Green v. County School Board of New Kent County

Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, 391 U.S. 430 (1968), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case involving school desegregation. Specifically, the Court dealt with the freedom of choice plans created to avoid compliance with the Supreme Court's mandate in _Brown II _ in 1955. The Court held unanimously that New Kent County 's freedom of choice plan did not adequately comply 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. Green v. County School Board of New Kent County was a follow-up of _Brown v. Board of Education _.

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**Green v. County School Board of New Kent County **

Green established what came to be known as the five Green factors — faculty, staff, transportation, extracurricular activities and facilities — the criteria by which later courts would evaluate school districts' progress on desegregation.

Contents

• 1 Background

  • 1.1 School segregation in the Jim Crow era

    • 1.1.1 Virginia

  • 1.2 The Civil Rights Act

• 2 Fourth Circuit

• 3 Supreme Court

  • 3.1 Decision

• 4 Impact of Green and the five "Green factors"

• 5 50th anniversary celebration

• 6 See also

• 7 References

• 8 Further reading

• 9 External links

Background

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School segregation in the Jim Crow era

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Brown v. Board of Education is a landmark desegregation ruling, but difficult to implement, and limited to state-sanctioned segregation of public schools. 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" did little to speed up the school board's plan for integration. Judge John J. Parker of the United States Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit led many in the South in interpreting Brown as a charge not to segregate, but not as an order to integrate.

The Supreme Court heard several more cases surrounding the speed and efficacy of desegregation between its initial ruling in Brown and the Green v. School Board case in 1968.

Virginia

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Virginia had long mandated racial segregation in public education under the Virginia Constitution of 1902.

The school board continued to operate a segregated system in the wake of the Brown rulings, on the authority of several "massive resistance " state laws enacted to resist them. One such law, the Pupil Placement Act, divested local boards of authority to assign children to particular schools and centralized that power with the newly created State Pupil Placement Board. Under the act, children were automatically reassigned to their prior school each year unless they applied for transfer to another school and the board approved their application. New students' schools were also assigned by the board.

At the time of the 1960 census, in New Kent County, Virginia, approximately half of the 4,500 residents were African American.

There was little residential segregation, no attendance zones, and about half the students in the county were black. : 56  The school system had only two schools, the New Kent School for white students and the George W. Watkins School for black students. Since 1965 students had been bused to the school of their choice, but no white students had ever opted to attend the black school, and only 15% of black students chose to attend the white school.

The Civil Rights Act

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The U.S. Congress, concerned with the lack of progress nationally in school desegregation, and the far-right resistance in the Deep South, included provisions in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that would withhold federal funding from schools that refused to dismantle segregation, and allowed the federal government to bring desegregation suits. : 55  A few years later, with the support of the political branches, the Supreme Court held in Green that broad remedies were needed to desegregate "root and branch". Every school district had an "affirmative duty" to achieve proportional racial enrollment for every public school in a "dual system" : 129  This was the end of "colorblind" freedom of choice plans, but in subsequent cases the Supreme Court made it more cumbersome to challenge racial inequality in schools that had never been segregated under Jim Crow laws .

Fourth Circuit

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The case was initially decided by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Richmond after plaintiffs filed suit in 1965 for injunctive relief against maintenance of allegedly segregated schools. In response, the Board, in order to remain eligible for federal financial aid, adopted a "freedom of choice" plan for desegregating the schools. The plan permitted students, except those entering the first and eighth grades, to choose annually between the schools; those not choosing were assigned to the school previously attended; first and eighth graders must affirmatively choose a school. In 1965, thirty-five black students enrolled in the previously all-white New Kent school. The District Court approved the plan, as amended.

More than a hundred additional African-American students enrolled each year in 1966 and 1967. The newly enrolled black students reported harassment by their white peers, to which teachers and administrators turned a blind eye. The case was argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit on January 9, 1967, and decided June 12, 1967. The Court of Appeals approved the "freedom of choice" provisions, although it remanded for a more specific and comprehensive order concerning teachers. During the plan's three years of operation, no white student chose to attend the all-Africa

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