ABSTRACT
On April 7, 1970, the Detroit Board of Education adopted a voluntary desegregation plan to address the increasing racial polarization of the Detroit city schools. The state legislature responded by passing Public Act 48, a statute that placed school districts under the local control of neighborhoods, thereby preventing implementation of the April 7 plan. The Detroit Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) brought suit, asserting that Public Act 48 unconstitutionally interfered with the previously adopted desegregation plan and contending that the
Detroit Public School System was racially segregated due to official actions on both the state and federal levels. After considering evidence showing such actions and their links to Detroit’s segregated school system, the district court determined that the only way to effectively address what indisputably was a constitutional violation was to reach outside of the city of Detroit itself and into the neighboring districts to unify the schools. In this regard, the district court concluded that anything but an interdistrict approach would result in an all-black school system. The Sixth Circuit agreed. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Burger similarly upheld the finding of discrimination in Detroit, but disagreed that the courts could appropriately institute an interdistrict desegregation plan to address that problem absent an interdistrict violation of the U.S. Constitution. Because there allegedly had been no showing that the suburban districts had engaged in actions intended to segregate the Detroit city schools, the Court concluded that the multidistrict remedy proposed by the district court was impermissible. The result of the Court’s ruling was that the Detroit city schools, and others throughout the nation, would remain segregated.
