Supreme Court Takes on Desegregation Cases
By Victor Merina
IJJ Senior Fellow
More than 50 years after the Supreme Court ruled that separate schools are inherently unequal in Brown v. Board of Education, the court will hear arguments today considering whether race can still be a factor when school systems design programs to promote integration.
In key cases that have already drawn widespread interest, the justices will review school-choice plans in Louisville and Seattle that use race as one factor in assigning students to public schools.
As the Washington Post reports, it is the first time in more than a decade that the Supreme Court will consider what is proper for school systems to do to promote desegregation and will mark the first test on the issue for two new justices – Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. – and court’s conservative majority.
More than 50 groups and organizations have filed friend-of-the-court briefs on behalf of the Louisville and Seattle school systems and a pro-affirmative action march and rally are planned for today outside the Supreme Court.
As author Susan Eaton writes in the New York Times, the court will decide the fate of voluntary policies intended to achieve racial diversity in public classrooms in those two cities but the impact will go beyond those school districts.
Eaton, the research director at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, writes that if the court bans such policies, schools across the country will face new difficulties in achieving racial diversity in public classrooms.