The Charlotte Mecklenburg School System

In 1974, Judge Wendell Arthur Garrity Jr. of the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts ruled that the schools were unconstitutionally segregated (Weinbaum). He ordered Boston to desegregate in all public schools by forced busing. This new plan forced students from white neighborhoods to go to school in black neighborhoods, and forced students black neighborhoods to go to school in predominantly white neighborhoods to balance the racial diversity. However, this ruling was highly unpopular among the White Americans who were still in favor of segregation. A series of protests began to follow soon after the desegregation orders, but the most significant protest would be captured in a series of snapshots.

The Supreme Court is perhaps most well known for the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954. By declaring that segregation in schools was unconstitutional, Kevern Verney says a ‘direct reversal of the Plessy … ruling’1 58 years earlier was affected. It was Plessy which gave southern

Greensboro, North Carolina accepted and supported the Brown v. Board case ruling in 1954 because they viewed desegregation as unavoidable. This quickly ended within the next three years as school board members like Chairman Ed Hudgins elucidated the ruling as simply avoiding prejudice but not having to integrate. Other forms of resistance derived straight from the lieutenant governor, Luther Hodges, who led anti-desegregation forces and managed to push for laws like Pupil Assignment Act and the Pearsall Plan. The Pupil Assignment Act took the control of education away from the state so that local city school boards could individually decided how to avoid

The five reports of school segregation separately went to local courts with no avail. The cases then appealed to the Supreme Court, where they were pooled under the title “Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas”. (Good, 31, 32) (Davidson et al. 850)

Brown v. Board of Education was a landmark case that was decided by the Supreme Court of America in 1954. It is a case that is believed to have brought to an end decades of increasing racial segregation that was experienced in America’s public schools. The landmark decision of this case was resolved from six separate cases that originated from four states. The Supreme Court is believed to have preferred rearguments in the case because of its preference for presentation of briefs. The briefs were to be heard from both sides of the case, with the focus being on five fundamental questions. The questions focused on the attorneys’ opinions about whether Congress viewed segregation in public schools when it ratified the 14th amendment (Benoit, 2013). Changes were then made to the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

In Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg [County, North Carolina] Board of Education of 1971, the Supreme Court approved "administratively awkward, inconvenient, and even bizarre" methods to achieve integration; one of the measures included busing. In 1972, Morgan v. Hennigan was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Massachusetts District, charging that Boston public schools were unconstitutionally segregated. Prosecuting attorney Nick Flannery worked to prove Boston's segregation was not de facto (actually existing though not legally or officially established), but instead de jure (according to law), similar to Southern school districts. On 21 June 1974, Judge W. Arthur Garrity "found that the [Boston] School Committee had used covert techniques to segregate the system, and had done so with ‘segregative intent.'" A two-phase plan was called for; in Phase I, students would be bused from Roxbury, a predominantly black area, to South Boston, a neighborhood regarded as "the stronghold of opposition to desegregation." The integration started in September 1974, and was mostly quiet, except for some conflicts at both South Boston's high school and Roxbury's high school, a few of which required Governor Frank Sargent to call out the National Guard. Later in the school year, many white families planned a major boycott of the public schools. An anonymous tip was sent out saying

In 1945, the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was brought to the Supreme Court. Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer who represented the African Americans, won the case. The Supreme Court ruled that segregation in schools was unconstitutional. Although these decisions were established, some schools in the South still did not allow African Americans into their schools. A plan was made by the Little Rock, Arkansas school board to gradually integrate the schools (2, page 1). There were two pro-segregation groups that assembled to protest against the plan. These groups were the Capital Citizens Council and the Mother’s League of Central High School. Even though this opposition took place, nine African American students registered at the Arkansas Central High School for the very first time in

With the issue of desegregation in the Boston county schools, the school system had been ignoring a state act before the federal judge acted. In 1965 Massachusetts had passed the Racial Imbalance Act that required schools to desegregate if they had a population of 50 percent or greater of a single race, the Boston school system refused to pass the act in their own area (Gellerman). Instead of sitting back and letting the school board ignore the job they were appointed to do, black

The U.S. Supreme Court issued its historic Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, on May 17, 1954. Involved in the 14th Amendment, the decision declared all laws instating segregated schools to be unlawful, and it called for the desegregation of all schools throughout the nation. After the decision, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) attempted to register black students in previously all-white schools in cities throughout the South. In Little Rock, the capital city of Arkansas, the Little Rock School Board agreed to comply with the high court's ruling. Virgil Blossom, the Superintendent of Schools, submitted a plan of measured integration to the school board on May 24, 1955, which the board unanimously ratified. The plan would be implemented during the fall of the 1957 school year.

1955 the supreme court ordered school districts to integrate their schools with speed. This decision led to

The key holding of the Court was that, even if segregated black and white schools were of equal quality in facilities and teachers, segregation by itself was harmful to black students and unconstitutional.

The desegregation of public facilities began with the decision of Brown vs Board of Education in 1954, where the Supreme Court of the United States deemed segregation unlawful and unconstitutional. The country was told that desegregation was to take place "with all deliberate speed". This angered the white community. Violent retaliation was the means used to prevent the integration of blacks into various public facilities. In fact, the Autherine Lucy case demonstrated to the entire country that violent mobs could halt integration demanded by a federal court order. However, three years later, the Little Rock Crisis would affirm that if provoked by mobs, the executive

Just two years after the death of Charles Houston, segregation/Jim Crow was finally put to the test in the historic case of Brown v. Board of Education. The case began when Reverend Brown and various NAACP members fought to put their children in the close white schools, which led to Brown v. Board of Education. On December 9, 1952, the case was in effect and for seventeen months segregation hung in the balance.

The laws were not changed until the Brown v. Board Of Education’s decision was made in 1954 which was a case made up of several other cases from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware (PBS) The case began because a group of African American students were not allowed entrance into a segregated school because of their race. The court ruled in the student's favor because they viewed segregation in schools as unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment (B v. BOE: Case Brief Summary). After this court ruling, states were obligated to desegregate their public schools in order to follow the new law which lead to many African American students applying to schools all around the country, including in Arkansas. The students were applying in Arkansas up to a year before the state had planned to begin their desegregation.

Charlotte-Mecklenberg Board of Education, the ruling clarified that a one-race school did not mean that the school was carrying out segregation policies, but that the burden would be on the schools to prove that there was no segregation or discrimination in place. After reading this 1971 unanimous ruling of the Supreme Court, I appreciated that it provided the District Court with the authority necessary to regulate school districts in their efforts for desegregation. A ruling such as this created a space for us to be able to acknowledge and provide relief for segregation caused by the government where the District Courts see