ABSTRACT
The question of racially integrating US schools has been a major issue in both court cases and public life since the famous Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The Supreme Court ruled against this remedy in the case of Rodriguez v. San Antonio Independent School District of 1973, using dubious logic heavily influenced by a mentality incorporating a 'deep structural' fear of Communism and the spectre of 'absolute equality' accompanying it. In 1968, Derrick A. Bell, Jr. and Charles E. Jones, black lawyers with the federally supported Western Center for Law and Poverty, a branch of the US government's Office of Economic Opportunity located in Los Angeles, decided to challenge the state of California's local, property-based system of taxation for funding schools. The American black and Hispanic communities would have exploded had they done so, not to mention the national and international outrage that would have occurred if the Court had repudiated school integration.
