Court Opinion

ID: 9475297
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:23:14.659974+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:44:38.207548
License: Public Domain

PATRICK E. HIGGINBOTHAM, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part:
I join the panel majority in affirming the district court’s conclusion that the Lawrence County School District has not been declared technically “unitary.” The District thus remains under an affirmative duty to continue taking what steps are necessary to extirpate the lingering effects of past de jure segregation. But I do not agree that the United States District Judge who tried this case abused his discretion by refusing to order wholesale modifications of the District’s attendance plan, a plan imposed by this court and in place for nearly sixteen years. Nor do I agree that the district judge committed reversible error in postponing consideration of the teacher assignment issue or in finding that the Lawrence County school buses have been desegregated.
I
The majority’s opinion paints a picture of Lawrence County and its schools that conjures images of a truly dual system that has not existed in Lawrence County for over sixteen years. Even apart from the discrepancy between this picture and the view of the district judge, who has first hand knowledge of local conditions, the majority’s presentation is not supported by the paper record on which it purports to rely. The majority seems unable to accept the record as reflecting anything other than an era that no longer exists in Lawrence County, Mississippi; it looks past the clear proof of Lawrence County’s progress towards eliminating the tenacious vestiges of de jure segregation.
Until today, every judge who has considered this case has acknowledged, either *1053expressly or implicitly, the significance of residential patterns and the Pearl River as obstacles to the “perfect” racial balancing of the schools. Those obstacles have not been shown to be the fault of these defendants, and neither the defendants nor the federal courts are required to impose on the students of the county, black and white, the dislocations that would be required to make every school reflect the racial composition of the District as a whole. These circumstances were taken into account in the original attendance plan adopted by this court, see United States v. Hinds County School Board, 433 F.2d 611 (5th Cir.1970), and later events simply do not indicate any major or unexplainable departures from that plan.1 Certainly the majority does not show that the district court responded inadequately to'any of the departures. This can be seen by examining a more complete statistical account of the changes in the schools than is provided in the majority’s table.2
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*1054As this table shows, the mix of pupils has been remarkably stable over the past decade and a half. Significantly increased concentrations of black students have occurred at only two schools. Monticello Elementary and Beulah Williams, and this at a time when the percentage of black students in the District as a whole has increased. More important, perhaps, both of these facilities are elementary schools serving only the youngest children. These are the children for whom a neighborhood school has the greatest advantages, and whom we should be most reluctant to send on long bus rides every day. At Monticello Elementary, the percentage of black pupils has increased, but the result has been a school with a 56/44 racial ratio that even the majority does not contend is “racially identifiable.” Although Beulah Williams has become 71% black, that school obviously took over some of the load that had been carried by nearby Silver Creek School before it was closed — and this court adopted the plan under which Silver Creek was 66% black.3 In sum, these statistics simply do not suggest, let alone prove, that the defendants have been guilty of backsliding or of seeking to undermine the original attendance plan.
In arriving at the conclusion that 43% of Lawrence County’s students, and over half of its elementary pupils, attend “racially identifiable” schools, the majority overlooks the close correspondence between the current student mix and the mix that we approved sixteen years ago. The majority also insists on minimizing the isolated location of Topeka-Tilton in a predominantly white area, and on characterizing New He-bron as a “white” school even though its student body is fully 35% black. Finally, the majority finds that McCullough is “racially identifiable” as a “predominantly black” school when 48% of its students are white — an observation that sorely taxes the meaning of the words. In any event, this court has firmly rejected the artificial statistical approach to racial identifiability that the majority insists on using as the very linchpin of its decision. See Price v. Denison Independent School District, 694 F.2d 334 (5th Cir.1982).
Just as the statistics point toward a conclusion opposed to the one the majority embraces, so too does the evidence we have about race relations within the schools. The record contains summaries of participation in extracurricular activities, along with the 1985 yearbooks of Topeka-Tilton and New Hebron (both “white” schools according to the majority) and a 1985 yearbook covering Monticello High, Monticello Elementary, and McCullough. At both of the supposedly “white” schools, extracurricular activities (where, because of the students’ freedom, significant race prejudice would be most likely to transpire) are apparently well integrated. Not only are black athletes rather obviously not excluded from participation, but organizations such as Future Farmers of America and Future Homemakers of America are integrated. Perhaps most significantly, the results of various student popularity contests fail to reflect any fundamental divisiveness. For example, blacks are well represented among the homecoming “celebrities” at both schools, and a number of extracurricular organizations have black officers; indeed, Topeka-Tilton (where 90% of the students are white) elected at least one black class president and one black vice-president. The other yearbook, which covers schools in which the races are more evenly balanced, shows the same pattern, only more clearly. The candid photographs common to public school yearbooks show children and young people black and white at play — at football games, dances and parties. Not only is there no suggestion in this record of any racial incidents over the decade and a half that the district has been under federal judicial supervision, there is no finding of discrimination in services or *1055disparate educational achievement; nor is there evidence that any deficiencies in the educational programs have any relevance to race, much less that they are a vestige of a de jure system. These facts are more informative than the equivocal statistics cited by the majority and are certainly important if we mean what we say when we deny that we are wedded to racial ratios.
