The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 95, July 1991 - April, 1992 Page: 54
598 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Hzstorzcal Quarterly
The Supreme Court accepted Wisdom's reasoning on an appeal
from a Fourth Circuit Court ruling in the Green case of 1968. There the
high court discovered in Brown II "the affirmative duty" of southern
school boards to convert at once to a unitary system. "The burden on a
school board today is to come forward with a plan that promises realis-
tically . . . to work now." The test of realism was statistical proof of
blacks and whites sitting together in classrooms in a proportion roughly
reflecting the racial student population of the district. The Fifth Circuit
and Green decisions were similar in their concern for compensatory re-
dress, statistical validation, and impatience with fakery. The result was
a judicial revolution sanctioning race, not racial neutrality, as the ar-
biter of school attendance."
Green sealed the fate of the racial imbalance at the Hamilton Park
School. The circumstances triggering the first suit against the RISD
were, however, political rather than judicial. In 1969 the Nixon admin-
istration attempted to delay desegregation in thirty-three Mississippi
counties in return for Mississippi senator John Stennis's continued ac-
tive support for the antiballistic missile system. The Supreme Court, in
the Alexander decision, sternly commanded the districts to desegregate.
To quiet the resulting dismay and confusion over its apparent back-
ward step, the administration attempted to bring all the laggard south-
ern districts into line. The RISD was not among the latter, but the joint
HEW-DOJ sweep through the South caught it up with thirty-seven
other Texas districts that were statistically flawed. The RISD officials
and the federal representatives meeting in Austin, Texas, on July 28,
1970, agreed to seek "clarification" of Hamilton Park's status "once and
for all by the courts.""2
The third and final phase of the RISD's struggle with desegregation
began when district judge William M. Taylor, Jr., a conservative Lyn-
don Johnson appointee, received the case on August 19. Hearings on
August 20 and 24 produced a stalemate. Henry D. Akin, Jr., the board's
attorney, filed the existing RISD plan, while the government attorneys
filed an HEW plan calling 'for pairing Hamilton Park elementary with
to appease northerners, who refused to accept the idea of HEW assistance to overcome racial
imbalance, in addition to segregation Charles and Barbara Whalen, The Longest Debate A Legi-
latzve Hstory of the 1964 Czvil Rzghts Act (New York" New American Library, Mentor Books,
1985), 33. When the act referred to racial imbalance in other places it was plain that the refer-
ence was to a numerical racial imbalance whether produced by segregative law (de jure) or by
segregated residential patterns (de facto) Graglia, Dzsastei by Decree, 58-66, 118- 1 20 Bass,
Unlikely Heroes, 297-310, uncritically endorses Wisdom's reasoning
22 Green v County School Board of New Kent County, Vrginima, May 27, 1968, Supreme Court Re-
porter, Vol. 88A (St. Paul, Minn.. West Publishing Co, 1969), 1689-1693, 1694 (quotations),
1695-1696, (cited hereafter as Green v County School Board).
2SRead and McGough, Let Them Be Judged, 479-491; undated memorandum (quotations),
untitled green folder (RISD ar chives).
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 95, July 1991 - April, 1992, periodical, 1992; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth117153/m1/82/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.