new plans and steps towards realistically converting to a desegregated system. Green v. County School Board of New Kent County was a follow-up of Brown v. Board of Education .
“When this opinion is handed down, the traffic light will have changed from Brown to Green.” –U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, 1968.
Green established what came to be known as the five Green factors — faculty, staff, transportation, extracurricular activities and facilities — the criteria by which later courts would evaluate school districts' progress on desegregation.
In Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Warren Court ruled that state-sanctioned segregation of public schools was unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment. One year later, in Brown II, enforcement of this principle was given to district courts, ordering that they take the necessary steps to make admittance to public schools nondiscriminatory "with all deliberate speed." The term "all deliberate speed" did little to speed up the school board's plan for integration. Judge John J. Parker of the United States Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit led many in the South in interpreting Brown as a charge not to segregate, but not as an order to integrate. [2] The Supreme Court heard several more cases surrounding the speed and efficacy of desegregation between its initial ruling in Brown and the Green v. School Board case in 1968.
Virginia had long mandated racial segregation in public education under the Virginia Constitution of 1902. [3] At the time of the 1960 census, in New Kent County, Virginia, approximately half of the 4,500 residents were African American. [4] [1] The school system had only two schools, the New Kent School for white students and the George W. Watkins School for black students. [5] School buses traveled overlapping routes throughout the county.
The school board continued to operate a segregated system in the wake of the Brown rulings, on the authority of several "massive resistance" state laws enacted to resist them. One such law, the Pupil Placement Act, divested local boards of authority to assign children to particular schools and centralized that power with the newly created State Pupil Placement Board. [6] Under the act, children were automatically reassigned to their prior school each year unless they applied for transfer to another school and the board approved their application. New students' schools were also assigned by the board. [7] White families almost uniformly chose the predominantly white school, and African-American families almost uniformly chose the predominantly black school. As of September 1964, no New Kent student had applied to the Pupil Placement Board for a transfer between the schools. [8]
The U.S. Congress, concerned with the lack of progress nationally in school desegregation, included provisions in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that would withhold federal funding from schools that refused to dismantle segregation.
The case was initially tried in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Richmond. Plaintiffs filed suit in 1965 for injunctive relief against maintenance of allegedly segregated schools. In response, the Board, in order to remain eligible for federal financial aid, adopted a "freedom of choice" plan for desegregating the schools. The plan permitted students, except those entering the first and eighth grades, to choose annually between the schools; those not choosing were assigned to the school previously attended; first and eighth graders must affirmatively choose a school. In 1965, thirty-five black students enrolled in the previously all-white New Kent school. [9] The District Court approved the plan, as amended.
More than a hundred additional African-American students enrolled each year in 1966 and 1967. [9] The newly enrolled black students reported harassment by their white peers, to which teachers and administrators turned a blind eye. [9] The case was argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit on January 9, 1967, and decided June 12, 1967. The Court of Appeals approved the "freedom of choice" provisions, although it remanded for a more specific and comprehensive order concerning teachers. During the plan's three years of operation, no white student chose to attend the all-African-American school, and although 115 Black pupils enrolled in the formerly all-white school, 85% of the African-American students in the system still attended the all-Black school.
This case was argued during the same term as Raney v. Board of Education of Gould School District and Monroe v. Board of Commissioners of Jackson, Tenn. [10] In the latter case, the plan in question was called "free transfer."
NAACP Legal Defense Fund lawyers Samuel W. Tucker, Jack Greenberg, Henry L. Marsh, III, James Nabrit III, Michael Meltsner and Oliver W. Hill argued and prepared the petitioners' case, and Tucker presented their arguments. Frederick T. Gray represented the school board, and Louis F. Claiborne served as amicus curiae . [11]
The Court noted that "freedom of choice" plans[ further explanation needed ] tended to be ineffective at desegregating a school system. Although the Court did not rule that all "freedom of choice" plans were unconstitutional, it held that in New Kent County's case the freedom-of-choice plan violated the Constitution. [5] [10]
The Court's skepticism of New Kent's freedom of choice plan was due in part to the county's slowness: "it is relevant that this first step did not come until some 11 years after Brown I was decided and 10 years after Brown II directed the making of a 'prompt and reasonable start.' ... Moreover, a plan that, at this late date, fails to provide meaningful assurance of prompt and effective disestablishment of a dual system is also intolerable. 'The time for mere 'deliberate speed' has run out,' Griffin v. County School Board, 377 U. S. 218, 377 U. S. 234."