Conceptual difficulties aside, even the in-tervenors’ own expert consultant did not seek to portray the Lawrence County schools in the bleak tones of the majority’s opinion. The consultant, Michael Stolee, submitted a report suggesting six different attendance plans for the schools. Although the plans vary in a number of particulars, the common element is that they would all close Beulah Williams, which suggests that that school’s 71% black majority is the intervenors’ core concern.4 The Sto-lee report, in any event, did not claim that Beulah Williams would have to be closed in order to achieve desegregation, and the author makes it quite clear that he prefers larger schools because they make possible more extensive curricular choices and extracurricular activities. Whatever the merits of Stolee’s educational theories, the federal courts are not charged with balancing the educational advantages and disadvantages of large versus small schools. On the other hand, whatever omissions or defects are present in the Stolee report, it at least manifests a recognition that federal courts are not obliged or permitted to ignore the educational welfare of the Lawrence County students in the pursuit of some mathematically perfect racial balancing act.
II
Throughout the long and difficult journey of the federal courts from Brown to this latest case, we have emphasized the critical role of the trial judge. The local federal district judge, who is on the scene and often drawn from the community, is incomparably better equipped than we are to consider the nuances and peculiarities of each district and to exercise genuine judgment in reading demographic tabulations. This court has always displayed a considerable and appropriate deference to district judges who took bold, even very unsettling, steps to uproot the old dual school systems of the past. That same deference should be accorded to a district judge who concludes, with an abundance of record support, that desegregation can proceed without further massive judicial intervention. Indeed, one would think such deference particularly appropriate when the district judge declines to undertake radical modifications of a plan imposed by this court. With all deference, I find in the panel opinion more rhetoric and speculation than factual argumentation. I cannot agree that there was an abuse of discretion in the district court’s refusal to order further de-segregative steps that the majority itself has not been able to specify.
A
The majority’s decision is contrary to the approach of the Supreme Court, as illustrated in the following passages:
The duty of both the District Court and the Court of Appeals in a case such as this, where mandatory segregation by law of the races has long since ceased, is to first determine whether there was any action in the conduct of the business of the School Board which was intended to, and did in fact, discriminate against minority pupils, teachers, or staff____ If such violations are found, the [courts] must determine how much incremental segregative effect these violations had on the racial distribution of the ... school population as presently constituted, when that distribution is compared to what it would have been in the absence of such constitutional violations. The remedy must be designed to redress that difference, and only if there has been a *1056systemwide impact may there be a sys-temwide remedy.
Dayton Board of Education v. Brinkman, 433 U.S. 406, 420, 97 S.Ct. 2766, 2775, 53 L.Ed.2d 851 (1977) (citations omitted).
[H]aving once implemented a racially neutral attendance pattern in order to remedy the perceived constitutional violations on the part of the defendants, the District Court had fully performed its function of providing the appropriate remedy for previous racially discriminatory attendance patterns.
Pasadena City Board of Education v. Spangler, 427 U.S. 424, 436-37, 96 S.Ct. 2697, 2704-05, 49 L.Ed.2d 599 (1976).
There is need to keep in mind steadily the limits of inquiry proper to the case before us. We are not framing a decree. We are asking ourselves whether anything has happened that will justify us now in changing a decree. The injunction, whether right or wrong, is not subject to impeachment in its application to the conditions that existed at its making. We are not at liberty to reverse under the guise of readjusting____ Nothing less than a clear showing of grievous wrong evoked by new and unforeseen conditions should lead us to change what was decreed____
United States v. Swift & Co., 286 U.S. 106, 119, 52 S.Ct. 460, 464, 76 L.Ed. 999 (1932).
Brinkman, Spangler, and Swift apply basic and related principles controlling the federal courts in the administration of equitable remedial power. The common thread in these cases is the requirement that a decree must always be tailored to the wrong at issue. Because of the intrusive character of the federal superintending injunction, this general principle of equity is reinforced by concerns based on federalism.
