A History of Black Achievement as Impacted by Federal Court Decisions in the Last Century

Historically in America, Black people have experienced dubious victories in the legal system with regards to their right to an education, a privilege recognized in state constitutions. Efforts by Black people to gain a quality education and significantly impact achievement and their quality of life through America's legal system started more than 100 years before the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. This article chronicles these efforts and underscores some of the many cases that have impacted achievement of Blacks in America. Moreover, it explores options for the future and concludes that the struggle for equal educational opportunity for Blacks in this country is vying for the attention of the increasingly more conservative federal court judges.

[T]he Negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What he needs is Education. What he must remember is that there is no magic, either in mixed schools or in segregated schools. A mixed school with poor and unsympathetic teachers, with hostile public opinion, and no teaching of truth concerning Black folk, is bad. A segregated school with ignorant placeholders, inadequate equipment, poor salaries, and wretched housing, is equally bad. Other things being equal, the mixed school is the broader, more natural basis for the education of all youth. It gives wider contacts; it inspires greater self-confidence; and suppresses the inferiority complex. But other things seldom are equal, and in that case, Sympathy, Knowledge, and Truth outweigh all that the mixed school can offer. (Du Bois, 1935, p. 335)

On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the applicability of the "separate but equal" doctrine to education in its unanimous decision, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) (Brown I). The High Court held that segregation deprived Black students of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. However, the Court provided no direction on how desegregation of schools was to be implemented. In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1955) (Brown II), the Court re-emphasized that segregation was unconstitutional and pointed out that school authorities were given the primary responsibility for elucidating, assessing, and solving problems associated with it, and the lower courts were responsible for determining whether the action of school authorities constituted good faith implementation of the governing constitutional principles that required that segregation be removed from schools. In an effort to expedite this serious work, the Supreme Court offered some general suggestions that lower courts might consider in addressing the problem, including those related to administration, condition of school plant, school transportation systems, personnel, or discriminatory local laws and regulations.

The Supreme Court acknowledged that it may take some time for school districts to create plans to eradicate discrimination, but it ordered in Brown II that public schools in that case "admit students on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed" (p. 301), confirming the fact that they expected full compliance to start as soon as was practicable. However, many challenges, often rooted simply in racism, prevented this order from being carried out with deliberate speed throughout the nation. In fact, years passed before many school systems even attempted to desegregate; and, to delay the process even more, resistant state officials and state legislatures and sometimes White citizens erected barriers to avoid carrying out this order while the expected beneficiaries, Black children, helplessly waited as their education suffered (Gordon, 1994). Some scholars argue that Blacks were experiencing more academic success prior to the Brown I decision to desegregate schools. On balance, scholars have countered that the Brown decisions sought desegregation at all costs, even when Black students appeared to be achieving in segregated but successful schools (Bell, 1987; Cole, 1986). To be sure, the struggle that punctuated 1954 was a continuation of the same one for an equal educational opportunity that Blacks started decades earlier in the antebellum South. It is important to note Brown I was also part of a larger legal strategy to integrate the American society. In Brown I, Supreme Court justice Warren noted, "Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments" (p. 493).

During this 50th anniversary of the landmark Brown decision, Blacks in America are still struggling to get a quality education, and segregation seems to be primarily ignored by the courts and thus here to stay, especially in the wake of many other problems such as inadequate funding for poor school districts and the achievement gap between Black and White students. To be sure, several scholars have pointed out the relationship of these issues to segregated schools. Although it can be argued that all of these bear upon the achievement of Black students, segregation bears a unique connection to Blacks in this country and their academic achievement.

This article will discuss some of the major decisions pre- and post-Brown. The purpose of this article is to look at the history of Black student achievement through an analysis of select federal court decisions. The list of cases that were analyzed is not exhaustive, and the cases have been selected based on their connection to Black student achievement.

