Milliken v. Bradley | |
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Argued February 27, 1974 Decided July 25, 1974 | |
Full case name | Milliken, Governor of Michigan, et al. v. Bradley, et al. |
Citations | 418 U.S. 717 ( more ) 94 S. Ct. 3112; 41 L. Ed. 2d 1069; 1974 U.S. LEXIS 94 |
Case history | |
Prior | Bradley v. Milliken, 433 F.2d 897 (6th Cir. 1970); 438 F.2d 945 (6th Cir. 1971); 338 F. Supp. 582 (E.D. Mich. 1971); 345 F. Supp. 914 (E.D. Mich. 1972); affirmed, 484 F.2d 215 (6th Cir. 1973); cert. granted, 414 U.S. 1038(1973). |
Subsequent | On remand, Bradley v. Milliken, 402 F. Supp. 1096 (E.D. Mich. 1975); affirmed and remanded, 540 F.2d 229 (6th Cir. 1976); cert. granted, 429 U.S. 958(1976); affirmed, 433 U.S. 267 (1977). |
Holding | |
The Court held that "[w]ith no showing of significant violation by the 53 outlying school districts and no evidence of any interdistrict violation or effect," the district court's remedy was "wholly impermissible" and not justified by Brown v. Board of Education (1954). | |
Court membership | |
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Case opinions | |
Majority | Burger, joined by Stewart, Blackmun, Powell, Rehnquist |
Concurrence | Stewart |
Dissent | Douglas |
Dissent | White, joined by Douglas, Brennan, Marshall |
Dissent | Marshall, joined by Douglas, Brennan, White |
Laws applied | |
U.S. Const. amend. XIV |
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Education in the United States |
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Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974), was a significant United States Supreme Court case dealing with the planned desegregation busing of public school students across district lines among 53 school districts in metropolitan Detroit. [1] It concerned the plans to integrate public schools in the United States following the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision. [2]
The ruling clarified the distinction between de jure and de facto segregation, confirming that segregation was allowed if it was not considered an explicit policy of each school district. In particular, the Court held that the school systems were not responsible for desegregation across district lines unless it could be shown that they had each deliberately engaged in a policy of segregation. The case did not expand on Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971), [3] the first major Supreme Court case concerning school busing.
Brown v. Board of Education was a landmark desegregation ruling, but difficult to implement. The case also did not take into account many sources of segregation in the US, including an ongoing migration of Black people into cities, white flight to the suburbs, and policies and practices that barred non-whites from suburban housing. By the 1970s, many urban school districts had super-majorities of black students. [4] Educational segregation was therefore widespread, with informal racial barriers in the form of numerous thinly disguised practices that opposed Black people living in suburbs.
Detroit is one of the most segregated cities in the United States. [5] [6] During the Great Migration, the city gained a large black population, which was excluded upon arrival from white neighborhoods. This exclusion was enforced by economic discrimination (redlining), exclusionary clauses in property deeds, as well as violence (destruction of property including arson and bombings, as well as assault). [7] Some of the discriminatory policies in Detroit ended as public awareness increased and became more sensitive to the national civil rights movement, which began after World War II, and as black voting power in city precincts increased. The changes allowed Black people to move into additional neighborhoods in the City, but some neighborhoods resisted and for the most part little or no change of segregative practices occurred in the suburbs.
By the mid-70s, more than two-thirds of students in the Detroit school system were black. [4]
On August 18, 1970, the NAACP filed suit against Michigan state officials, including Governor William Milliken. The original trial began on April 6, 1971, and lasted for 41 days. The NAACP argued that although schools were not officially segregated (white only), the city of Detroit and the State as represented by its surrounding counties had enacted policies to increase racial segregation in schools. The NAACP also suggested a direct relationship between unfair housing practices (such as redlining) and educational segregation. [8] District Judge Stephen J. Roth initially denied the plaintiffs' motion for a preliminary injunction.
