Supreme Court Upholds Busing to Achieve School Integration
In Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg, decided on this day, the Supreme Court approved the busing of students to achieve racial integration.
The Court, however, expressed its frustration with the lack of progress in school integration, 17 years after Brown v. Board of Education, decided on May 17, 1954.
Most observers believe that school busing to achieve racial integration was dealt a serious blow by the Supreme Court in 2007, with the decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1 and a companion case. Data on school attendance patterns by race indicate that racially integrated schools peaked in 1988 and has been declining ever since. May believe that America’s schools are more segregated today than they were before Brown v. Board of Education. See Jonathan Kozol’s book, The Shame of a Nation (listed below.
The Court: “Bus transportation has been an integral part of the public education system for years, and was perhaps the single most important factor in the transition from the one-room schoolhouse to the consolidated school. Eighteen million of the Nation’s public school children, approximately 39%, were transported to their schools by bus in 1969–1970 in all parts of the country . . . Thus, the remedial techniques used in the District Court’s order were within that court’s power to provide equitable relief. . . .”
Read: Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of a Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (2005)
Learn more: James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and its Troubled Legacy (2001)
Listen to the oral arguments in the case: http://www.oyez.org/cases/1970-1979/1970/1970_281