Read Online The Roberts Court: The Struggle for the Constitution by Marcia Coyle - Free Book Online
Authors: Marcia Coyle
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residing in Detroit is to attend a unitary school system in that district,” wrote Burger. “Unless petitioners drew the district lines in a discriminatory fashion, or arranged for white students residing in the Detroit District to attend schools in Oakland and Macomb Counties, they were under no constitutional duty to make provisions for Negro students to do so.”
Ironically for what was to come later in the Seattle and Louisville cases in the Roberts Court, Burger also spoke directly to the power of local school boards to manage education within their districts. He wrote:
“Boundary lines may be bridged where there has been a constitutional violation calling for interdistrict relief, but the notion that school district lines may be casually ignored or treated as a mere administrative convenience is contrary to the history of public education in our country. No single tradition in public education is more deeply rooted than local control over the operation of schools; local autonomy has long been thought essential both to the maintenance of community concern and support for public schools and to quality of the educational process.”
Justice Thurgood Marshall, one of four dissenters, called the decision“an emasculation” of the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. “Our Nation, I fear, will be ill-served by the Court’s refusal to remedy separate and unequal education, for unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together.”
Six years later, in 1980, a young Harvard Law School graduate named John Roberts Jr. walked into the Supreme Court to begin his clerkship with Associate Justice William Rehnquist, who, after he became chief justice in 1986, would lead the Court’s withdrawal from the school desegregation effort as well as a retreat from affirmative action.
The Court did little with school desegregation in the 1980s, explains Ryan, but the Rehnquist Court took up three cases in the early nineties that would get federal courts out of the business of overseeing school districts’ integration plans: Board of Education v. Dowell in 1991 (a 5–3 decision by Rehnquist); Freeman v. Pitts in 1992 (8–0 decision by Justice Anthony Kennedy); and Missouri v. Jenkins in 1995 (5–4 decision by Rehnquist).
Between 1969 and 2006, the year the Seattle and Louisville lawsuits reached the Supreme Court, presidents made fourteen appointments to the Court, twelve of which came from Republican presidents. Many of the later desegregation and affirmative action rulings were the work of the Court’s conservative majorities, more often than not by 5–4 margins.
“Constitutional interpretation involves judicial discretion; judicial discretion reflects political ideology; and conservative justices tend, unsurprisingly, to subscribe to the conservative racial ideology of the party that appointed them,” wrote the Harvard legal historian and constitutional law scholar Michael Klarman, author of From Jim Crow to Civil Rights , after the Seattle-Louisville decisions in 2007. “That ideology embraces a narrow, formalist conception of what counts as race discrimination; abhors the use of racial preferences, whether benignly motivated or not; and deems this nation’s ugly history of white supremacy as something more to be repudiated than remedied.” 12
With court orders to desegregate schools slowly being withdrawn, a second wave of legal challenges arose, challenges to voluntary school plans designed to prevent racial isolation or resegregation. The newly formed Roberts Court now would be asked to step back onto the battlefield of school integration to answer whether race could be used in this context. And this time, those asking would not be parents seeking to force recalcitrant school and state officials vested in a discriminatory educational system, but parents who themselves felt discriminated against by the good faith efforts of school officials to
Ironically for what was to come later in the Seattle and Louisville cases in the Roberts Court, Burger also spoke directly to the power of local school boards to manage education within their districts. He wrote:
“Boundary lines may be bridged where there has been a constitutional violation calling for interdistrict relief, but the notion that school district lines may be casually ignored or treated as a mere administrative convenience is contrary to the history of public education in our country. No single tradition in public education is more deeply rooted than local control over the operation of schools; local autonomy has long been thought essential both to the maintenance of community concern and support for public schools and to quality of the educational process.”
Justice Thurgood Marshall, one of four dissenters, called the decision“an emasculation” of the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. “Our Nation, I fear, will be ill-served by the Court’s refusal to remedy separate and unequal education, for unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together.”
Six years later, in 1980, a young Harvard Law School graduate named John Roberts Jr. walked into the Supreme Court to begin his clerkship with Associate Justice William Rehnquist, who, after he became chief justice in 1986, would lead the Court’s withdrawal from the school desegregation effort as well as a retreat from affirmative action.
The Court did little with school desegregation in the 1980s, explains Ryan, but the Rehnquist Court took up three cases in the early nineties that would get federal courts out of the business of overseeing school districts’ integration plans: Board of Education v. Dowell in 1991 (a 5–3 decision by Rehnquist); Freeman v. Pitts in 1992 (8–0 decision by Justice Anthony Kennedy); and Missouri v. Jenkins in 1995 (5–4 decision by Rehnquist).
Between 1969 and 2006, the year the Seattle and Louisville lawsuits reached the Supreme Court, presidents made fourteen appointments to the Court, twelve of which came from Republican presidents. Many of the later desegregation and affirmative action rulings were the work of the Court’s conservative majorities, more often than not by 5–4 margins.
“Constitutional interpretation involves judicial discretion; judicial discretion reflects political ideology; and conservative justices tend, unsurprisingly, to subscribe to the conservative racial ideology of the party that appointed them,” wrote the Harvard legal historian and constitutional law scholar Michael Klarman, author of From Jim Crow to Civil Rights , after the Seattle-Louisville decisions in 2007. “That ideology embraces a narrow, formalist conception of what counts as race discrimination; abhors the use of racial preferences, whether benignly motivated or not; and deems this nation’s ugly history of white supremacy as something more to be repudiated than remedied.” 12
With court orders to desegregate schools slowly being withdrawn, a second wave of legal challenges arose, challenges to voluntary school plans designed to prevent racial isolation or resegregation. The newly formed Roberts Court now would be asked to step back onto the battlefield of school integration to answer whether race could be used in this context. And this time, those asking would not be parents seeking to force recalcitrant school and state officials vested in a discriminatory educational system, but parents who themselves felt discriminated against by the good faith efforts of school officials to
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