Court Opinion

ID: 9449595
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 16:16:28.573532+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:31:54.011056
License: Public Domain

On Petition for Rehearing.
PER CURIAM.
This matter is before the Court on the petitioners’ application for a rehearing.
*360July 9, 1963, this Court by mandate directed the District Court to enter an injunction and order requiring the Board of Commissioners of Mobile County to submit to the District Court by August 1, 1963, a step-ladder plan for desegregating the public schools in Mobile, starting with the first grade in September 1963. Three days later, another panel of the Court decided Armstrong v. Board of Education of the City of Birmingham, No. 20595, 5 Cir., 323 F.2d 333. In that case the Court declined to issue an injunction pending appeal which would go so far as to provide “when and how the complete desegregation of the public schools may be accomplished.” The Court’s mandate requires the Birmingham School Board to submit by August 19, 1963, a plan for an immediate start in desegregation by applying the Alabama Pupil Placement Law to all school grades.
At this initial stage in the travail of desegregating the public schools in Alabama, the School Boards of Mobile and Birmingham face substantially the same social, legal, and administrative difficulties. We express no opinion of the merits of uniformity in school desegregation as against a school board’s tailoring a plan and a trial judge’s shaping a decree, to fit a particular school system. But we have reached the conclusion that at this early point in the legal proceedings, at a time when no school board in Alabama has formulated any plan for desegregation, there should not be one law for Birmingham and another for Mobile. We have decided therefore to conform the Mobile order to the Birmingham order.
Accordingly, the Court amends the judgment and order of July 9, 1963, issued as the mandate, by deleting the following paragraph:
“It is further ordered, adjudged and decreed that said persons be and they are hereby required to make an immediate start in the desegregation of the school of Mobile County, and that a plan be submitted to the District Court by August 1, 1963, which shall include a statement that the maintenance of separate schools for the Negro and white children of Mobile County shall be completely ended with respect to the first grade during the school year commencing September 1963, and with respect to at least one successively higher additional grade each school year thereafter.”
and, in lieu thereof, directs the District Court for the Southern District of Alabama to enter the following paragraph as its judgment and order:
“It is further ordered, adjudged and decreed that said persons be and they are hereby required to submit to this Court not later than August 19, 1963, a plan under which the said defendants propose to make an immediate start in the desegregation of the schools of Mobile County, Alabama, which plan shall effectively provide for the carrying into effect not later than the beginning of the school year commencing September 1963 and thereafter of the Alabama Pupil Placement Law as to all school grades without racial discrimination, including ‘the admission of new pupils entering the first grade, or coming into the County for the first time, on a nonracial basis,’ Augustus v. Board of Public Instruction, 5 Cir., 1962, 306 F.2d 862, 869 (that opinion describes such a plan which has been approved and is operating in Pensacola, Florida).”
As in the Birmingham decision, the order contemplates a full hearing before the District Court. The District Court will therefore go forward with the trial already fixed for November 14, 1963.
Except to the extent expressly granted herein, the petitioners’ application for a rehearing is denied.
The Clerk is directed to issue the mandate, as amended, forthwith.