PRE-AAOHW

Historically in America, Black people have found dubious victories in the legal system with regards to the right to an education, a privilege recognized in state constitutions instead of the U.S. Constitution. Efforts by Black people to gain a quality education and significantly impact achievement and their quality of life through America's legal system started 100 years before the 1950s (Bell, 1980). Perhaps the earliest case that highlights this important struggle relative to education took place in Boston almost 50 years before Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the case from which the concept of "separate but equal" gained its popularity. It is important to note that Plessy was a case about transportation that had larger implications for society, because it legitimated the doctrine of "separate but equal." In Boston, around the mid-180Os, Blacks had established a successful school that was taken over by the school committee composed of White citizens of that city. In Roberts v. City of Boston (1849), a father challenged the "separate but equal" doctrine when he refused to have his daughter walk beyond a White primary school to attend a school established for Blacks only. he sued to desegregate the school charging that segregated schools breed racial prejudice. The Massachusetts court conceded that colored persons were entitled by law in the commonwealth to equal rights, including constitutional, political, civil, and social rights. However, the court still found that the regulation in question, which provided separate schools for colored children, was not a violation of any of these rights. In fact the court concluded that the school committee was within its power to separate the White and Black students, especially if the education was equal. Hence, in Boston in 1849, we see the origin of the "separate but equal" doctrine with a direct application to education, unlike in Plessy, the case from which the doctrine originated.

In 1954, the struggle to achieve equality in education gained national prominence with the case of Brown v. Board of Education ofTopeka, Kansas (1954). However, there are two important higher education cases that the Supreme Court decided before Brown I and after Roberts. In the first case, Sweatt v. Painter (1950), a student, Heman Sweatt, was denied admission to the University of Texas Law School in 1946 because he was Black. The Court found that even though the school established another separate but equal facility, the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment required that Sweatt be admitted to the University of Texas Law School. This is one of the cases that not only provided the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) with a much-needed victory, but it also provided the organization with a legal strategy to use in future cases on school desegregation.

Another higher education case, McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education (1950), was decided the same year [195O]. McLaurin, a student who possessed a master's degree, chose to apply to a doctoral program in education at the University of Oklahoma. School authorities adhered to the Oklahoma statute and denied him admission because a state law made it a misdemeanor to maintain or operate, teach or attend a school at which both Whites and Blacks are enrolled. McLaurin filed a complaint seeking to stop the school from enforcing the statute, alleging that the action of the school authorities and the statutes upon which their action was based were unconstitutional and deprived him of the equal protection of the laws as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. he won at the district court level and the legislature amended this statute, to permit the admission of Blacks to institutions of higher learning attended by White students.

McLaurin's victory made it possible for him to be admitted only in situations where institutions offered courses that were not available in the schools for Blacks, and, in such cases, the program of instruction was to be given only on a segregated basis. Consequently, university officials and other students employed this law that allowed segregation to subject McLaurin to inhumane treatment. For example, he was required to sit at a designated desk in a room adjoining the classroom instead of within the room with the other students. he was also required to sit at a designated desk on the mezzanine floor of the library, but not permitted to use the desks in the regular reading room. Moreover, during lunch he was required to sit at a designated table and to eat at a different time from the other students in the school cafeteria.

The U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari on the McLaurin case and concluded that the conditions to which he was subjected in order to receive his education deprived him of his personal and present right to the equal protection of the laws as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. In both Sweatt and McLaurin, the Court recognized that the African American citizen has rights and that those rights may be implicated when considering the manner in which education is being delivered or withheld by state institutions. The Sweatt and McLaurin decisions drew clear distinctions between the U.S. Supreme Court's reasoning and that of the Boston court. For example, in Roberts, the rights of a Black girl in primary school were recognized but not important enough to overcome the government's need to maintain a "separate but equal" facility in regards to education. Even though McLaurin and Sweatt won their cases, unlike the Roberts family, each of the struggles to gain equal educational opportunity clearly had an adverse effect on the achievement of the three Black students, even though they were at different stages in their educational pursuits.

