Article and Webquest on the Supreme Court and Civil Rights (Summative)

This is a summative article and WebQuest assignment based on the Supreme Court and Civil Rights

Read the articles embedded in the post and answer any associated questions and research the questions associated with the Webquest. 

You are to create a Word document that will have the questions and answers that you have researched. 

How the Supreme Court Shaped School Segregation

For more than a century, the Supreme Court has played a powerful role in defining the racial composition of public schools in the U.S. From the mid-1800s, when the court defined “separate but equal” to recent challenges to integration, here’s a look at some of the landmark decisions.

1896: Plessy v. Ferguson

The case: A black man, Homer Adolph Plessy, was charged with breaking state law by riding in a white railroad car in Louisiana. The court ruled that as long as the state had equitable facilities for both whites and blacks, there was no need to integrate them.

The fallout: The case established the doctrine of “separate but equal,” which allowed segregated schools and other facilities for the next 58 years.

How did Plessy v. Ferguson establish separate but equal as the standard for 58 years?

1938: Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada

The case: African-American student Lloyd Gaines was turned away from the all-white law school at the University of Missouri because he was black. The state had no law school for black students, so Missouri offered to pay his tuition at a black school in another state instead. Gaines refused, arguing before the Supreme Court that his rejection was a violation of the 14th Amendment. The court ruled for Gaines, deciding that the school must admit him if the state couldn’t provide equal facilities for all students.

The fallout:  While it didn’t overturn the “separate but equal” principle, the ruling marked the beginning of the erosion of the Plessy decision by insisting that states provide equal facilities for all students if they are to be segregated.

SM: I’m a little confused by this — if Plessy said separate but equal, how is this different?

How did the 14th Amendment apply in Gaines' case?

1954: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka

The case: The case, brought on behalf of black schoolchildren, argued that the separate schools for black children in Topeka, Kans. were inferior, with out-of-date textbooks and scant supplies, but that those children were nonetheless denied admittance to the white schools in their community. In a unanimous ruling, the court found that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

The fallout: The landmark case invalidated Plessy but offered no guidance for school districts on how or when to integrate their schools. The case marked the beginning of a protracted legal fight to integrate public schools.

How exactly did Brown v. Board of Education invalidate Plessy v. Ferguson? 

1955: Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka et al (Brown II)

The case: Topeka officials appealed to the court to determine how they should be required to implement the integration order. The Supreme Court held that the districts were responsible for figuring out how to integrate their schools, and could take more time if necessary to work out the details, but that they should proceed with “all deliberate speed.”

The fallout: Many school districts and lower courts interpreted the ruling as an opportunity to delay their integration efforts. Some closed down schools rather than allow black children to attend, and encouraged white parents to enroll their children in private academies, some of which still operate today.

How did the Supreme Courts' own language make matters worse for desegregation? 

1964: Griffin v. School Board of Prince Edward Co.

The case: After Brown, the Virginia legislature organized a campaign against integration known as “massive resistance.” As part of that effort, Prince Edward County severed funding for its public schools, forcing them to close. It provided vouchers to all children to attend private schools, but at the time all of those schools were white-only. A federal court ordered Prince Edward County to reopen the public schools, and the county appealed to the Supreme Court, which found that the schools must be reopened. The court also ordered the county to raise taxes to funnel more funding to the public school system.

The fallout: For four years, there was no formal education for black children in the county. The case highlighted the court’s growing frustration with resistance to integration in southern states.

How did this case illustrate "massive resistance" against the decision of Brown v. Board?

According to the link below, how did the Supreme Court find? What was the vote total? What was the dissenting opinion? 

https://www.oyez.org/cases/1963/592 Links to an external site.

1968: Green v. County School Board of New Kent County

The case: The Virginia county had maintained its segregated school system through a “freedom of choice” plan under which whites chose to go to the all-white school and most blacks continued to choose the black school. The court considered this to be a form of token compliance. It also ordered the removal of segregation in schools by “root and branch.”

The fallout: The Green decision sped up integration efforts, and established new criteria to determine whether a district was complying with orders to integrate, including measuring the ratio of black and white students and teachers, and the quality of the facilities available to all students.

School integration would peak in 1988. In the south, the percentage of black children in white schools, once at zero, rises to nearly 44 percent.

What was the Court's conclusion in Green v. County School Board?

https://www.oyez.org/cases/1967/695 Links to an external site.

1991: Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell

The case: Oklahoma City had been forced to integrate its schools under a federal desegregation plan in 1972, and a few years later, the court found that the city had complied with the plan. In 1984, the city attempted to reduce busing, but opponents tried to block the plan, arguing the city remained under the federal integration injunction. The court found that because a federal court had previously declared the city in compliance, it could be released from the order.

