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Published: March 1, 2011

Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education (1969)



One of three U.S. Supreme Court decisions to speed the pace of desegregation and outlaw all efforts to evade it. In the decade following the Court’s landmark BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF TOPEKA decision in 1954, many school districts, counties and states attempted a variety of schemes to preserve racial segregation by conforming to the letter of the law, while disregarding its spirit.
To strengthen the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Congress passed the all-encompassing CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964, followed by a series of education acts in 1965 to expand federal expenditures to education in desegregated school districts and, thereby, to encourage compliance. Nevertheless, resistance to desegregation continued, and in a series of three major decisions in 1968 and 1969, the Supreme Court crushed that resistance. Alexander v. Holmes was the second of these.
The first was GREEN V. COUNTY SCHOOL BOARD OF NEW KENT COUNTY in 1968, which outlawed a freedom-of-choice plan that allowed whites not to attend schools with black students and enroll in a body at a white school and leave no seats for blacks to fill. The Court held that the school board had “the affirmative duty to take whatever steps might be necessary to convert to a unitary system in which racial discrimination would be eliminated root and branch.” The Court also defined what constituted a segregated and desegregated school, saying that any school with 85% or more of the students of a single race was in violation of the law. It ordered school boards to “convert promptly to a system without a ‘white’ school and a ‘Negro’ school, but just schools.”
In 1969, after some districts were failing to comply, the Supreme Court responded angrily in Alexander v. Holmes. It defined “promptly” by ordering every school district in the South and, indeed, the United States, “to terminate dual school systems at once and to operate new and hereafter only unitary schools.” In United States v. Montgomery County Board of Education later that year, the Court established racial ratios for teachers, while reaffirming its earlier student ratios. By then, noncompliance was proving costly—not just in time and money, but in the loss of federal subsidies to education. Federal spending on education had climbed from $4.5 billion in 1966 to $8.8 billion in 1970 and would continue climbing to nearly $20 billion over the next decade. Rather than risk losing its share of such funds, the South capitulated. By 1972, more than 90% of all southern black pupils attended biracial schools, compared to only 76.4% in border states and 89.1% in the North and West.
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