Note that Sweatt and McLaurin, which were also important victories for the NAACP, took place in 1950 before the well-known Brown case was decided in 1954. However, the facts in Roberts indicated that the struggle of African Americans to achieve equal educational opportunity started much earlier than the landmark decision in Brown. Nevertheless, by 1950, Black children in the K-12 setting still had not experienced victories similar to those in the Sweatt and McLaurin higher education cases because up to that period in time segregation for Black children was still a fact of life. Ironically, Roberts is instructive in that some of the same goals sought over 150 years ago still remain a pertinent part of the desegregation debate today.

BROWN

The Brown I (1954) case originally involved four class-action lawsuits filed on behalf of African American students who had been denied admission to schools attended by White students. The African American students were from the states of Delaware, South Carolina, and Virginia which all had state constitutions or statutes that required segregation be maintained. The remaining students were from Kansas and Washington, D.C., which allowed segregation. The legal question of Brown I was, "Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities?" (p. 493)

The Supreme Court held that segregating children in public schools exclusively on the basis of race, regardless if physical facilities and other "tangible" factors are equal, deprives the Black children of equal educational opportunities. Accordingly, the Court concluded that segregation had a detrimental psychological effect on Black children that eventually resulted in an inferiority complex. Russo, Harris, and Sandidge (1994) noted, "for the first time in history, the Court relied on data from the social sciences and considered the deleterious effects of racial segregation in reaching its decision" (p. 299). This led to the conclusion by the Supreme Court that separate educational facilities were inherently unequal and in violation of equal protection of the laws as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.

Despite the importance of Brown, scholars have pondered whether the principles it set forth are still effective in the quest to achieve equal educational opportunity for African American children today (Bell, 1987; Brown, 1994; Middleton, 1995). Similarly, Bell (1976) posited that Brown has had a dubious effect on the achievement of Black children. Even though the case opened the doors to integrate, questions have surfaced since the decision surrounding the effectiveness of desegregation on Black student achievement and whether it really exists nationally, especially given the fact that many urban cities and schools remain segregated. On the one hand, Middleton (1995) concludes:

After four decades of school desegregation effort under Brown v. Board of Education, American cities have become more segregated by race and income, and public schools have continued to deteriorate. Reasonable observers of the American educational system will readily conclude that despite Brown, our system of education does not meet the needs of a majority of our African-American students, (p. 22)

Scholars have noted what they consider clear gains that have followed as a result of Brown I (Dawkins & Braddock, 1994; liebman, 1990; Taylor, 1993). For example, they have surmised that teenage pregnancy, dropout rate, and delinquent behavior are substantially lower among African American children in desegregated schools and that these students, like their White counterparts, are better prepared to integrate and live among people of different races in significant areas of American life. Criticism of this viewpoint is based on the circumstances of Black students of today in integrated schools who have to face covert and overt racism in such schools. In the past, students literally faced dangerous mobs in their quest to desegregate schools. Examples are given in the next section.

POST BROWN

In general, Black students, parents, and educators carried the burden of courageously desegregating schools while school boards reluctantly created plans that were supposedly in compliance with the Brown I ruling. No story is perhaps more compelling than the battle to desegregate Little Rock's Central High School in 1957 (Beals, 1994). The nine students, who came to be known as the Little Rock Nine, were saddled with the mission to integrate the school and, in the process, experienced a number of hardships in their bold resistance to Governor Faubus, the Arkansas legislature, and the mob of angry White citizens they met each morning as they attempted to attend classes. The citizens, who were intent on maintaining the vestiges of segregation, shouted and threatened to harm the students making it necessary to provide them with escorts by law enforcement officials. In recognizing it as a duty to implement desegregation as outlined in Brown I, the Little Rock Board of Education undertook a study three days after the decision was handed down (Cooper v. Aaron, 1958). Nearly a year later and to the detriment of these students' education and seven days before the Brown II opinion, the study was complete, and the school board approved a plan that would be implemented a distant two years later in the fall of 1957 and completed in 1963. In demanding immediate desegregation, rightfully outraged African American parents of the school district declared their children's rights to a non-discriminatory education and demanded admittance to public schools on a non-segregated basis. Accordingly, the parents filed for an injunction enjoining the local school board from continuing to maintain segregated schools in the district under the guise of an investigative study. Holding for the school district, the district court concluded that the plan proposed by the school board to effectuate a transition to a racially non-segregated school system was adequate and had been promptly started (Aaron v. Cooper, 1956).