The fallout: The Oklahoma City school system returns to neighborhood schools. The case set a precedent to allow school districts to be released from desegregation orders if they could prove that they had successfully integrated their public schools.

According to the below link, that was the conclusion of the Court?

https://www.oyez.org/cases/1990/89-1080 Links to an external site.

2007: Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1

The case: The school districts of Seattle and Louisville had both voluntarily adopted plans to integrate schools based on race. In Seattle, children could apply to any high school, but once several schools filled up, the race was used as the first factor in determining where the overflow students would be placed. In Louisville, students were assigned to schools by race to meet certain percentages. The Supreme Court ruled that the plans were unconstitutional because they force students to attend certain schools based solely on their race even though a court hadn’t previously determined that the districts were segregated. The court also considered the racial classifications to be overly broad: Seattle categorized students only as “white” or “non-white,” and Louisville grouped students into “black,” “white” and “other.”

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the 5-4 opinion.

The fallout: The court didn’t strike down all integration plans based on race. But in tightening standards for such plans, the ruling clears the way for future challenges.

How did the Supreme Court rule on the following questions? (be very specific) 

1) Do the decisions in Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger apply to public high school students?

2) Is racial diversity a compelling interest that can justify the use of race in selecting students for admission to public high schools?

3) Does a school district that normally permits a student to attend the high school of her choice violate the Equal Protection Clause by denying the student admission to her chosen school because of her race in an effort to achieve a desired racial balance?

https://www.oyez.org/cases/2006/05-908 Links to an external site.

What Led to Desegregation Busing—And Did It Work?

After a 1954 ruling declared that segregated schools were unconstitutional, a decades-long effort to integrate them through busing was often met with violent protests.

Kids have been riding buses to get to school since the 1920s. But the practice became politically charged when desegregation busing, starting in the 1950s, attempted to integrate schools.

The 1954 U.S. Supreme Court landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas unanimously found racially segregated schools to be unconstitutional and in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

In that case, one plaintiff, Linda Brown, a third-grader, had been forced to walk six blocks to catch the bus to take her to a black school even though a white school was seven blocks from her front door. 

A few years later, desegregated busing began in some districts to take black and Latino students to white schools, and bring white students to schools made up of minority students. The controversial program was devised to create more diverse classrooms and close achievement and opportunity gaps.

Charlotte Busing Seen as a Success

In 1971, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education unanimously upheld busing. The decision effectively sped up school integration, which had been slow to take root.

After the ruling, school integration in Charlotte, North Carolina was lauded as a success, with schools across the country looking to the city as an example of how to implement desegregation. 

Research by Roslyn Mickelson, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, showed that between 1971 and 2002, the majority of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools students attended racially desegregated schools and achievement for all students improved.

“Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s proudest achievement of the past 20 years is not the city’s impressive new skyline or its strong, growing economy,” a 1984 editorial in The Charlotte Observer noted. “Its proudest achievement is its fully integrated schools.”

Protests Turn Violent in Boston

Court-ordered busing faced a tougher battle in Boston after U.S. District Judge W. Arthur Garrity ordered the city’s public schools to desegregate in June 1974. Protests in the New England city erupted and persisted for months, sometimes turning violent.

"More than 400 court orders would be required to carry out the busing plan over the next decade," the Boston Globe reported in 2014. "Thousands of students would flee the city schools. White enrollments would plummet. Education would continue to suffer. Many of those sent to distant schools dropped out and never graduated. Decades later, the violent start of busing would widely be seen as the worst moment in the city’s history."

Boston wasn’t the first city to experience a public busing backlash. Court-ordered busing efforts drew immediate protests across the country, beginning in New York in 1957, and fanning out to cities like Baltimore, Maryland, Pontiac, Michigan and in Louisville, Kentucky. 

Voluntary Busing Programs Peak in the 1980s

Busing programs became voluntary in many communities following the passage of the General Education Provisions Act of 1974, which prohibits federally appropriated funds for busing. Berkeley, California was among the cities that continued a voluntary busing program. The plan, which led future California Senator Kamala Harris—then a kindergartner—to attend a school outside her neighborhood in 1969, quickly changed the racial demographics of the city’s schools.

Voluntary busing programs continued into the 1970s and peaked in the early 1980s. The trend toward increased integration began to shift, however, in the 1990s, when a series of court rulings released school districts from court-ordered desegregation plans, deeming them no longer necessary.

Courts even began to tamp down on local, voluntary busing programs. A 2007 Supreme Court ruling in Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District #1, limited the ways in which districts can promote desegregation. 

