Court Opinion

ID: 9454029
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 18:33:02.534341+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:33:56.066200
License: Public Domain

WISDOM, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
I respectfully dissent. This case is not moot.
The Board erred.1 2*****The district court erred. This Court erred.2 But we are not now powerless to fashion a remedy to reduce the impact of the error.
It is, of course, too late to enjoin construction of a building that is already up. It is not too late to enjoin future construction of buildings. True, Houston’s 59 million dollar school program, the immediate cause for this litigation, has been completed. But the building and expansion of public schools go on endlessly. I would reverse and remand this case with instructions that the district court enjoin the Board from engaging in future school construction without first considering the effect a proposed new location or expansion foreseeably may have upon the conversion of the dual system of segregated schools to a unitary, nonracial system.
That is not enough. The harm to the Negro plaintiffs did not stop with completion of the construction; that was when it began. Segregation through schoolsite selection is a continuing and expanding process that widens the gap between the races because a white school *36attracts white parents to the neighborhood and a Negro school attracts some Negro parents to the neighborhood. Segregated schools and segregated residential patterns, therefore, are interacting agents which tend to accentuate the racial polarity that complicates and makes more difficult the Board’s affirmative duty to erase all vestiges of the dual system. I would instruct the district court to require the Board to submit promptly a realistic plan for undoing the adverse effects of the construction program. The Board should come forward now with proposals, such as the consolidation and pairing of schools, that will tend to counteract continued segregation (or token desegregation) brought about or aggravated by improper location of school sites.

. The record supports the plaintiffs’ contention that the Houston school construction program perpetuates the dual system. In its supplemental opinion the majority stated that “admittedly the Houston school authorities did not affirmatively consider” the “effect which a proposed new location or expansion might have upon the question of integration”. The majority conceded that this “mandate” was imposed by Jefferson and “more clearly spelled out” in United States v. Board of Public Instruction of Polk County, Florida, 5 Cir., 1968, 395 F.2d 66.

. The opinions of this Court were in the printer’s hands before May 27, 1968, the date of the Supreme Court’s decision in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, 391 U.S. 430, 88 S.Ct. 1689, 20 L.Ed.2d 716. Green settled beyond any argument that the Houston School Board failed to meet constitutional standards. In the instant case the question before the Board was whether, in a context necessarily involving a choice of alternatives, a school board should select sites tending to erase the effects of the dual system of legalized segregated schools or is free to select sites tending to maintain segregation (or token desegregation). The Board faced up to the issue, but resolved it, in reliance on Briggs v. Elliott, E.D.S.C.1955, 132 F.Supp. 776, and “freedom of choice”, by determining that there “is no affirmative duty on the School District to consider race in the selection of school sites”. Green makes short work of disposing of this notion: Schools boards which have operated “state-compelled dual systems were nevertheless clearly charged with 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. * * * If there are reasonably available other ways [than freedom of choice], such for illustration as zoning, promising speedier and more effective conversion to a unitary, nonracial school system, freedom of choice must be held unacceptable”. In short, if a choice must be made between two courses of action, a school board should choose the alternative that promises the speedier and more effective conversion of the school district to a unitary, nonracial system. See also Raney v. Board of Education of Gould School District, 1968, 391 U.S. 443, 88 S.Ct. 1697, 20 L.Ed.2d 727, a companion case to Green.