Convinced that the school board should be required to desegregate the schools sooner, the parents appealed the action against the school board, but on April 26, 1957, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the decision, finding that the school integration plan was reasonable and proper (Aaron v. Cooper, 1957). Parents decided not to appeal this action to the Supreme Court and students were scheduled to enter school the following fall pursuant to the desegregation plan that was established by the school district. The painful decision resulted in African American children once again waiting after having expended energy in an effort to gain an equal educational opportunity through desegregation.

The Aaron v. Cooper cases made it to the Supreme Court because of the violence promulgated by the Governor, his use of the National Guard, and the incidents surrounding the school. On September 4, 1957, students attempted to desegregate school but were blocked by the Arkansas National Guard, acting under orders of the governor. Governor Faubus had to be legally enjoined from using the National Guard to keep the Black students from attending the school. Three weeks after they started school at Central High School, another attempt was made to desegregate the school after a false start. This resulted in police officers having to remove the students from the school for their safety after a large demonstration erupted outside of the school and the mob broke through police barriers and made it inside. Beals (1994), a member of the Little Rock Nine, recalled that some of the Arkansas police officers who were supposed to protect them removed their badges and joined the rampage after the mob infiltrated the school. Finally, President Eisenhower dispatched federal troops to Little Rock to quell the violence. On November 27, 1957, federalized National Guardsmen replaced the troops and they remained until the end of the school year. all but one of the Little Rock Nine remained throughout the school year.

On February 20, 1958, due to extreme public hostility, made worse by the resistant actions of the governor and legislature, the school board requested a postponement of their program for desegregation. The board proposed that the Black students already admitted to the school be withdrawn and sent to segregated schools, and that all further steps to carry out the board's desegregation program be postponed for a period of two and one-half years. This began another trip through the courts for the Blacks in Little Rock. Although a district court granted the request (Aaron v. Cooper, 1958), the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed it (Aaron v. Cooper, 1958). The Supreme Court took the case and upheld the decision of the Eighth Circuit. On Governor Faubus's resistance to the order of Brown I, the court stated, quoting an earlier case, "If the legislatures of the several states may, at will, annul the judgments of the courts of the United States, and destroy the rights acquired under those judgments, the Constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery" (p. 18). It reasoned that Brown I was the law of the land and the rights of minority students could not be sacrificed to the violent and disorderly actions of a recalcitrant governor.

In the interest of integrating one high school in Arkansas, six cases were tried in the federal courts. The goal of desegregating Central High School placed nine Black students in a school of two thousand White students. What occurred in Little Rock was indicative of the turbulent times in schools systems in certain parts of America and the court orders they were under following Brown I and Brown II. In the first Cooper case the school board mentioned that it was willing to comply with constitutional requirements as soon as the Supreme Court outlined the method to be followed. However, no such outline was given. So, like Brown I, Cooper provided no guidelines as to what constituted a desegregated school and districts continued the trend set by admitting only a few assigned or voluntary Black students (Gordon, 1994). Although perhaps not often meeting with the same scale of resistance in Little Rock, the courageous journey to desegregate schools led mostly by Black students, their parents, and civil rights leaders continued to meet resistance throughout the nation.

