Court Opinion

ID: 9458701
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 20:59:44.854356+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:35:52.097652
License: Public Domain

COLEMAN, Circuit Judge
(concurring in part and dissenting in part):
Given the decision on the merits as outlined in the majority opinion, I concur in the procedures discussed with reference to the appropriate remedy.
As in United States v. Texas Education Agency, 5 Cir., 1972, 467 F.2d 848 (en banc) [No. 71—2508] I would defer decision on the merits in this case until we shall have received the guidance of the Supreme Court which ought to come with the decision of the Denver case, now on the calendar of the Supreme Court.
I, therefore, dissent to deciding the Corpus Christi case at this time.
Seeing, however, that the case nevertheless is to be decided, I wish briefly to express some separate views of my own. This is done with considerable reluctance because when the Supreme Court speaks in the Denver case my observations may turn out to be legally incorrect or useless.
I am compelled to say that I am unable to agree, as a legal proposition, that the United States is a Country which is composed of “many nations within a nation”. We have Americans of Mexican extraction, of Polish extraction, of Irish extraction, of many other extractions, and we have Americans who are either poor or rich. Even so, an American is an American, without prefix or suffix— as Mr. Sam Rayburn once said (on another subject).
The idea that there are mexican-amer-icans, afro-americans, or any other hyphenated americans, leads either to divisions among the people or to political “power plays”, or both. If a person is an American, that should “end it” and he ought to remember “E Pluribus Unum”.
Americans of Mexican ancestry are members of the white race. Therefore, if any children of Mexican ancestry are being required to attend a school which by comparison is deficient in faculty, or curriculum, or school plant, then the school board should be mandatorily required to correct the deficiencies right where they exist. This should be done not because the children are of Mexican ancestry but because all children in these United States are entitled to the equal protection of the law.
This would avoid the highly artificial and necessarily unstable expedient of re*157quiring children to spend a substantial portion of their days on buses and in strange localities.
In Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. at 494, 74 S.Ct. at 691, 98 L.Ed. 873 (1954), the Supreme Court said:
“Td separate them [black children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”
The same effect is inevitable when children are reminded every day that they live in a community of such inferiority [so considered by those in authority] that they must be bussed out of it for an education, but condemned to remain in it at all other times. Such children will not become integral parts of the communities to which they are bussed. The real, and lasting, remedy would be to improve the housing, the schools, and the living conditions where the children live. The government is equally as able to do this as it is to corfduct daily upheavals in mass, via the bus.
My sympathies are with children who are faced with the lack of educational opportunity. I would not claim to cure the problem by the application of a “band-aid” of doubtful, if not harmful, value.