ABSTRACT
Scholars have described the evolving law on school desegregation as "inscrutable", "incoherent", and "a patchwork of unintelligibility". At the very least, the jurisprudence of school desegregation was complex. The black plaintiffs in Brown agreed with the New York Times. They acknowledged that the Constitution allowed for some discrimination against groups, but they said the equal protection clause required not only that discrimination must be justified but also that especially weighty evidence was necessary to justify racial discrimination. The principal sponsor of the Civil Rights Act in the Senate, Senator Humphrey, gave similar assurances. The purpose of the civil rights bill was to prohibit racial discrimination, not to seek any sort of racial balance. The Office of Education developed new guidelines for administering the Civil Rights Act. In Congress, the office's guidelines for interpreting the Civil Rights Act came in for criticism, but there was no explicit repudiation of the new policy.
