Brennan v. Armstrong

433 U.S. 672, 97 S. Ct. 2907, 53 L. Ed. 2d 1044, 1977 U.S. LEXIS 148

• Court: Supreme Court of the United States
• Decided: June 29, 1977
• Docket: 76-809
• Status: Published

Opinions

Per Curiam.

This school desegregation case involves the school system in the city of Milwaukee, Wis. The District Court here made various findings of segregative acts on the part of petitioner School Board members, appointed a Special Master “to develop a plan for the desegregation of the Milwaukee public school system,” and certified its order for interlocutory appeal to the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Amos v. Board of School Directors, 408 F. Supp. 765. The Court of Appeals, observing that there was “an unexplained hiatus between specific findings of fact and conclusory findings of segregative intent,” stated that the District Court is “entitled to a presumption of consistency” and concluded that the findings of the District Court were not clearly erroneous. 539 F. 2d 625. Neither the District Court in ordering development of a remedial plan, nor the Court of Appeals in affirming, addressed itself to the inquiry mandated by our opinion in Dayton Board of Education v. Brinkman, ante, p. 406, in which we said:

“If such violations are found, the District Court in the first instance, subject to review by the Court of Appeals, must determine how much incremental segrega-tive effect these violations had on the racial distribution of the Dayton school population as presently constituted, when that distribution is compared to what it would have been in the absence of such constitutional violations. The remedy must be designed to redress that difference, and only if there has been a systemwide impact may there be a systemwide remedy.” Ante, at 420.

The petition for certiorari is accordingly granted, the judgment of the Court of Appeals is .vacated, and the case is remanded for reconsideration in the light of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Dev. Corp., 429 U. S. 252 (1977), and Dayton.