By its forward cast, an injunction contemplates change and thus must be sufficiently malleable to adapt the ordered relief to contemporary circumstances. At the same time, a fully adjudicated judgment granting an injunction must be respected in order to serve the values of repose underlying our doctrines of finality. The tension between these two propositions is accommodated by the teaching, of which Swift is illustrative, that a motion to modify an injunction cannot be used as an occasion for re-trying the original premises of the judgment; instead, any modification must be confined and tailored to the change in circumstance that justifies the modification.
This accommodating distinction between modification and retrial also helps adjust the tensions inherent in the extraordinary nature of the injunctive remedy. Thus, for example, in school desegregation cases, the Supreme Court has cautioned that “[t]he constitutional command to desegregate schools does not mean that every school in every community must always reflect the racial composition of the school system as a whole.” Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1, 24, 91 S.Ct. 1267, 1280, 28 L.Ed.2d 554 (1971). Similarly:
Neither school authorities nor district courts are constitutionally required to make year-by-year adjustments of the racial composition of student bodies once the affirmative duty to desegregate has been accomplished and racial discrimination through official action is eliminated from the system. This does not mean that federal courts are without power to deal with future problems; but in the absence of a showing that either the school authorities or some other agency of the State has deliberately attempted to fix or alter demographic patterns to affect the racial composition of the schools, further intervention by a district court should not be necessary.
Id. at 31-32, 91 S.Ct. at 1283-84. Repeating a litany of allegations about “racially identifiable” schools will not change the fact that the Supreme Court has declined to adopt a mechanistic approach to the sensitive task of securing the constitutional rights of citizens.
B
In defense of its decision, the majority states that “[i]t is a non-sequitur to con-*1057elude that a district court’s sole power to deal with a school board’s later disregard of a constitutional desegregation order is to order compliance with the original order.” However true this may be, the argument is directed at a strawman, for the district court did not rest its decision on any such ground.5 The real non sequitur in this case is the majority’s assumption that the power to modify a prior decree implies the right to reexamine its premises. Similarly, the real question in this case does not revolve around the theoretical limits of the remedial powers of a court of equity but around the question of whether this district judge abused his discretion by ordering enforcement of the existing plan. When one looks past rhetoric, the utterly pro forma nature of the majority’s effort to show an abuse of discretion is apparent.
First, the majority purports to hold that the district court committed clear error in failing to find that New Hebron, Topeka-Tilton, Beulah Williams, and apparently McCullough, are racially identifiable. Apart from the fact that the majority’s conclusion is plainly wrong as applied to McCullough and is strained at best as applied to New Hebron, the district court correctly stated and applied the law as it affects racial identifiability. The district judge noted both that racially identifiable schools are not per se unconstitutional and that statistical data are no more than a starting point for analysis. The district court then went on to find that the Pearl River and the residential patterns6 in the county make the price of achieving perfect racial balance in the schools too high. The court expressly supported this conclusion by pointing out, again correctly, that the racial mix in the schools does not differ substantially from the mix that this court imposed and approved in 1970.
At the crucial point in the district judge’s opinion, he observed that the plaintiff-intervenors complain that “a number of whites cross attendance zone lines and county lines to avoid majority black schools, especially Beulah Williams.” The judge then concluded that “strict enforcement of the attendance zones should alleviate a substantial portion of the racial imbalance.... [and that w]ith proper enforcement of school attendance zones, this court is of the opinion that the current school attendance zone plan in effect in Lawrence County satisfies the constitutional standard of ‘promis[ing] realistically to work now.’” (quoting Green v. County School Board, 391 U.S. 430, 439, 88 S.Ct. 1689, 1694, 20 L.Ed.2d 716 (1968)). The majority asserts that the district judge’s conclusion that racial imbalance would be reduced if zone jumping were prevented was “entirely speculative,” ignoring the fact that this so-called “speculation” was simply the acceptance of the plaintiff-intervenors’ own submission. Furthermore, the majority also rejects the possibility that changes in the racial composition of the schools is due to demographic changes in the county. After one eliminates zone jumping and demographic changes as possible causes of the changes, what is left? The majority never tells us. The majority does not — because it cannot — refute the district judge’s conclu*1058sion that the existing attendance plan, which this court devised, satisfies the constitutional standard under which it must promise to eliminate the vestiges of illegal discrimination. Instead, the majority recites — but then forgets — the constitutional standard, and leaves us with allusions to “racially identifiable schools.”