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the "implementation of the April 7 plan was [unconstitutionally] thwarted by State action in the form of the Act of the Legislature of Michigan" and remanded the case for an expedited trial on the merits. [9]
On remand to the District Court, Judge Roth held the State of Michigan and the school districts accountable for the segregation, [10] and ordered the implementation of a desegregation plan. [11]
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed some of the decision, [12] specifically the official segregation that had been practiced by the City's school district, but withheld judgment on the relationship of housing segregation with education. The Court specified that it was the state's responsibility to integrate across the segregated metropolitan area. [13]
The accused officials appealed to the Supreme Court, which took up the case on February 27, 1974. [8]
The Supreme Court overturned the lower courts in a 5-to-4 decision, holding that school districts were not obligated to desegregate unless it had been proven that the lines were drawn with racist intent on the part of the districts. Thus, superficially arbitrary lines drawn by State agencies which produced segregated districts were not illegal. [4] [14]
The Court held that "[w]ith no showing of significant violation by the 53 outlying school districts and no evidence of any interdistrict violation or effect," the district court's remedy was "wholly impermissible" and not justified by Brown v. Board of Education. The Court noted that desegregation, "in the sense of dismantling a dual school system," did not require "any particular racial balance in each 'school, grade or classroom.'" The Court agreed that the Constitutional rights of Black people had been violated by the City' school district; the segregative results involving suburban districts did not make suburban districts nor the State of Michigan responsible. [13]
The Court also emphasized the importance of local control over the operation of schools.
Justice Thurgood Marshall's dissenting opinion stated that:
School district lines, however innocently drawn, will surely be perceived as fences to separate the races when, under a Detroit-only decree, white parents withdraw their children from the Detroit city schools and move to the suburbs in order to continue them in all-white schools. [15]
Justice William O. Douglas's dissenting opinion stated that:
Today's decision ... means that there is no violation of the Equal Protection Clause though the schools are segregated by race and though the black schools are not only "separate" but "inferior."... Michigan by one device or another has over the years created black school districts and white school districts, the task of equity is to provide a unitary system for the affected area where, as here, the State washes its hands of its own creations. [16]
The Supreme Court's decision required the City of Detroit's school district to redistribute the relatively small number of white students more widely across the district. According to Wayne State professor John Mogk, the decision also enabled the white flight that re-entrenched the city's segregation. [8] The Detroit Public Schools became even more disproportionately black over the next two decades (with 90% black students in 1987). [13]
This result reaffirmed the national pattern of city schools attended mostly by Black people, with surrounding suburban schools mostly attended by Whites. [13] [17]
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.
Desegregation is the process of ending the separation of two groups, usually referring to races. Desegregation is typically measured by the index of dissimilarity, allowing researchers to determine whether desegregation efforts are having impact on the settlement patterns of various groups. This is most commonly used in reference to the United States. Desegregation was long a focus of the American civil rights movement, both before and after the US Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, particularly desegregation of the school systems and the military. Racial integration of society was a closely related goal.
Desegregation 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 racially homogeneous. 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.
Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497 (1954), is a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the Constitution prohibits segregated public schools in the District of Columbia. Originally argued on December 10–11, 1952, a year before Brown v. Board of Education, Bolling was reargued on December 8–9, 1953, and was unanimously decided on May 17, 1954, the same day as Brown. The Bolling decision was supplemented in 1955 with the second Brown opinion, which ordered desegregation "with all deliberate speed". In Bolling, the Court did not address school desegregation in the context of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, which applies only to the states, but rather held that school segregation was unconstitutional under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Court observed that the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution lacked an Equal Protection Clause, as in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. However, the Court held that the concepts of equal protection and due process are not mutually exclusive, establishing the reverse incorporation doctrine.
Briggs v. Elliott, 342 U.S. 350 (1952), on appeal from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of South Carolina, challenged school segregation in Summerton, South Carolina. It was the first of the five cases combined into Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the famous case in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional by violating the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. Following the Brown decision, the district court issued a decree that struck down the school segregation law in South Carolina as unconstitutional and required the state's schools to integrate. Harry and Eliza Briggs, Reverend Joseph A. DeLaine, and Levi Pearson were awarded Congressional Gold Medals posthumously in 2003.
Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78 (1927), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the exclusion on account of race of a child of Chinese ancestry from a public school did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The decision effectively approved the exclusion of any minority children from schools reserved for whites.
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.
Missouri v. Jenkins, 515 U.S. 70 (1995), is a case decided by the United States Supreme Court. On June 12, 1995 the Court, in a 5–4 decision, reversed a district court ruling that required the state of Missouri to correct intentional racial discrimination in Kansas City schools by funding salary increases and remedial education programs.
Browder v. Gayle, 142 F. Supp. 707 (1956), was a case heard before a three-judge panel of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama on Montgomery and Alabama state bus segregation laws. The panel consisted of Middle District of Alabama Judge Frank Minis Johnson, Northern District of Alabama Judge Seybourn Harris Lynne, and Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard Rives. The main plaintiffs in the case were Aurelia Browder, Claudette Colvin, Susie McDonald, and Mary Louise Smith. Jeanetta Reese had originally been a plaintiff in the case, but intimidation by segregationists caused her to withdraw in February. She falsely claimed she had not agreed to the lawsuit, which led to an unsuccessful attempt to disbar Fred Gray for supposedly improperly representing her.
