ABSTRACT
William Bradford Reynolds's opinions on school desegregation can be characterized by first describing their antithesis. In theory the courts required only that students be assigned to public schools on a nondiscriminatory basis. When the Supreme Court nevertheless held that the New Kent plan was unacceptable, the Court seemed to require more than it said it was requiring. So also in other cases, when the Court ruled against assigning students to the nearest neighborhood schools. Consequently, other integrationists, like James S. Liebman of the Columbia University School of Law, said the civil rights movement should abandon the remedial approach and start over with a forthright argument for integration. Liebman advised integrationists to proceed openly. They should simply say that racial justice required the United States to have integrated schools. Like Reynolds, Ronald Reagan thought it was a mistake to force children to leave their neighborhoods to attend distant, racially balanced schools.
