Opinion ID: 2977993
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The History of Desegregation in Shelby County

Text: The majority opinion does not recount the history of this lengthy and complicated case. Because I believe that we must consider the entire record to evaluate properly the district court’s judgment, I set forth the most important facts of the case below.
The years between 1963 and 1971 were by far the most active in the case’s history. This period was marked by the County’s early intransigence in adopting appropriate measures to de-segregate its schools, the intervention of the Department of Justice (the “Government”) to pressure the County to take its desegregation obligations seriously, and ultimately, in 1971, the district court’s approval (following a reversal and remand by this Court) of a comprehensive plan to eliminate the racial identifiability of all the County’s schools. On June 12, 1963, nine years after Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) was decided, twenty-one public-school students brought this class action against the Shelby County Board of Education (the “Board”) seeking a declaratory injunction that the public schools were unconstitutionally segregated and an injunction requiring the Board to integrate them. (Joint Appendix (“JA”) 156.) In response to the Plaintiffs’ complaint, the Board denied any wrongdoing, but nonetheless submitted a plan to the district court, which approved it on March 17, 1964. (JA 156-160.) This first effort amounted to no more than a “freedom-of-choice” plan, and it barely qualified as that. “Freedom-of-choice” plans purported to put an end to segregated schools by permitting African-American students voluntarily to choose to attend the all-white schools from which they had long been excluded. The Board’s plan, however, erected numerous obstacles to exercising free choice. It conditioned the transfer of African-American students into white schools on a showing of good behavior, acceptable academic performance, sufficient family income, and psychological stability. (JA 158.) Nos. 07-6076/6363 Robinson, et al. v. Shelby County Bd. of Educ. Page 21 In 1966, two years after the district court approved the Board’s freedom-ofchoice plan, the Government intervened in the case. (JA 160.) In response to a Government motion criticizing the Board for lack of progress in desegregating its schools, the district court entered an order making minor modifications to the decree, but these changes still did not promise to make the mandate of Brown a reality. (JA 162-63.) By 1967, four years after the Plaintiffs filed suit, and thirteen years after Brown, 100 percent of white students attended the formerly all-white schools and 98.7 percent of African-American students attended the formerly all-black schools. (JA 165.) On January 19, 1967, in response to another Government motion contending that the Board was shirking its desegregation obligations, the district court again modified the decree. (JA 284.) The district court tinkered with the plan to make it slightly easier for African-American students to transfer to the formerly all-white schools, but the anemic “freedom-of-choice” approach still ruled the day. Although continuing to fall short in terms of desegregating the student bodies of the Shelby County Schools, the district court’s January 19, 1967 order was notable because for the first time it spelled out precise benchmarks for desegregating the County’s faculties. (JA 284.) The court held that a faculty would be regarded as desegregated when its racial composition reflected the County-wide composition within a deviation of ten percentage points. (JA 286.) To that end, the court ordered the Board to fill all faculty vacancies with teachers whose race was under-represented in the school at issue. (JA 286.) In addition, the district court ordered the Board to implement a program to recruit white teachers to work in schools whose faculties were predominantly African-American and African-American teachers to work in schools with predominantly white faculties. (JA 287.) To measure the Board’s compliance with these requirements, the district court ordered it to file certain reports on a regular basis. First, before filling a faculty vacancy with a teacher of the over-represented race, the Board was required to notify the Court of its intention to do so, as well as explain its efforts to transfer or hire a teacher of the under-represented race and why those efforts failed. (JA 288-89.) In its July 26, 2007 order declining to dissolve the desegregation decree, the district court found that Nos. 07-6076/6363 Robinson, et al. v. Shelby County Bd. of Educ. Page 22 throughout this litigation, the Board has never once filed this report before transferring/hiring a teacher of the over-represented race to fill a vacancy.1 Second, the Board was instructed to submit, on August 1 of each year, a report providing data on the racial make-up of the faculty in each school, as well as the number of vacancies that were filled