To comply with the Court's mandate, the school board separated the New Kent and George Watkins schools by grade level, rather than race. The Watkins School became George Watkins Elementary School, and New Kent became New Kent High School. [1]
In the decades following Green, courts throughout the U.S. used five criteria identified in Green, known as the five Green factors, to assess whether school systems had sufficiently desegregated. The Green factors are: (1) faculty, (2) staff, (3) transportation, (4) extracurricular activities, and (5) facilities. These five Green factors from the following text in Green, assessing New Kent's failure to integrate:
"Racial identification of the system's schools was complete, extending not just to the composition of student bodies at the two schools, but to every facet of school operations -- faculty, staff, transportation, extracurricular activities and facilities."
This guidance built on the Court's previous guidance from Brown II in 1955 where the Supreme Court charged the district courts to: "consider problems related to administration arising from the physical condition of the school plant, the school transportation system, personnel, revision of school districts and attendance areas ... and revision of local laws and regulations."
Several events took place in New Kent County, Virginia during May 2018 to celebrate 50 years since the Supreme Court's ruling on the case. The Green vs County School Board of New Kent organization has a list of the events. [12] In 2018, the Library of Virginia honored Calvin Coolidge Green (1931–2011), pastor, soldier, educator, civil rights activist and father of named plaintiff Charles Green, as one of its Strong Men and Women. [13]
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality. The decision partially overruled the Court's 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, which had held that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that had come to be known as "separate but equal". The Court's unanimous decision in Brown, and its related cases, paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the civil rights movement, and a model for many future impact litigation cases.
Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 (1971), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case dealing with the busing of students to promote integration in public schools. The Court held that busing was an appropriate remedy for the problem of racial imbalance in schools, even when the imbalance resulted from the selection of students based on geographic proximity to the school rather than from deliberate assignment based on race. This was done to ensure the schools would be "properly" integrated and that all students would receive equal educational opportunities regardless of their race.
Race-integration busing was a failed attempt to diversify the racial make-up of schools in the United States by sending students to school districts other than their own. While the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, many American schools continued to remain largely uni-racial. In an effort to address the ongoing de facto segregation in schools, the 1971 Supreme Court decision, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, ruled that the federal courts could use busing as a further integration tool to achieve racial balance.
The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. is an American civil rights organization and law firm based in New York City.
Massive resistance was a strategy declared by U.S. senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. of Virginia and his son Harry Jr.'s brother-in-law, James M. Thomson, who represented Alexandria in the Virginia General Assembly, to get the state's white politicians to pass laws and policies to prevent public school desegregation, particularly after Brown v. Board of Education.
Segregation academies are private schools in the Southern United States that were founded in the mid-20th century by white parents to avoid having their children attend desegregated public schools. They were founded between 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, and 1976, when the court ruled similarly about private schools.
The Cleveland School District (CSD) is a public school district based in Cleveland, Mississippi (USA).
Freedom of Choice, or Free transfer plan, was the name for a number of plans developed in the United States during 1965–1970, aimed at the integration of schools in states that had a segregated educational system.
New Kent High School is a historic school in New Kent, Virginia. The school, along with the nearby George W. Watkins Elementary School, is associated with the landmark Supreme Court case Green v. County School Board of New Kent County (1968), in which the court defined what the standards of Brown v. Board of Education were in the desegregation cases. This decision ended the era of Massive Resistance and ushered in the era of integration.
George W. Watkins Elementary School is an elementary school located in Quinton, Virginia, and is one of two such schools in New Kent County. As a formerly African American-only high school, it, along with the nearby New Kent High School is a National Historic Landmark and is associated with the Supreme Court case Green v. County School Board of New Kent County. Like the other public schools in New Kent, Watkins is located on Route 249, though it is about seven miles west of the others.
Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, 396 U.S. 19 (1969), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ordered immediate desegregation of public schools in the American South. It followed 15 years of delays to integrate by most Southern school boards after the Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that segregated public schools were unconstitutional.
Daniel Holcombe Thomas was a United States district judge who served nearly five decades on the United States District Court for the Southern District of Alabama.
Samuel Wilbert Tucker was an American lawyer and a cooperating attorney with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His civil rights career began as he organized a 1939 sit-in at the then-segregated Alexandria, Virginia public library. A partner in the Richmond, Virginia, firm of Hill, Tucker and Marsh, Tucker argued and won several civil rights cases before the Supreme Court of the United States, including Green v. County School Board of New Kent County which, according to The Encyclopedia of Civil Rights In America, "did more to advance school integration than any other Supreme Court decision since Brown."
NAACP v. Button, 371 U.S. 415 (1963), is a 6-to-3 ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States which held that the reservation of jurisdiction by a federal district court did not bar the U.S. Supreme Court from reviewing a state court's ruling, and also overturned certain laws enacted by the state of Virginia in 1956 as part of the Stanley Plan and massive resistance, as violating the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. The statutes struck down by the Supreme Court had expanded the definitions of the traditional common law crimes of champerty and maintenance, as well as barratry, and had been targeted at the NAACP and its civil rights litigation.
The Stanley Plan was a package of 13 statutes adopted in September 1956 by the U.S. state of Virginia. The statutes were designed to ensure racial segregation would continue in that state's public schools despite the unanimous ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that school segregation was unconstitutional. The legislative program was named for Governor Thomas B. Stanley, a Democrat, who proposed the program and successfully pushed for its enactment. The Stanley plan was a critical element in the policy of "massive resistance" to the Brown ruling advocated by U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. The plan also included measures designed to curb the Virginia state chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which many Virginia segregationists believed was responsible for "stirring up" litigation to integrate the public schools.
Caswell County Schools is a PK–12 graded school district serving Caswell County, North Carolina. Its six schools serve 3,012 students as of the 2010–2011 school year.
In the United States, school integration is the process of ending race-based segregation within American public and private schools. Racial segregation in schools existed throughout most of American history and remains an issue in contemporary education. During the Civil Rights Movement school integration became a priority, but since then de facto segregation has again become prevalent.
The Commission on Public Education, known as the VPEC or Gray Commission, was a 32-member commission established by Governor of Virginia Thomas B. Stanley on August 23, 1954 to study the effects of the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Brown v. Board of Education issued on May 17, 1954 and May 31, 1955, and to make recommendations. Its counsel were David J. Mays and his associate Henry T. Wickham.
Earl Abbath Fitzpatrick was a Virginia lawyer and member of the Virginia General Assembly representing Roanoke between 1940 and 1959, first as a delegate and then as a state Senator. A lieutenant in the Byrd Organization, Fitzpatrick was active in the Massive Resistance to racial integration vowed by U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd after the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Brown v. Board of Education. He introduced much of the segregationist legislation and was vice-chairman of the Boatwright Committee which investigated the NAACP for litigating on behalf of civil rights, before being defeated in the 1959 Democratic primary.
The Commission on Education, known as the Perrow Commission after its chairman, Virginia state senator Mosby Perrow Jr., was a 40-member commission established by Governor of Virginia J. Lindsay Almond on February 5, 1959 after the Virginia Supreme Court in Harrison v. Day and a three-judge federal court in James v. Almond had both struck down significant portions of the Stanley Plan, which had implemented Massive Resistance to the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Brown v. Board of Education issued on May 17, 1954 and May 31, 1955. Four legislators were appointed from each of the ten U.S. Congressional districts in Virginia. Compared to the Gray Commission that Governor Thomas B. Stanley had appointed five years previously, Perrow Commission included more representatives from cities, northern and Western Virginia, although many members served on both commissions.