Joseph Francis Rummel was a German-born American Catholic prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as bishop of the Diocese of Omaha in Nebraska from 1928 to 1935 and as archbishop of the Archdiocese of New Orleans from 1935 to 1964.
Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, 551 U.S. 701 (2007), also known as the PICS case, is a United States Supreme Court case which found it unconstitutional for a school district to use race as a factor in assigning students to schools in order to bring its racial composition in line with the composition of the district as a whole, unless it was remedying a prior history of de jure segregation. Chief Justice Roberts wrote in his plurality opinion that "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
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. 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.
Stephen John Roth was a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan.
Morgan v. Hennigan was the case that defined the school busing controversy in Boston, Massachusetts during the 1970s. On March 14, 1972, the Boston chapter of the NAACP filed a class action lawsuit against the Boston School Committee on behalf of 14 black parents and 44 children. Tallulah Morgan headed the list of plaintiffs, and James Hennigan, then chair of the School Committee, was listed as the main defendant.
Lee v. Washington, 390 U.S. 333 (1968), is a United States Supreme Court decision that upheld an appeals court decision to forbid segregation of public prisons.
School segregation in the United States was the segregation of students based on their ethnicity. While not prohibited from having schools, various minorities were barred from most schools, schools for whites. Segregation was enforced by formal legal systems in U.S. states primarily in the Southern United States, although elsewhere segregation could be informal or customary. Segregation laws were dismantled in 1954 by the U.S. Supreme Court because of the successes being attained during the Civil Rights Movement. Segregation continued longstanding exclusionary policies in much of the Southern United States after the Civil War. Jim Crow laws codified segregation. These laws were influenced by the history of slavery and discrimination in the US. Secondary schools for African Americans in the South were called training schools instead of high schools in order to appease racist whites and focused on vocational education. School integration in the United States took place at different times in different areas and often met resistance. After the ruling of Brown v. Board of Education, which banned segregated school laws, school segregation took de facto form. School segregation declined rapidly during the late 1960s and early 1970s as the government became strict on schools' plans to combat segregation more effectively as a result of Green v. County School Board of New Kent County. Voluntary segregation by income appears to have increased since 1990. Racial segregation has either increased or stayed constant since 1990, depending on which definition of segregation is used. In general, definitions based on the amount of interaction between black and white students show increased racial segregation, while definitions based on the proportion of black and white students in different schools show racial segregation remaining approximately constant.
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.
Keyes v. School District No. 1, Denver, 413 U.S. 189 (1973), was a United States Supreme Court case that claimed de facto segregation had affected a substantial part of the school system and therefore was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. In this case, black and Hispanic parents filed suit against all Denver schools due to racial segregation. The decision on this case, written by Justice William J. Brennan, was key in defining de facto segregation. Brennan found that although there were no official laws supporting segregation in Denver, "the Board, through its actions over a period of years, intentionally created and maintained the segregated character of the core city schools." As a result of the ruling, the entire district in Denver, Colorado, must be desegregated. The issue of "intent" would become a key factor in the Boston case.
Educational inequality has existed in the Southeast Michigan area of the United States since the birth of institutional, urban schooling in the US. Inequality between lower and higher class districts have perpetuated divisions in educational opportunities and outcomes between Michigan communities, especially areas in and around Detroit, the state's largest city. According to a report by the Kerner Commission from 1967, "spending per pupil in Detroit suburbs was 27% greater than in the city and that spending since World War II had risen more in the suburbs than in the city. ." More recently, the economic decline of Detroit culminating in the 2013 Detroit bankruptcy has aggravated the educational tensions.
Hedgepeth and Williams v. Board of Education, Trenton, NJ, 131 N.J.L. 153, 35 A.2d 622 (1944), also known as the Hedgepeth–Williams case, was a landmark New Jersey Supreme Court decision decided in 1944. The Court ruled that since racial segregation was outlawed by the New Jersey State Constitution, it was unlawful for schools to segregate or refuse admission to students on the basis of race. The case led to the formal desegregation of New Jersey public schools and was a precursor to Brown v. Board of Education.
In 2000, metropolitan Detroit was the most racially segregated large metropolitan area in the United States (Dn, Stokes, and Thomas 2007). Accompanying such extreme racial residential segregation is extreme class segregation.