Court Opinion

ID: 9461938
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 22:28:16.279523+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:37:19.932809
License: Public Domain

EDWARDS, Circuit Judge
(concurring).
I join my colleagues in the drafting and issuance of today’s order because any final decision of the United States Supreme Court is the law of the land. But conscience compels me to record how deeply I disagree with the decision which we are enforcing. In Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717, 94 S.Ct. 3112, 41 L.Ed.2d 1069 (1974), the Supreme Court overruled this court and the United States District Court in Detroit by reversing a carefully documented finding of fact that racial desegregation in the schools of Detroit could not be accomplished within the boundaries of the Detroit school district where the school population was found to be approximately 64% black, with a predicted 72% black school population by 1975-76 and 80.7% by 1980-81. The decision also imbued school district boundaries in Northern states (which like Michigan, had never had school segregation laws) with a constitutional significance which neither federal nor state law had ever accorded them.
This court’s opinion in Bradley v. Milliken, 484 F.2d 215, 217 (6th Cir. 1973), had accepted a finding by the District Judge that a desegregation plan limited to Detroit “would result in an all black school system immediately surrounded by practically all white suburban school systems, with an overwhelmingly white majority population in the total metropolitan area.” The Supreme Court did not overturn that finding.
The key sentence in the majority opinion of the Supreme Court reads: “The constitutional right of the Negro respondents residing in Detroit is to attend a unitary school system in that district.” Presumably this means that if and when the Detroit school district becomes 95% or more black, immediately surrounded by suburban school districts 95% or more white, no problem of federal constitutional significance arises.
Unless the thrust of this sentence is altered by further Supreme Court interpretation or overruling — or by action in the area of racial integration by Congress or the Presidency — it can come to represent a formula for American apartheid.
Since the Supreme Court decision is based in part upon the fact that (like all Northern states) Michigan never had school segregation by state statute, the case creates one law for the North and another for the South.
I know of no decision made by the Supreme Court of the United States *681since the Dred Scott decision (Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393, 15 L.Ed. 691 (1857)) which is so fraught with disaster for this country.