School Desegregation and the Swann Case

Author(s):  
Richard A. Rosen ◽  
Joseph Mosnier

This chapter examines Chambers's and his firm's immense contributions to the legal campaign to end school desegregation in the U.S. Chambers filed federal lawsuits against scores of recalcitrant school districts across North Carolina. His most significant victory was the landmark Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971, hailed as the most significant schools ruling since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Litigating Swann at trial, Chambers convinced federal District Court Judge James B. McMillan to authorize the busing and other remedies to overcome a system of racially dual schools. Later, still just 34-years old, Chambers argued the case for the Legal Defense Fund at the U.S. Supreme Court. Chief Justice Warren Burger's unanimous opinion appeared an unqualified endorsement by the High Court of the use of aggressive remedies finally to defeat school desegregation. By the mid-1970s Charlotte had come to serve as a national model of successful transition to desegregated schools.

2021 ◽  
pp. 191-206
Author(s):  
Michael J. Rosenfeld

Chapter 14 tells the story of how Jim Obergefell, whose husband John Arthur was dying, sued the state of Ohio to try to force the state to list Obergefell as the husband on Arthur’s death certificate. Ohio was one of many states whose constitution explicitly rejected recognition of same-sex marriages, wherever they were originally celebrated. Obergefell won in federal district court, but the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals consolidated his case with DeBoer v. Snyder from Michigan and cases from two other states, and overturned them all. The plaintiffs appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision of 2015 made marriage equality the law of the U.S. After the Obergefell victory, April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse were legally married in Michigan and then cross-adopted their children.


2019 ◽  
Vol 100 (5) ◽  
pp. 14-18
Author(s):  
Jeremy Anderson ◽  
Erica Frankenberg

Sixty-five years after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, the federal and judicial role in school desegregation has declined. In a more difficult political and legal environment, it has fallen on school districts to develop and implement voluntary integration plans through diversity-minded student assignment policies. In this article, Jeremy Anderson and Erika Frankenberg discuss how many and what types of voluntary integration policies currently exist in the U.S. and assess how effective they are at reducing racial and socioeconomic segregation.


2016 ◽  
Vol 118 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Mark A. Gooden ◽  
Terrance L. Green

Nathaniel Jones was born May 12, 1926, in Youngstown, Ohio, and served as the general counsel for the NAACP from 1969–1979. During that time, he litigated the Milliken v. Bradley I case before the U.S. District Court in 1971 and the U.S. Supreme Court in 1974. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter nominated Nathaniel Jones to the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, and at 87 years of age, he still serves as a retired senior judge for the court. Our conversation with the Honorable Judge Nathaniel Jones entails his reflections about Milliken 40 years later, origins of his involvement in the case, and suggestions for school desegregation advocates in the 21st century. To begin, we briefly describe Milliken and how the conversation with Judge Jones came about. We organized our conversation around topical areas about the case, which reflect our interview questions. Our discussion with Judge Jones occurred on March 22, 2014, in Cincinnati, Ohio. This conversation concludes with Nathaniel Jones discussing what Detroit and other urban schools districts could potentially be like if Milliken would have been upheld by the Supreme Court.


Author(s):  
David G. García

This chapter explores the evolution of the White architects' four strategies of segregation from 1939, when they sought voter approval to construct a school east of the railroad tracks, through 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racially segregated schools were inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional. During this time, the school trustees constructed new schools that maximized the race, class, and east–west geographic divisions in the city and sought to normalize the undereducation of Mexican American children. By 1954—the same year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case—the trustees had strategically positioned nine of the district's eleven schools west of Oxnard Boulevard and the railroad tracks in neighborhoods kept predominately White through racial covenants.


Author(s):  
Whitney Borup

Plessy vs. Ferguson is a legal decision made by the United States Supreme Court upholding the constitutionality of ‘separate but equal’ laws popular in the post-Civil War South. In June 1892 Homer Plessy, a man with one-eighth African blood, was arrested for violating Louisiana’s ‘equal but separate’ clause when he sat in a railway car designated for white passengers. Louisiana district court judge, Justice John Howard Ferguson, upheld the arrest, claiming a state had the legal power to regulate railroads operating within its borders.


Author(s):  
Bruce J. Dierenfield ◽  
David A. Gerber

This chapter examines and analyzes the five-year journey of Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School District (1993) from the federal district court in Tucson to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to the U.S. Supreme Court. William Bentley Ball, the Zobrests’ attorney, and John Richardson, the school district’s attorney, clashed over whether the Establishment Clause permitted any government aid to a Catholic school. Many religious and civil libertarian groups—but just one national deaf association—filed arguments to sway the court. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who wrote the majority decision favoring the Zobrests, misunderstood the complicated function of a sign language interpreter to permit what he regarded as incidental parochial school aid. Rehnquist maintained the aid was permissible because the plaintiffs and their deaf son were its main beneficiaries.


2018 ◽  
Vol 112 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-117

On December 4, 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court permitted the most recent version of President Trump's executive action restricting the entry of nationals from certain countries to take effect. The decision stayed nationwide injunctions granted by two federal district courts on constitutional and statutory grounds. This version of Trump's “travel ban,” (EO-3), issued on September 24, 2017, restricts the entry of nationals from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen—all of whom had been restricted under previous orders—as well as North Korea, Venezuela, and Chad. While litigation continues in the Courts of Appeals for the Fourth and Ninth Circuits, the Trump administration fully implemented EO-3 by December 8.


Author(s):  
Gwyneth Mellinger

This chapter opens the ASNE story in the mid-1950s, when ASNE members began registering the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation ruling and the specter of more sweeping civil rights reforms. During the 1950s, the ASNE leadership was dominated by Southern editors and much of the organization's tension over civil rights was inflected with regionalism. Key moments in the decade examined by this chapter include the ASNE board's initial resistance to integrating the organization and the membership's discourteous reception of prominent civil rights leaders—the first African Americans invited to address the ASNE—at the 1964 convention.


Author(s):  
Sarah K. Fields

This chapter explores the Don Newcombe's lawsuit against Coors Brewing Company Newcombe played in the Negro baseball leagues until 1949, when the Brooklyn Dodgers signed him after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947. He had a stellar career, winning the Most Valuable Player award, the Cy Young Award, and the Rookie of the Year award. However, his career in Major League Baseball was cut short in 1960, in part because of a continuing battle with alcohol. Eventually, Newcombe acknowledged his problem, and, as a recovering alcoholic, he served as a spokesman for the National Institute on Drug and Alcohol Abuse. As an anti-alcohol advocate, Newcombe was shocked when he discovered an advertisement for Killian's Irish Red Beer (a brand produced by Coors Brewing) that featured a drawing of an old-time baseball game in which the pitcher was a recognizable version of Newcombe. He sued Coors for a violation of his right of publicity but lost in the federal district court. Despite that decision, the Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals agreed with Newcombe and overturned the lower court, establishing that celebrity athletes had the right to choose how their image was used in advertising and allowing them to disassociate themselves from products they found distasteful.


Author(s):  
Timothy R. Johnson

This article discusses courtroom proceedings in U.S. federal courts. It begins by examining how federal district courts conduct trials. To make clear how these proceedings run it compares what really happens in most trials compared to how Hollywood portrays trials. In addition, it considers several key rights associated with trial proceedings. From there, it considers how federal circuit courts conduct business in open court. A key aspect of this section is how circuit proceedings differ across the country because each circuit has different rules governing arguments. Finally, it assesses the oral arguments in the U.S. Supreme Court as well as how these proceedings may affect the decisions justices make. In each section it provides a descriptive overview of the processes and then discusses current research and direction for future analyses.


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