Trends of the 60s and 70s

As Blacks continued the seemingly insurmountable mission to desegregate schools, two other cases made their way to the Supreme Court. In Goss v. Board of Education of the City ofKnoxville (1963), the Supreme Court struck down a plan that allowed students to transfer from a school in which their race was the minority to a formerly segregated school where their race was the majority. In McNeese v. Board of Education for Community Unit School District 187, Chaokia, Illinois (1963), the Court held in favor of Black students when it concluded that it was not necessary to exhaust administrative remedies in a state claim in school desegregation cases prior to seeking relief in federal court. In other words, if school officials deprived students of equal protection they were permitted to try the case in federal court without exhausting state remedies. In a case decided 10 years after Brown I, Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (1964), the Supreme Court held that by contributing to private schools through tuition grants in an effort to circumvent desegregation, the school district denied Black students their equal protection rights.

The trend of the U.S. Supreme Court continued over the next decade with important victories such as Rogers v. Paul (1965) where Arkansas Black students successfully contested a plan that desegregated the schools at the lethargic rate of one grade per year. The students fought and won immediate transfers to a more extensive curriculum from which they were excluded because of race. Here, it is apparent that students used Brown J to access a better curriculum that happened to be reserved only for White students. In this case, Blacks had a direct impact on their achievement.

A noteworthy ruling that took place three years later was the victory in the Green v. County School Board of New Kent County (1968). Green marked the first case on school desegregation following the appointment of Justice Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. It also marked the end of the school choice programs first seen in the Goss case. Although the Court stopped short of striking down these types of plans, it did find that such a plan was unconstitutional as applied to New Kent County. This county operated two high schools, one Black and one White, and these schools remained largely segregated for three years after the implementation of this plan until challenged by Black students. Other cases that marked victories on freedom-of-choice programs included Raney v. Board of Education of the Gould School District (1968) and Monroe v. Board of Commissioners of the City of Jackson, Mississippi (1968).

The cases in the years that followed moved the Court toward creating a unitary system in schools, i.e., terminating the dual school systems of Black and White as seen in Green. Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971) was the prominent case that marked the entry of busing as a strategy to desegregate schools in support of unitary status. In Swann, the all too common doughnut effect, where White suburbs surrounded the mostly Black urban areas such as Charlotte-Mecklenburg, was present. A plan to achieve the popular racial balance was put into place and approved by the district court and subsequently approved by the Fourth Circuit after modifications. The Court commented in this case that numerical ratios and quotas, although not constitutionally required, could provide a starting point for school desegregation.

The next set of significant cases, Milliken v. Bradley (Milliken I) (1974) and Milliken v. Bradley (Milliken If) (1977) marked what some thought was a major shift in the Court's rulings away from metropolitan school desegregation remedies and a setback in the fight to integrate the nation's schools (Brown, 1979; Brown, 1994; Gordon, 1994; Russo, Harris, & Sandidge, 1994). In Milliken I, the Supreme Court held, among other things, that it was improper to impose a multidistrict remedy for Detroit's single-district de jure segregation in the absence of findings that the surrounding suburban districts had failed to operate unitary school systems or had committed acts that effected Detroit's segregation. Detroit, like many urban centers, was predominantly Black, racially isolated, and surrounded by my mostly White suburban districts. In his dissent, Justice Marshall believed the majority opinion of the Supreme Court in Milliken I was swayed more by a perceived growing feeling that enough had been done to enforce constitutional guarantees for Black students rather than neutral constitutional principles.

Trends in the 80s, 90s, and Beyond

Russo, Harris, and Sandidge (1994) noted the vigorous activity of the Supreme Court leading up to the 1980s, but they found that only two minor cases reached the high court in this decade. Perhaps the most significant case relative to achievement of students started with the Missouri v. Jenkins (1990), in which the issue was whether the federal judiciary could impose a tax increase to fund a school desegregation remedy. The Supreme Court affirmed the authority of federal judges to increase taxes beyond those set by state statute to pay for the cost of desegregating schools. In the second case, Missouri v. Jenkins (1995), the Court addressed whether there should be limits on this funding and found that the federal judiciary exceeded the bounds of discretion when it mandated funds for the creation of student achievement programs and across-the-board salary increases for all instructional staff because achievement of the students was still low. The Supreme Court held that student achievement programs and salary increases were not the appropriate test to determine if a school system had achieved unitary status. This case set the tone for how the High Court might answer the question of achievement for African American students and affiliated ways to address it through the legal system. This response by the Court was one that limited the power of the judiciary to directly address the less than adequate funding issues that are possibly linked to the segregation of urban schools.