by faculty of the over-represented race. (JA 289.) The August 1 report was to be supplemented on October 1 of each year. (JA 289.) On August 1, 1967, the Board submitted its first annual report on teacher desegregation. This report showed that the Board employed 1500 teachers. Pursuant to the district court’s order that the Board re-assign teachers of the opposite race “in all cases in which the transfer can be accomplished without seriously impairing the educational program,” (JA 287), the Board reported that it had re-assigned just 128 teachers, or 8.5 percent of the total number. The Board’s October supplement showed that of the 200 vacancies filled for the upcoming school year, only twelve of these were filled by teachers of the under-represented race. On May 27, 1968, the Supreme Court decided Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, 391 U.S. 430 (1968). There, the Court held that “freedom-of-choice” plans were generally inadequate to satisfy the mandate of Brown. Leaving no doubt about the gravity of the responsibility facing local school boards, the Green Court stated, “The burden on a school board today is to come forward with a plan that promises realistically to work, and promises realistically to work now.” Id. at 439. School boards were instructed to take whatever remedial steps were required to eliminate racial discrimination “root and branch.” Id. at 438. The district court issued another order on July 17, 1968, clarifying the Board’s desegregation responsibilities in light of Green. (JA 171.) As to faculty desegregation, the court reiterated that the ratio of African-American to white teachers in each school was to reflect the County-wide ratio within a margin of ten percentage points. The court held that this ratio had to be satisfied in the County’s elementary schools (defined as 1 The Board does not dispute this finding. Nos. 07-6076/6363 Robinson, et al. v. Shelby County Bd. of Educ. Page 23 grades one through six) by the start of the 1968-69 school year and that it was to be met in the remainder of the County’s schools by the start of the 1969-70 school year. (JA 172.) The court further ordered the Board to prepare a new desegregation plan designed to accomplish these goals and otherwise eliminate the racial identifiability of the County’s schools. (JA 172.) On August 15, 1968, the district court provided additional guidance about the preparation of the Board’s new desegregation plan. (JA 173.) For the first time, the district court set a benchmark for desegregating the County’s student bodies. The court ruled that insofar as feasible, the Board should assign students so that the ratio of African-American to white students in each school reflected the County-wide ratio, within a margin of ten percentage points. (JA 173.) The Board submitted its post-Green plan for the district court’s review on January 15, 1969. This plan did not come anywhere close to achieving the student racial balance that the district court had ordered. (JA 175.) The Board admitted that its plan did not require the desegregation of high school students, but instead permitted them to remain in the high schools that they were already attending. (JA 175.) As to faculty desegregation, the Board sought relief from the obligation of achieving any particular racial ratio among high school teachers, let alone that specified by the district court (a black-to-white ratio in each school that reflected the ratio in the County as a whole, plus or minus ten percentage points). (JA 174.) The Board argued that the work of desegregating high school faculties was made more difficult by the fact that these teachers were licensed in particular subject areas. The Plaintiffs and the Government opposed the Board’s post-Green plan as inadequate. (JA 175-78.) The district court nonetheless approved it. On April 6, 1970, the district court approved certain modifications to the Board’s desegregation plan. See Robinson v. Shelby County Bd. of Educ., 311 F. Supp. 97, 10405 (W.D. Tenn. 1970). Importantly, the court backed away from its earlier insistence that the County achieve a student racial composition within each school that reflected the County racial composition within ten percentage points. Rather, the court held that Nos. 07-6076/6363 Robinson, et al. v. Shelby County Bd. of Educ. Page 24 the Board was not required to achieve any particular degree of racial balance among its students and that the most that could be asked was for the Board to “honestly draw[] unitary geographical zone lines, that is, zones not gerrymandered to preserve segregation . . . .” Id. at 102. The court stood by its prior pronouncements with respect to faculty desegregation but added the caveat that efforts to de-segregate high school teachers should be tempered by considerations of their qualifications. The court stated, “to the extent feasible, in the light of the qualifications of the teachers and the need for teachers of particular qualifications in the [secondary] school, such teachers will be assigned and