Court Opinion

ID: 9692210
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 15:47:17.693298+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:19:33.172239
License: Public Domain

*62Souris, J.
(concurring in affirmance and remand). I concur in Mr. Justice Black’s disposition of this appeal. Plaintiffs’ proofs failed to establish either present deprivation of due process or equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment or present denial or abridgement on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude of their right to vote as guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment.
Inkster village straddles the boundary between Nankin and Dearborn townships. In that part of the village lying in Dearborn township, there are (1960 census data) 18,700 residents of whom 4,600 are Negro. Within the so-called strip area of Inkster included within the boundaries of the proposed city of Dearborn Heights reside 2,980 persons,* none of them Negro. Of the remaining 15,720 persons who reside in the Dearborn township portion of Inkster village, 11,120 whites and 4,600 Negroes are excluded from the new city. Whatever the incorporators’ motives or purposes in drawing the new city’s boundaries as they did, the results affected all remaining residents of the Dearborn township portion of Inkster village, both white and Negro, in precisely the same manner. If those who are Negro were excluded from the new city, so were the white residents. If the Negro residents were deprived of portions of their incorporated village and of their township, so were the more numerous white residents. If, by the contraction of the boundaries of the village and township resulting from incorporation of the new city, the Negro residents’ right to vote was affected, so was the right to vote of each remaining white resident. The point is that Inkster’s Negro residents were not affected in any manner different from the more numerous white residents who were not in-*63eluded in the new city. Their present exclusion from the new city was not discriminatory in the sense that only Negroes, hut not whites, were excluded therefrom; nor, as Justice Black properly concludes, does this record show that by racially discriminatory action of defendants any citizen “cannot cross or recross at will, or reside and vote as a resident on either side of, or cannot buy or rent property on the other side of, an ‘impenetrable wall’ made of a city limit or boundary.” From such facts there can be no judicial finding that defendants, whatever their motives, violated plaintiffs’ Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendment rights.
Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 364 US 339 (81 S Ct 125, 5 L ed 2d 110), was relied upon by plaintiffs in support of their Fifteenth Amendment claim. As I read Justice Black’s opinion, he suggests that Gomillion’s rule is inapplicable except when municipal boundaries are so drawn that Negroes are excluded from, and denied the right to vote in, the municipality in which they previously lived and voted. I agree that Gomillion is inapplicable, but only because plaintiffs’ proofs failed to show that the suffrage rights of only, or substantially only, Negroes were affected. In fact, plaintiffs’ proofs, as indicated above, show clearly that whatever present effect incorporation of the new city had on the rights of Inkster’s Negroes, it affected likewise the rights of all white residents and voters remaining in the village of Inkster.
I cannot believe that the decision in Gomillion would be other than as we know it, as Justice Black seems to suggest, had Alabama’s legislature created by statute a lily-white 28-sided monstrosity of a new city entirely within, and without alteration of, the pre-existing boundaries of racially impure Tuskegee. Fifteenth Amendment rights do not depend' upon the formalistic distinction between fencing *64Negroes out of their municipality and fencing them in. Gomillion’s assertion of Fifteenth Amendment rights would be entitled to equal judicial regard had Alabama’s legislature left Tuskegee’s Negroes the heritage of their old municipal community, including its legislative charter and pre-ordained name, save only a withdrawn portion inhabited exclusively by whites.
I see no valid distinction between Gomillion’s rule and these plaintiffs’ pleaded constitutional claim. Had they proved that Negroes’ rights to vote had been abridged discriminatorily by the contraction of the village and township in which they lived and voted, they would be entitled to judicial vindication of their constitutional rights.
That there is racial segregation in housing in the village of Inkster cannot be denied. Justice Black’s description of its racial composition portrays the brutal facts. Its existence, however, is not the result of the new city’s incorporation nor does the record disclose that the incorporation of that new city presently discriminatorily denies or abridges Inkster’s Negro residents’ rights, as Justice Black has noted.
However, this record discloses sufficient evidence to convince me, reviewing this record de novo, that certain of the defendants and others associated with their incorporation efforts were not entirely free of racial bias in the performance of acts necessary to the new city’s incorporation. That such evidence does not rise to the level of immutable truth is no deterrent to the exercise by this Court and by the chancellor of continuing jurisdiction, as Justice Black proposes, to guard every right secured to plaintiffs by the Constitution and laws of the United States and of this State.
We deal here with constitutional rights dependent for their universal enjoyment upon our judicial will *65and skill to guard against sophisticated as well as unsophisticated restraints. By retaining jurisdiction this Court, through the chancellor, can deter rapidly and effectively any future infringement of plaintiffs’ rights which existing patterns of racial segregation might otherwise encourage.
Smith, J., concurred with Souris, J.
O’Hara, J., took no part in the decision of this case.

 Computed from plaintiffs’ Exhibit 3.