CONCLUSION

The move toward achieving equal educational opportunities through the legal system for Blacks has proven to be a challenge, not unlike many other challenges encountered by this group in this country. The desegregation remedies fought for have provided Blacks with mixed success at best. For example, Brown I provided the order to desegregate, but for so many years no reliable definition elucidated what constituted a desegregated school percentage-wise. Moreover, racism and related safety issues retarded many of the serious efforts to desegregate the schools. Even in the case of the yearlong battle fought to desegregate Central High School in Arkansas, only nine students integrated the school of 2,000. The first clear attempt to implement desegregation was the use of racial balancing. Still, problems with "tipping," a process described as having too many Blacks, caused White flight and gradually central urban centers have once again returned to de facto segregated centers, if they were ever affected by desegregation at all. Much like what happened prior to racial balancing in some northern school districts, we see a small number of economically able African Americans taking advantage of schools that tend to have more resources. These schools tend to be located in the suburban areas and simply are not viable options for most Black children. Moreover, recent decisions of conservative courts have found that racial imbalances may be the result of demographic factors and where people choose to live and desegregation may be achieved only if de facto segregation is eliminated. Bell (1987) has argued that desegregation, although integrating only a small number of students, caused many Black teachers and Black principals to lose their jobs and even closure of some effective Black schools, a completely unintended effect by civil rights activist who were fighting for equal educational opportunity.

This returns us to the fact that schools may need to now focus on fighting for equal opportunity through gaining state funding and creating quality education systems, regardless of the racial balance. If it is inevitable that the urban centers are going to be segregated by fact, then the focus must be on providing a quality education to those students that are unable to leave the urban center. This constitutes the majority of Black students. Any remedy that is fashioned must be done so with these constituents in mind. Orfield, Frankenberg, and Lee (2003) have found a resurgence of school segregation that is largely impacted by an increasingly more conservative judiciary, making urban schools reminiscent of de facto segregation that took place before Brown I. Although this type of system was held by the Supreme Court to cause psychological and educational harm in Brown /, it perhaps created a sense of pride in the race and a willingness to achieve for many African American students; pride that is so desperately needed today. Although this is truly not the answer for all Black students in America, it can present a viable solution for some, especially those who are not mobile. Hence, policymakers should focus on improving education in areas that have become more segregated or were never really desegregated. If we can educate this group effectively, we will have addressed the existing unequal educational opportunities for Black students that the Brown ruling set out to eradicate.

REFERENCES

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Aaron v. Cooper, 243 F.2d 361 (8th Cir. 1957).

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Aaron v. Cooper, 257 F.2d 33 (8* Cir. 1958).

Deals, M. (1994). Warriors don't cry: A searing memoir of the battle to integrate Little Rock's central high school. New York: Washington Square Press.

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Dawkins, M. P., & Braddock, J. H. (1994). The continuing significance of desegregation: School racial composition and African American inclusion in American society. The Journal of Negro Education, 63, 394-405.

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Russo, C., Harris, J. J., & Sandidge, R. F. (1994). Brown v. Board of Education at 40: A legal history of equal educational opportunities in American public education. The Journal of Negro Education, 63, 297-309.

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Taylor, W. (1993). The continuing struggle of equal educational opportunity. North Carolina Law Review, 71, 1693-1709.

Mark A. Gooden University of Cincinnati

AUTHOR

MARK A. GOODEN is Assistant Professor in the Departments of Educational Administration and Urban Educational Leadership at the University of Cincinnati. His research interests include educational technology and its use by administrators, legal issues related to the connection between the Internet, students' rights and school violence, and issues in urban educational leadership.

All queries or comments regarding this article should be addressed to mark.gooden@uc.edu.

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