transferred so that the ratio of white to Negro teachers in each school will be, within a tolerance of 10%, the same as in the system as a whole.” Id. at 105. On appeal of the district court’s April 6, 1970 order, this Court remanded the case for further consideration of the County’s desegregation obligations. See Robinson v. Shelby County Bd. of Education, 442 F.2d 255, 258 (6th Cir. 1971). This Court held that the district court had misapprehended the extent of the County’s affirmative duty to undo the effects of its past discriminatory conduct. Id. at 258 (“Where there has been a history of state-imposed segregation of the schools, it is not sufficient to adopt a plan which, out of context, might be seen as nondiscriminatory but which does not do as much to disestablish segregation as an alternative proposal which is feasible and pedagogically sound.”). In response, the district court approved a revised desegregation plan in August 1971. See Robinson v. Shelby County Bd. of Educ., 330 F. Supp. 837, 843-47 (W.D. Tenn. 1971), aff’d 467 F.2d 1187 (6th Cir. 1972). This plan was largely that advanced by the Board, but the district court also accepted certain suggestions from the Title IV Center at the University of Tennessee, as well as the Government. Id. at 843. This latest effort apparently dealt exclusively with student desegregation. Id. Nos. 07-6076/6363 Robinson, et al. v. Shelby County Bd. of Educ. Page 25
The Board’s 1971 desegregation plan approved by the district court marked the last substantial revision to the Board’s desegregation efforts in the history of this case. It was also virtually the last time that either the Plaintiffs or the Government challenged any of the Board’s decisions as contrary to its desegregation obligations, or argued that the Board was not complying with the plan’s requirements. Perhaps due in large part to the lack of adversarial litigation, the record is rather thin on evidence showing what progress, if any, the Board made toward dismantling the vestiges of unlawful discrimination in its schools. It appears that neither the Plaintiffs, the Government, nor the district court required much in the way of statistical data tracking the racial composition of the County’s students and faculty over time. To begin with, very little can be gleaned from the record about what was happening with student desegregation. There is almost no evidence documenting the racial composition of each school from year to year (and comparing that to the Countywide ratio), the indicators the Board used, if any, to gauge its progress, the obstacles the Board confronted, or how it made decisions in operating the County’s schools to ensure its full compliance with the desegregation decree. The definition of “success” and the Board’s path to arrive there are not clear. For instance, between August 20, 1974 and August 3, 2004, the district court entered more than fifty consent orders modifying the decree as to such things as school-attendance zones and new-school construction. (JA 192-234.) It appears that the Board rarely provided information about the impact these modifications would have on the student racial composition of each of the schools. The record suggests that the Board often did no more than conclusorily state that the changes were not expected to have any deleterious effects on the desegregation plan. (See, e.g., JA 219-26.) Moreover, Plaintiffs rarely interposed any objections to the Board’s plans and the same was true of the Government. On one of the few occasions that serious opposition to the Board’s plans was lodged, the district court found that the Board had allowed improper considerations to trump its desegregation duties. The dispute centered on the Nos. 07-6076/6363 Robinson, et al. v. Shelby County Bd. of Educ. Page 26 Board’s desire in 1985 to add ten new classrooms to an overwhelmingly white elementary school to alleviate over-crowding. (JA 203.) The Government opposed the construction project (it does not appear that the Plaintiffs joined the Government), claiming that the Board impermissibly wanted to avoid utilizing the excess capacity of nearby elementary schools with significant African-American populations. (JA 203-04.) On April 8, 1986, the district court denied the Board’s petition to build the extra classrooms. (JA 209.) The court agreed with the Government that the Board had failed to give due consideration to its desegregation obligations, and that it had elevated “community pride” (meaning the community pride of the white elementary school students and parents) in preserving present enrollment at the over-crowded elementary school over its duty to eliminate unlawful discrimination. (JA 209-10.) The record regarding faculty desegregation between 1971 and 2006 is only slightly more robust. After the Board’s initial report on August 1, 1967, the record is silent about the Board’s efforts to re-assign teachers. As noted above, the Board reported that it had re-assigned 8.5 percent of its teachers, effective during the 1967-68 school