Ayers v. Fordice

Facts of the Case

In 1975, a group of African American Missis-s ippians filed a class action lawsuit against the state of Mississippi in federal district court. The suit accused the state of maintaining a racially separate and unequal system of higher education in Mississippi in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In particular, the plaintiffs complained that the state had systematically discriminated against the state's public Black universities (Jackson State University, Alcorn State University, and Mississippi State University) in terms of funding, the breadth of their academic programs, and the quality of their physical plants. They sought a judicial order compelling the state to make substantial improvements on the state's Black campuses. Their leading plaintiff, Jake Ayers Sr., was a longtime civil rights activist who had been a member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Although he died in 1986, the suit still bears his name.

The state of Mississippi conceded that it, like other Southern states, had established and maintained legal segregation in higher education. However, it maintained that it had broken with its segregated past, and its current policies in higher education had been promulgated on a nondiscriminatory basis. The U.S. Justice Department intervened in the case on the side of plaintiffs. After 12 years of negotiation failed to end the impasse, the case went to trial. The district court ruled for the state, finding that racially neutral hiring and admission policies constituted sufficient compliance with its duty to eliminate the effects of legal segregation in higher education.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Fifth Circuit reversed the district court's ruling, holding that significant remnants of the former de jure system of racial segregation still persisted in Mississippi higher education. Subsequently, the full Fifth Circuit reversed the judgment of the three-judge panel, upholding the district court's original judgment. The African American plaintiffs and the U.S. Justice Department appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Lower federal courts had issued conflicting rulings with respect to the remedial measures states were required to make to eliminate the vestiges of legal racial segregation. For example, in Alabama State Teachers Association v. Alabama Public School and College Authority (1968), the district court held that “as long as the State and a particular institution are dealing with admissions, faculty, and staff in good faith,” its constitutional duty to remedy the effects of past discrimination is satisfied. This ruling contrasts sharply with Norris v. State Council of Higher Education (1971) in which the district court, borrowing from the public school context, declared that there should be no “White schools or Negro schools, just schools.” In a third case, a district court in Adams v. Richardson (1972) admonished states to take into consideration the unique role of historically Black colleges when crafting remedies to address decades of discrimination in higher education. Given these conflicting precedents, it was unclear how the Supreme Court would rule in Ayers v. Fordice.

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