The majority’s inability actually to identify any abuse of discretion in the district court’s decision is reflected in the majority’s order on remand. The court below is instructed to “[r]evise attendance zones so as to reduce the degree of racial identification of each school arid achieve, as closely as possible, a racially balanced student body at each school.” With enough dislocation, of course, every school could be made to reflect the district-wide racial balance with absolute perfection. The majority does draw back from such an extreme command, adding that “[i]n any plan, the interest of black parents in having their children attend schools as close to home as possible should be regarded equally with the interest of white parents in this entirely justifiable desire.” The difficulty is that this is exactly what the district judge did when he declined to order the closing of schools and the concomitant increase in the need for busing. Thus, the majority concludes that the district court abused its discretion by failing to do some undefined and unspecified something beyond what this court agreed was appropriate in 1970. I find no legal basis for this remand, which leaves the district judge with the unenviable task of attempting to implement the majority’s visceral confidence that “something more” can and should be done.
Ill
Persuaded, as I am, that the district court should be affirmed because it did not abuse its discretion, I need not reach the argument that that court was required to leave the existing attendance plan in effect unless there was proof that post-1969 changes in the racial composition of the schools were the product of purposely seg-regative acts by the defendants. But this argument should not be left unmentioned. It has some force, and even if not accepted in its full flower, it lends content to and informs the range of the discretion enjoyed by the district court.
Proving a violation of the fourteenth amendment’s equal protection clause requires proof of purposeful discrimination. By itself, proof that a state agency has done something that has a disparate impact on a racially identifiable class will not show the required purposeful discrimination. See Washington v. Davis, 426 U.S. 229, 96 S.Ct. 2040, 48 L.Ed.2d 597 (1976). Such discriminatory purpose has of course been a given as to school districts that maintained regimes of de jure segregation. But when a district has freed itself from its former de jure status by eliminating its dual schools, and has achieved unitary status, purposeful discrimination is no longer a given. It follows that declaring a district “unitary” is of great practical significance in the real world of imperfect proofs; it is therefore not surprising that we have required determinations of unitary status to be carefully done. It is for this reason that I, like the district court, agree that the Lawrence County School District has not been declared unitary. This, however, does not dispose of the argument that a school district can free itself from the evidentiary burdens imposed by its old de jure system with regard to one of its practices by implementing a constitutionally sound plan that eliminates that practice.
There are strong indications that the Supreme Court accepted this argument in Pasadena City Board of Education v. Spangler, 427 U.S. 424, 96 S.Ct. 2697, 49 L.Ed.2d 599 (1976). After quoting Swann’s admonition that year-by-year adjustments of the racial composition of student bodies are not required after the duty to desegregate has been accomplished, the Court went on to explain that this principle extends to school districts that may not have achieved technically “unitary” status:
It may well be that petitioners have not yet totally achieved the unitary system contemplated by this quotation from *1059Swann. There has been, for example, dispute as to the petitioners’ compliance with those portions of the plan specifying procedures for hiring and promoting teachers and administrators. But that does not undercut the force of the principle underlying the quoted language from Swann. In this case the District Court approved a plan designed to obtain racial neutrality in the attendance of students at Pasadena’s public schools. No one disputes that the initial implementation of this plan accomplished that objective. That being the case, the District Court was not entitled to require the [school district] to rearrange its attendance zones each year so as to ensure that the racial mix desired by the court was maintained in perpetuity. For having once implemented a racially neutral attendance pattern in order to remedy the perceived constitutional violations on the part of the defendants, the District Court had fully performed its function of providing the appropriate remedy for previous racially discriminatory attendance patterns.
427 U.S. at 436-37, 96 S.Ct. at 2704-05 (emphasis in original) (citation omitted).
Allowing school districts to achieve unitary status in increments is consistent with the Supreme Court’s refusal to allow systemwide remedies in the absence of deliberate discriminatory acts having systemwide effects. See, e.g., Keyes v. School Dist. No. 1, 413 U.S. 189, 93 S.Ct. 2686, 37 L.Ed.2d 548 (1973); Dayton Board of Education v. Brinkman, 433 U.S. 406, 97 S.Ct. 2766, 53 L.Ed.2d 851 (1977) (Dayton I); Columbus Board of Education v. Penick, 443 U.S. 449, 99 S.Ct. 2941, 61 L.Ed.2d 666 (1979); Dayton Board of Education v. Brinkman, 443 U.S. 526, 99 S.Ct. 2971, 61 L.Ed.2d 720 (1979) (Dayton II). There is no logical reason why a legal presumption of purposeful discrimination cannot be incrementally dissipated when proved purposeful discrimination is itself treated in an incremental manner. The fourteenth amendment speaks to the realities of securing equality for individuals, of ending state classifications drawn on racial lines, of honoring the worth of persons judged individually rather than by the irrelevant fortuity of race. Subscription to this vision requires that one acknowledge that there is a risk of perverse results in relying on group statistics to measure fulfillment of the constitutional promise of individual dignity. Recognition that unitary status can be achieved step-by-step would mitigate the risks of using such group measures and would help achieve a closer fit between the constitutional promise and its fulfillment.
