Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971) stands out as one of its most important school desegregation cases for two reasons. First, Swann was the Supreme Court's last unanimous judgment in a major school desegregation case. Second, Swann is the first case in which the justices examined, and ultimately upheld, the use of busing to achieve school desegregation in systems that operated under de jure, as a matter of law, racial segregation. Swann thus helped reform public school systems in the American South by allowing educators to employ busing as a means of transforming their student bodies in a manner consistent with allowing schools to provide equal educational opportunities for all children.

Swann began when a federal trial court in North Carolina approved a desegregation plan that the Fourth Circuit subsequently modified. Included in the desegregation plan's extensive provisions were calls for what turned out to be its most noteworthy feature in creating restructured attendance zones in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district, which relied on busing to bring about greater racial balances in [Page 866]public schools. After the Fourth Circuit upheld the desegregation plan, including busing for secondary schools, but vacated and remanded the plan to the trial court for additional consideration as it applied to students who attended elementary schools, both sides sought further review.

As Swann was progressing through the federal courts, it did so in the context of increasing judicial calls to speed up the slow pace of desegregation in public school systems that, more than a decade after the original Brown v. Board of Education (1954), continued to operate dual, or segregated, schools. In fact, the Supreme Court made its sense of urgency to take dramatic steps to end segregation clear in its 1969 declaration in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education. In Alexander, frustrated with the slow pace of desegregation, the Court unequivocally ended its reliance of the “all deliberate speed” standard that it had announced in Brown v. Board of Education II (1955). Instead, the Alexander Court thus declared that “the obligation of every school district [is] to terminate dual school systems at once and to operate now and hereafter only unitary schools.”

The immediate impact of the Supreme Court's judgment in Alexander resulted in a plethora of lower federal court orders demanding that educational officials desegregate their dual school systems. Insofar as the lower federal courts implemented a wide variety of arrangements, however, inconsistencies emerged over the constitutional dimensions of what the plans needed to accomplish and how they could direct officials to achieve their desegregative goals. Against this background, the Swann Court addressed the responsibilities of school officials in desegregating a dual school system.

In Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education the Supreme Court affirmed the trial court's order in whole while upholding those parts of the Fourth Circuit's judgment that supported the trial court's remedy. More specifically, the Court began by acknowledging that since public school officials in the district had intentionally maintained segregated, or dual, schools, the federal trial court had the authority to develop equitable remedies to dismantle the formerly dual system, thereby rendering it unitary or desegregated. As such, the Court reasoned that even though it would not establish rigid mathematical guidelines or ratios for busing students, if assigning children to neighborhood schools did not effectively dismantle segregated schools, then the federal trial court could rely on busing as a means of implementing an equitable solution.

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