year. The record does not disclose whether the Board undertook any more reassignment efforts after 1967. Certainly, the Board does not state in its briefing to this Court that it did so, nor does it point to any evidence of such. Thus, it appears that in response to the district court’s January 19, 1967 order, the Board had done all the faculty re-assigning it intended to do by August 1, 1967. With respect to teacher transfers to fill vacancies, the district court had instructed the Board to file annual reports showing the number of openings filled by teachers of the over-represented and under-represented race. Between 1974 and 1979, the Board’s reports show that half the time, a majority of vacancies were not filled by teachers of the under-represented race (as ordered by the district court). (JA 133; 194-95; 198-201.) It appears that the Board stopped reporting this statistic altogether by 1981. Neither the Plaintiffs, the Government, nor the district court seems to have taken issue with the Board’s abandonment of this requirement. In addition, although the Board was supposed to notify the court before filling a vacancy with a teacher of the over-represented race Nos. 07-6076/6363 Robinson, et al. v. Shelby County Bd. of Educ. Page 27 and justify its inability to employ an opposite-race teacher, the record is bereft of any evidence that the Board ever did so, and the Board does not dispute that it did not. Besides the Board’s lackluster track record as to faculty re-assignment and vacancies, the record discloses another deeply disturbing trend. Between 1974 and 2006, the total percentage of African-American faculty at the County’s schools declined markedly. The Board’s 1974 annual report showed that thirty-three percent of the County’s faculty were African-American, which correlates closely to the fact that around this same period, thirty percent of the County’s students were African-American. In 2006, only fifteen percent of the County’s faculty were African-American, even though around this same period, a significantly higher percentage, thirty-four percent, of the County’s students were African-American. In August 1989, the district court was so disturbed by the decline in the Board’s employment of African-American teachers that it asked the parties to address the question of whether the Board’s reports “for the reporting period of August 1, 1985, to August 1, 1989, indicate an employment practice or policy within the Shelby County Schools which achieves a gradual but definite decline in the number of black teachers employed by the school system.” (JA 214.) The Board responded that the problem was attributable to fewer African-American people becoming teachers. (JA 214.) The Government had a different position, noting that between 1972 and 1989, the number of white teachers had more than doubled, but the number of African-American teachers had remained virtually the same, that the Board had “recruited almost 10 times as many white applicants as black applicants,” and that its offer rate for white candidates was much higher than for African-American candidates. (JA 215.) The Government also cited statistics showing that the Memphis City Schools (located within Shelby County, but not part of the Shelby County school system) did a much better job of recruiting African-American applicants, even though the starting salary for teachers in Memphis was slightly less than that offered by the Board. (JA 215-16.) The Government also argued that the Board was much less proactive than it could have been in its outreach to colleges and universities, particularly to historically African-American colleges. (JA Nos. 07-6076/6363 Robinson, et al. v. Shelby County Bd. of Educ. Page 28 216.) On July 3, 1990, the district court ordered the Board to submit supplemental annual reports regarding its minority recruiting practices. (JA 218.) The Board filed regular supplemental reports on minority recruiting between 1990 and 2006. These reports both confirm that the Board expanded its outreach to colleges and universities, including historically African-American colleges, and provide data on the offer rates for African-American and white candidates. In the early years, offer rates for African-American candidates sometimes exceeded those for white candidates; but by 1997, offers to white candidates always outpaced offers to AfricanAmerican candidates, sometimes significantly. See, e.g., JA 228 (October 1999 report showing that twenty-six percent of African-American applicants interviewed through the central office were given offers, compared to fifty-one percent of white applicants). Thus, the extent of the Board’s compliance with the desegregation decree between 1971 and 2006 is difficult to assess. During that time, the Plaintiffs never challenged any of the Board’s decisions. Similarly, the Board did not apprise the court (and the court apparently did not inquire) of any factors that impeded its progress desegregating as much as practicable or any steps it took to alleviate those impediments. The Board did not even bother to submit the required reports on faculty desegregation. Whether the racial disparities that continue to mark the Shelby County Schools are due to reasons wholly unrelated to the ongoing effects of unlawful discrimination, as the majority contends, or whether the Board could and should have done more to attain its desegregation objectives, are not answered by the record as it existed at the time the parties moved for dissolution of the decree. Moreover, as described below, the parties did not fill this evidentiary gap at the two hearings conducted by the district court to consider their motion. 