Adams v. United States

620 F.2d 1277, 1980 U.S. App. LEXIS 20007
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit
DecidedMarch 3, 1980
DocketNos. 79-1468, 79-1470, 79-1471, 79-1477 and 79-1486
StatusPublished
Cited by48 cases

This text of 620 F.2d 1277 (Adams v. United States) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Adams v. United States, 620 F.2d 1277, 1980 U.S. App. LEXIS 20007 (8th Cir. 1980).

Opinion

Opinion of the Court by LAY, Chief Judge, and HEANEY, BRIGHT, ROSS, STEPHENSON, HENLEY and McMILLI-AN, Circuit Judges.

Prior to 1865, Missouri prohibited the creation or maintenance of schools for 'teaching black children to read or write. In 1865, the state legislature passed laws requiring that separate schools be established for black students. The substance of this legislation was incorporated in the Missouri Constitution of 1945. Separate schools were maintained by the St. Louis Board of Education pursuant to the legislation and the state constitution.

Ninety years after Missouri first required separate schools, the United States Supreme Court, in the Brown v. Board of Education decisions, found that segregated school systems were providing an inferior education to black children. It held that such systems must be disestablished with all deliberate speed. As a result of these decisions, the Missouri laws requiring separate schools were repealed or declared inoperative. The St. Louis Board of Education’s response to Brown was to adopt a “neighborhood school plan.” Now, twenty-six years later, St. Louis elementary and secondary schools remain segregated.

The St. Louis Board of Education failed to take effective measures to desegregate the school system in the years immediately following Brown I and has subsequently enforced policies with respect to the assignment of students, the transportation of students, the assignment of personnel and the construction of school facilities which cannot be reasonably explained without reference to racial concerns and which have contributed substantially to continuing segregation in the school system. This failure resulted in the commencement of this action in 1972.

Since 1972, the Board of Education has taken some steps to disestablish the dual system. These include the adoption of an incremental faculty desegregation plan and the opening of several specialized and magnet schools, some of which are integrated.

In our judgment, these steps, while meaningful, are not adequate to disestablish the existing segregated school system. Something more is clearly required. We thus have no alternative but to again remand this matter to the district court with directions to require the Board of Education, in consultation with the parties, a qualified expert and an interracial committee selected by the district court from all elements of the community, to develop and implement a plan that will integrate the St. Louis public schools.

I. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Prior to the Civil war, a Missouri statute provided: “No person shall keep or teach any school for the instruction of negroes or mulattoes, in reading or writing, in this State.” Act of February 16,1847, § 1, 1847 Mo.Laws 103. Beginning in 1865, the Missouri General Assembly enacted a series of statutes requiring separate public schools for blacks. See, e. g., Act of February 17, 1865, § 13, 1865 Mo.Laws 170; Act of June 11, 1889, § 7051a, 1889 Mo.Laws 226. This segregated system was incorporated into the Missouri Constitution of 1945, which specifically provided that separate schools were to be maintained for “white and colored children.” See Mo.Const. art. IX, § 1(a) (1945). Although a 1954 Attorney General opinion declared this provision unenforceable following Brown I, it remained a part of the state constitution until repealed in 1976. Statutes implementing the constitutionally mandated segregation provided for separate funding, separate enumerations, separate consolidated “colored” school districts, and the interdistrict transfer of black students. Most of these statutes were not repealed until 1957. See Act of July 6, 1957, § 1, 1957 Mo.Laws 452.

In the 1953-1954 school year, the St. Louis school district operated seven white and two black high schools, approximately eighty-three white and forty black elementary schools, and one white and one black vocational/technical school. There were 58,595 white (65.5%) and 30,880 black (34.5%) elementary and high school students attending school in the district.

[1281]*1281Under the state-mandated segregated system, white students were generally assigned to schools in their neighborhoods. Black students attended black schools in the “core” of the city. Those black students residing outside the “core” were bused into the black schools; for them there were no neighborhood schools.1 Separate overlapping attendance zones were maintained for black and white students. Black students from some suburban St. Louis County school districts were also bused into the City’s black schools because state law and practice prohibited them from attending their local schools. The black schools were staffed by black teachers, administrators and nonprofessionals; the white schools by white personnel.

After Brown, the St. Louis Board of Education declared that it would implement a plan designed to desegregate its system. The heart of that plan was said to be the “neighborhood school concept.”2 School attendance zones were redrawn and students were generally assigned to schools close to their homes. The zones were nearly identical with the boundaries of racially identifiable neighborhoods.3 Moreover, a “continuation transfer” option was made available to all students then enrolled, permitting them to remain in the school in which they were then enrolled until graduation, unless overcrowding would result.

The new plan did not change the segregated nature of the St. Louis school system. As detailed in Part IV of this opinion, schools that had all-black student and faculty populations prior to Brown continued to be all black or virtually all black after the 1955 plan went into effect. Most pre-Brown white schools also retained their racial identity. Those pr e-Brown white schools located in the black neighborhoods, however, turned virtually all black immediately after the plan was implemented.

II. PROCEDURAL HISTORY

On February 18, 1972, Craton Liddell, his mother, and other members of the Concerned Parents of North St. Louis and their children filed this action in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri seeking to represent the class of black school children in the St. Louis school system. They alleged that the Board of Education and its administrators had “effected and perpetuated racial segregation and discrimination” in the operation of the public schools of the City of St. Louis, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

For more than a year, the parties engaged in discovery proceedings. On October 3, 1973, a class was certified and, by public notice, other interested parties were invited to intervene on or before December 1, 1973. No one accepted the invitation. The defendant Board of Education’s motion to join as additional parties defendant the Governor, the State Attorney General, the Commissioner of Education of the State of Missouri, the State Board of Education, the St. Louis County Superintendent of Education, and the twenty school districts in St. Louis County that constitute the first two tiers of districts adjoining the City of St. Louis was also denied without comment by the district court on December 1, 1973.

Early in 1974, the district court requested that the parties stipulate as to the undisputed facts. The stipulations were filed on June 7, 1974.

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
620 F.2d 1277, 1980 U.S. App. LEXIS 20007, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/adams-v-united-states-ca8-1980.