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37 St. Louis U. L.J. 885 (1992-1993)
Public Schools Desegregation: A Contemporary Analysis

handle is hein.journals/stlulj37 and id is 895 raw text is: PUBLIC SCHOOL DESEGREGATION: A CONTEMPORARY ANALYSIS ROBERT L. CARTER* I am deeply troubled by recent Supreme Court decisions which ignore the tremendous racial imbalances in our public schools and express a zeal to declare an end to federal court supervision over school desegregation. The Supreme Court's eagerness to proclaim Victory! against governmentally created segregation is woefully premature. When we were arguing school segregation cases in 1952 and 1953 before the Supreme Court, we saw the dual school system as the key barrier to equal educational opportunity for African-Americans. With the 1954 declaration in Brown v. Board of Education,' I believed the path was then clear for black children to receive an equal education. My confidence in the inevitability of this result now seems naive. Although I expected the initial hostility to Brown, whereby black students were forcibly denied entrance to white schools by racist white parents and public officials, I did not anticipate the stubborn obstacles which have continued to hinder vindication by black children of their constitutional guarantee of equal educational opportunity now for nearly forty years. In particular, I am speaking of the intransigence of racism which has isolated poor African-American children in decaying cities and in substandard schools and the Supreme Court decisions which have eclipsed the promise of Brown. Indeed, the lack of forward movement in securing for black children the promise of Brown is best illustrated by Brown itself. Charging that the vestiges of segregation were still extant in the Topeka school system, seventeen African-American parents, including the daughter of Oliver Brown, the plaintiff in the 1954 case, moved to reopen the Brown case in 1979. Just last year, thirteen years after the case was reopened, the Tenth Circuit found an unconstitutional imbalance in student and teacher assignments at the district's three high schools, six middle schools and twenty-six elementary * Senior Judge, United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. A.B., Lincoln University; LL.B., Howard University; LL.M., Columbia University. This essay was originally presented at the Law and Education Section Workshop on Diversity, Desegregation & Affirmative Action held at the 1993 Association of American Law Schools' Annual Meeting on January 9, 1993, in San Francisco, California. 1. 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

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