3. The Joint Motion to Dissolve the Desegregation Decree On August 14, 2006, the Plaintiffs and the Board jointly moved for an order dissolving the desegregation decree and declaring the public schools “unitary.” The parties asserted that they had fully complied with the decree and that they had met the standards articulated by the Supreme Court for eliminating the effects of past de jure Nos. 07-6076/6363 Robinson, et al. v. Shelby County Bd. of Educ. Page 29 segregation. Despite the joint nature of the application, the district court recognized that it “ha[d] an obligation to independently evaluate these factors and the evidence to assure that the system as it exist[s] now is truly unitary and color blind.” (JA 1187.) The court therefore held evidentiary hearings on January 26, 2007 and July 23, 2007. The two hearings consisted largely of anecdotal testimony by school officials and parents. For example, Superintendent Bobby G. Webb testified that his staff worked diligently to adjust school attendance zones to make sure that the County has “good community-based schools and have them as diverse as we possibly can.” (JA 1204.) He stated, “I can tell you without a doubt that—that all of the staff that I have to work with . . . certainly love and respect every child regardless of their color, background or whatever . . . .” (JA 1205.) When asked by the district court what evidence it should consider in determining whether the Board’s efforts to promote color blindness will continue in the absence of court monitoring, Webb responded: “I personally can assure you that as long as I’m superintendent there will be no discrimination in any shape, form, or fashion.” (JA 1230.) Assistant Superintendent of Planning and Student Service Maura Sullivan testified that she had worked closely with Plaintiffs’ counsel over the years to adjust attendance zones based on enrollment projections and assess the impact of the adjustments on school demographics. (JA 1239-40.) Assistant Superintendent Lois Williams described the County’s efforts to recruit minority teachers. She identified the biggest barrier to minority-teacher recruitment as the shrinking teaching pool overall and the shortage among minority candidates in particular. (JA 1315.) The Board’s goal, according to Williams, is for fourteen percent of the teachers in each of the County’s schools to be minorities. (JA 1302.) During the July 23, 2007 hearing, the Plaintiffs and the Board called two parents to testify. The first, Ricky Jeans, had himself been a student in the Shelby County Schools in the late 1960s and had been one of the first African-American students to attend a formerly all-white school. (JA 1378-79.) Jeans testified in favor of dissolving the desegregation decree, stating, “I think that it’s time that we—we look backwards and Nos. 07-6076/6363 Robinson, et al. v. Shelby County Bd. of Educ. Page 30 see where we started at and look at the improvement of the system and what has gone on down through the years and support maybe dropping the system from this point on, but I am a big advocate of the Shelby County school system.” (JA 1379.) The second, Brenda Gipson, testified that the Shelby County Schools had become more diverse both in their student bodies and faculties since she had been involved with them through her children. Gipson testified that school administrators are “for an environment of inclusiveness—inclusiveness, they go out of their way to make sure that everyone feels important in the school system.” (JA 1387.) Finally, Gipson testified that some schools in the County have a largely African-American student body but that “obviously most of the ones in my area are predominantly white.” (JA 1388.) The evidence presented at the two hearings was thus largely anecdotal and based on the personal views of the interested parties and two parents. Neither the Board nor Plaintiffs put any school-desegregation experts on the stand to testify about the Board’s performance since the desegregation decree was imposed. Neither party put any witnesses on the stand to opine that the Board had achieved desegregation to the extent feasible or that it had availed itself of all opportunities to desegregate. Finally, there was no expert testimony about demographic changes in the County or about how such changes should be interpreted in light of the fact that the Board had formerly practiced de jure segregation.