I would not suggest that Spangler’s recognition of an incremental approach to the achievement of unitary status means that the implemented portion of a desegregation plan is absolutely immune from any modification. Modifications essential to the implementation of the remaining portions of the decree may be made without new proof of segregative purpose. But, as with a school district that has never practiced de jure segregation, the reach of the remedy should not exceed the scope of the demonstrated wrongs. Stated more concretely, the Spangler approach would forbid modifying the attendance plan in Lawrence County unless there is proof either that the present racial imbalances are the product of unlawful segregative intent or that a change in the plan is essential to implementing other portions of the desegregation plan, such as those having to do with teacher assignment and hiring.
Although the approach suggested by Spangler has significant force, my research indicates that the courts of appeals have virtually ignored it for over a decade and that the Supreme Court has not yet insisted that it be followed. For that reason, I believe that the present case can more prudently be decided using the abuse-of-discretion analysis set forth above.
IV
The majority’s treatment of the “bus routes” issue mirrors its approach to the case as a whole. The district court considered the evidence and stated: “School District transportation records establish *1060that some buses do have a substantial majority of riders of one race. The court’s review of the bus route map does not indicate that the bus routes are gerrymandered to effectuate segregated buses. Any racial imbalance that does occur is caused by the location of black and white communities, which was not shown to be the product of past discriminatory acts.” Although the majority does not dispute the district court’s conclusion, it nonetheless issues a vague directive apparently requiring the district judge to pressure the defendants into taking some undefined further steps. I see no legal basis for this directive, and I dissent from its issuance.
V
The district judge has not ruled on the issue of teacher assignment. The absence of a ruling is the result of the district court's determination of the most orderly method of proceeding. An appellate court ought ordinarily to await the trial court’s decision before reversing it. I dissent from the majority’s review of this undecided issue.
VI
We need not, and I trust will not, swerve from this court’s proved commitment to constitutionally secured justice, including the opportunities of public education freed of the debilitating sore of racial discrimination. But judges can err in both directions, and zealous devotion to our basic ideals must not blind us to their fragile nature. Nor should a correspondingly fierce determination not to backslide obscure the progress of this small Mississippi county that today gets the back of our hand. Federal injunctive power securing constitutional rights must be applied with balance and with firm but not crushing force. All else aside, the risks that attend the use of race to end the use of race, and the use of group measures to secure individual worth, cannot tolerate indelicate use of federal power. Our part in this delicate task demands far more deference to the trial judge than was accorded here. I would affirm the judgment of the district court, and I dissent from the decision to remand.

. The original plan was based on a plan recommended by the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, as modified by this court. See 433 F.2d at 613-14.

. 1970 figures are taken from United States v. Hinds County School Board, 433 F.2d 611, 614 (5th Cir.1970). 1985 figures are taken from an exhibit offered by the defendants in the current phase of the case.

. Furthermore, the black students at Beulah Williams constitute only 13% of the black students in the District. This court has, in another case, approved an attendance plan under which 55% of black elementary school students would attend schools 87% or more black and 44% would attend schools 93% or more black. Carr v. Montgomery County Board of Education, 511 F.2d 1374 (5th Cir.1975).

. The majority also calls Topeka-Tilton and McCullough "racially identifiable.” Under two of the plans suggested in the Stolee report, Topeka-Tilton would remain 86-87% white. The report does not even suggest that anyone could consider McCullough racially identifiable.

. The district court expressly stated that the defendants’ reliance on the doctrine of res judi-cata was without merit because “[a] school district has a continuing obligation to seek means of eradicating the vestiges of a dual system, a duty which may not be satisfied by rigorous adherence to a previous court order.” (emphasis in original) (citation omitted).

. The district court found that the "geographic separation of the races was not shown to be caused by any prior discriminatory acts on the part of the defendant.” Without so much as an allusion to the record or the district court’s contrary finding, the majority says that "the very demographic factors that separate residential areas by race are in part a vestige of past segregative practices by the Board, for it is patent that in the de jure segregation era, schools were built to accomodate students by race in areas where a single race predominated and reasonably inferrable that, as a result, parents then chose to reside near the racially segregated neighborhood schools.” I do not know how we know this. Such plausible assumptions about social phenomena are not the certain stuff of judicial notice. Because we are not a legislative committee, our sources must come from the record. The pronouncement that "We know” is bereft of content, not worthy of consideration, and is no answer.