Green v. County School Board
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| Green v. County School Board of New Kent Co. | ||||||||||||
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| Argued April 3, 1968 Decided May 27, 1968 |
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| Holding | ||||||||||||
| New Kent County's freedom of choice desegregation plan did not comply with the dictates of Brown v. Board of Education and was therefore unconstitutional. | ||||||||||||
| Court membership | ||||||||||||
| Chief Justice: Earl Warren Associate Justices: Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, John Marshall Harlan II, William J. Brennan, Jr., Potter Stewart, Byron White, Abe Fortas, Thurgood Marshall |
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| Case opinions | ||||||||||||
| Majority by: Brennan Joined by: Warren, Black, Douglas, Harlan, Stewart, White, Fortas, Marshall |
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| Laws applied | ||||||||||||
| U.S. Const., amend. XIV | ||||||||||||
Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, 391 U.S. 430 (1968) was an important United States Supreme Court case dealing with the freedom of choice plans created to comply with the mandate in Brown II. The Court held that New Kent County's freedom of choice plan did not constitute adequate compliance 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.
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[edit] Legal background
In Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 the Warren Court ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional. One year later, in Brown II, enforcement of this principle was given to district courts, ordering that they take the necessary steps to make admittance to public schools nondiscriminatory "with all deliberate speed." The term "all deliberate speed" was interpreted by school boards to be as slowly as possible. Circuit Judge John J. Parker led many in the South in interpreting Brown as a charge not to segregate, but not an order to integrate. In 1963 the Court ruled in McNeese v. Board of Education and Goss v. Board of Education in favor of integration, and showed impatience with efforts to end segregation.
[edit] Factual background
New Kent County is a rural county in Eastern Virginia. About one-half of its population of some 4,500 were black. There was no residential segregation in the county. The school system had only two combined elementary and high schools, one for whites, one for blacks. The 21 school buses traveled overlapping routes throughout the county. The segregated system was initially established and maintained under the state mandated racial segregation in public education. The School Board continued the segregated operation of the system after the Brown decisions, on the authority of several statutes enacted by Virginia in resistance to those decisions. Some of these statutes were held to be unconstitutional. One statute, the Pupil Placement Act, not repealed until 1966, divested local boards of authority to assign children to particular schools and placed that authority in a State Pupil Placement Board. Under that Act, children were each year automatically reassigned to the school previously attended unless, upon their application, the State Board assigned them to another school; students seeking enrollment for the first time were also assigned at the discretion of the State Board. White families almost uniformly chose the white-identified school, and blacks, out of fear of violence, retaliation, or hostility, almost uniformly chose the black-identified school. To September 1964, no pupil had applied for admission to another school under this statute.
[edit] Green before the Supreme Court
This case was argued along with Raney v. Board of Education of Gould School District and Monroe v. Board of Commissioners of Jackson, Tenn. In the last one, the plan in question was called free transfer.
Samuel Tucker argued the case for the petitioners, Frederick Gray for the Board. Louis Claiborne, represented the federal government. While the Court did not rule that "freedom of choice" plans were always unconstitutional, it did note that they tended to be ineffective at desegregating a school system, and held that in New Kent County's case the freedom-of-choice plan violated the Constitution.
The decision led to the search for other options, such as zoning, for the placement of students.