Historians Mixed on Busing's Legacy

In his book, Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation, Matthew Delmont, a professor of history at Dartmouth College, writes that the hot-button issue of the busing crisis was not about busing but “about unconstitutional racial discrimination in the public schools. … Judges ordered ‘busing’ as a remedy in northern school districts such as Boston, Denver, Detroit, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Pontiac that were found guilty of intentional de jure segregation in violation of Brown v. Board and the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Black leaders were mixed in practice. Activist Jesse Jackson, NAACP officials and U.S. Rep. Shirley Chisholm were among those who supported busing efforts and policies. But many black nationalists argued that focus should instead be placed on strengthening schools in black communities.

A February 1981 Gallup Poll found 60 percent of blacks were in favor of busing, while 30 percent were opposed to it. Among white people surveyed, 17 percent favored busing, and 78 percent were against it.

“It ain’t the bus, it’s us,’’ Jackson told The New York Times in 1981. ‘’Busing is absolutely a code word for desegregation. The forces that have historically been in charge of segregation are now being asked to be in charge of desegregation.’”

Still, some scholars see desegregation busing as a success. A 2011 study by Rucker Johnson, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, found that school desegregation significantly increased educational and occupational achievements, college quality and adult earnings for black students. It also reduced the probability of incarceration and improved adult health status. Among white students, Johnson found desegregation had no measurable effect.

Despite the results, desegregation busing remained limited. In the end, Delmont writes, the court-ordered busing effort, which applied to fewer than 5 percent of the nation’s public school students, “failed to more fully desegregate public schools because school officials, politicians, courts and the news media valued the desires of parents more than the rights of black students.”

Today, many school districts across the country remain largely segregated. According to a 2019 report by the nonprofit, EdBuild, more than half of U.S. children attend schools in districts where the student population is either more than 75 percent white or more than 75 percent nonwhite.

Due process and the rights of the accused: lesson overview

Key terms

Term  Definition

Selective incorporation: The gradual process of applying amendments in the Bill of Rights to state and local governments; only some of the rights in the Bill of Rights have been selectively incorporated.

Due process clause: Provisions of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments that limit the power of the government to deny people “life, liberty, or property” without fully respecting their legal rights and the correct legal procedure.

Miranda rule: A requirement that law enforcement officers inform a person subject to an interrogation of their right not to incriminate themselves under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments; created after the decision in Miranda v. Arizona (1966).

Public safety exception: An exception to the Miranda rule; it allows the police to perform unwarned interrogation and have the findings to stand as direct evidence in court, provided the information relates to public safety.

Right to legal counsel: The right to have the assistance of a lawyer; protected under the Sixth Amendment.

Right to speedy and public trial: The right to speedy and public trial protects a defendant from having a long delay between being arrested and facing trial; protected under the Sixth Amendment.

Right to an impartial jury: The right to an impartial jury means that the defendant has the right to face a jury that is not likely to have an opinion about the case already formed; protected under the Sixth Amendment.

Exclusionary rule     A requirement that any evidence found during an illegal search or seizure cannot be used to try someone for a crime.

Gideon v. Wainwright (1963): A Supreme Court ruling that guaranteed the right to an attorney for the poor or indigent.

Key takeaways

If you’ve ever watched a movie or television police drama set in the United States, you’ve probably heard the words “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you . . .” This series of sentences is called the Miranda warning: when police officers place someone under arrest, they are required to inform them of their right to remain silent, protected under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments.

The Court has at times ruled in favor of states’ power to restrict individual liberty: Although the Miranda rule requires police officers to inform someone under arrest of their rights, there is an exception to this rule. The public safety exception allows officers to interrogate a suspect without informing them of their rights if there is an objective need to protect the police or the public from immediate danger. An example of the public safety exemption is when the police interrogate a suspect to determine the location of a bomb.

The due process clause limits state from infringing individual rights: The Supreme Court has interpreted the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to mean that states cannot violate individual rights. For those accused of a crime, states may not infringe an individual’s right to counsel, or their protection against warrantless searches. For example, the exclusionary rule stipulates that evidence illegally seized by law enforcement officers searching without a warrant cannot be used against that suspect in criminal prosecution.

Security and due process are in tension with each other: The due process clause protects the rights of the accused, but it also makes ensuring national security and public safety more difficult. There are ongoing debates about the extent to which the government can monitor private data and communications while still preserving the liberties of citizens against warrantless search and seizure.

Review questions

How does selective incorporation limit state infringements of the rights of the accused?

What is one Supreme Court case that incorporated a right for criminal defendants?

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