Washington, D.C. -- In ruling that Mississippi’s public colleges are still illegally segregated, the Supreme Court has transformed judicial and political battles affecting higher education in 19 Southern and border states.
For the first time, the Court specified how states must demonstrate that they have removed the vestiges of past segregation. The standard set by the Court was much higher than that used by many lower courts and, many people say, by the Education Department.
Civil-rights leaders see the decision as a strong tool with which to pry open desegregation cases that have been closed in seven states. In other states, educators and civil-rights leaders say the decision could force predominantly white institutions to take more steps to attract black students and faculty members and to examine admissions requirements that may limit the enrollment of black students.
“This is going to be a whole new chapter for education in the states where a large number of black students go to college,” said Gary A. Orfield, a professor of education and social policy at Harvard University.
It is unclear what effect the decision will have on public black colleges. Legal experts are divided over whether the language in the decision will prompt states to increase their financial support for those institutions or to move to close them.
The crux of the Supreme Court ruling was that states must do more than merely eliminate laws barring black students from predominantly white colleges and show “good faith” to desegregate. That standard was used by a federal district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to rule earlier that Mississippi was desegregated.
The lower courts said the less-strict standard was appropriate in college segregation cases because students select which colleges they attend -- unlike public-school students, who are assigned to schools.
In a decision written by Justice Byron R. White, the Supreme Court rejected that view.
“In a system based on choice, student attendance is determined not simply by admissions policies, but also by many other factors,” Justice White wrote. “Thus, even after a state dismantles its segregative admissions policy, there may still be state action that is traceable to the state’s prior de jure segregation and that continues to foster segregation.”
All of the justices except Justice Antonin Scalia joined in the decision. (The complete texts of the majority opinion, two concurring opinions, and the dissenting opinion start on Page A19.)
Justice White’s decision said a state must reform all policies that are vestiges of segregation “to the extent practicable and consistent with sound educational practices.”
In the Mississippi case, the Court cited a number of policies that it said the lower courts should have forced the state either to justify or eliminate. It returned the case to federal district court to examine the issues in greater detail while developing a plan to desegregate the state’s colleges.
The Court ruled that the state’s admissions standards had been adopted with a discriminatory purpose and continued to hurt black students. The state relies on standardized test scores as the minimum criterion to gain admission to its public colleges, even though black students tend to receive lower scores than their white counterparts and the companies that distribute the tests advise against their being used as the sole criterion for admission.
The Court also ruled that Mississippi must justify or end the practice of having many duplicative academic programs at nearby historically black and predominantly white institutions. The decision said such duplication was “part and parcel” of the “separate but equal” philosophy that had led states to create black colleges rather than admit black students to then-all-white institutions.
In a portion of the decision that worried advocates for black colleges, the Supreme Court also said the lower courts must examine whether Mississippi operates its eight public four-year colleges as a way to perpetuate segregation. Three of those colleges are historically black. Noting that some of the institutions are near others, the Court said: “Continuing to maintain all eight universities in Mississippi is wasteful and irrational,” and said that closures or mergers might lead to more integration.
The Court rejected a request from civil-rights lawyers in Mississippi that the state be required to provide more funds for black colleges because those institutions educate many black students. The decision said: “If we understand private petitioners to press us to order the upgrading of Jackson State, Alcorn State, and Mississippi Valley solely so that they may be publicly financed, exclusively black enclaves by private choice, we reject that request. The state provides these facilities for all of its citizens.”
The justices differed on just where their opinion left black colleges. Justice Clarence Thomas, in a concurring opinion that drew praise from many of his past critics in civil-rights organizations, said the decision should not be read to discourage states from improving black colleges.
Justice Thomas cited the contributions that black colleges had made to generations of black students who were not allowed to attend other institutions. “It would be ironic, to say the least, if the institutions that sustained blacks during segregation were themselves destroyed in an effort to combat its vestiges,” he said.
Justice Scalia, in his dissenting opinion, said the majority opinion’s comments on program and institutional duplication would lead to “the elimination of predominantly black institutions.”
He also predicted that the decision would bring about “a number of years of litigation-driven confusion and destabilization in the university systems of all the formerly de jure states, that will benefit neither blacks nor whites, neither predominantly black institutions nor predominantly white ones.”
Federal efforts to desegregate Mississippi’s higher-education system date to 1969, when the Department of Education’s precursor, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, ordered Mississippi and nine other states to develop college desegregation plans. Mississippi never filed an acceptable plan, and so the case was sent to the Justice Department for enforcement.
In 1975, a group of black citizens sued the state in federal court, demanding a more equitable higher-education system, and the Justice Department then joined the case. Since then, the case made its way from federal district court to the Supreme Court.
The case has been closely watched for its impact beyond Mississippi. A total of 19 states were eventually ordered by either the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare or federal courts to come up with desegregation plans. (See map on Page A18.) But agency officials and judges have never had a Supreme Court decision to rely on.
David S. Tatel, a Washington lawyer who headed HEW’s Office for Civil Rights under President Carter, said: “This case is very important because OCR has always had a debate between those who thought race-neutral admissions were all that was required and those who wanted more. As long as that debate raged, it was difficult to complete the process.”
Now that the Supreme Court has analyzed Mississippi, many experts on desegregation say that the Education Department should reopen desegregation cases that it closed in seven states and demand more action by seven other states for which the department is currently reviewing progress in desegregation.
Janell M. Byrd, a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said the Education Department “has been at odds with the standard set by the Supreme Court” and should demand that states do more to attract black students to predominantly white institutions and to improve programs at black colleges.
Mr. Orfield of Harvard, who has studied the Education Department’s enforcement of anti-bias laws, said the Office for Civil Rights was much too easy on states, focusing on whether they met certain minimal goals instead of seeking full opportunity for black students. “OCR’s clearing of states is not valid under the constitutional theory of the Supreme Court decision,” he said.
If the civil-rights office does not take action, he added, black citizens throughout the Southern and border states should file class-action lawsuits against their public systems of higher education.
Michael L. Williams, Assistant Secretary of Education for civil rights, said last week that the department was reviewing the decision and would apply it to the states that it was monitoring. He said it was “premature” to say whether any state that the department had cleared of illegal segregation would be examined again.
Mr. Williams added, however, that he did not think the Education Department had been lenient with the states. “There has been a running debate between OCR and its critics over what standard OCR has used,” he said. “OCR’s characterization of what it has done has always been different from what the activists said it was.”
The decision produced varying reactions among state officials. Gov. Kirk Fordice of Mississippi, a Republican, last week appointed three committees to prepare plans to bring the state into compliance with the law.
In other states, higher-education leaders said they thought they had already met desegregation requirements -- regardless of the criticism they face from civil-rights leaders. Gary S. Cox, executive director of the Kentucky Council on Higher Education, said his state had been making steady progress in desegregation and did not need more federal monitoring. “We certainly haven’t achieved everything we set out to achieve, but we never had a system like the Mississippi system,” he said.
Critics of standardized testing said they thought the decision made testing requirements in formerly segregated states vulnerable to legal challenges. Cinthia H. Schuman, executive director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, said the Supreme Court’s criticism of the way Mississippi has used standardized tests was extremely significant.
“The Supreme Court noticed that supposedly neutral measures like test scores can be a veil for racial discrimination,” she said.
Harvard’s Mr. Orfield said the ruling was particularly applicable to Florida, which requires students to pass tests to receive associate’s or bachelor’s degrees, or to move on to junior-level work in college. Black students have failed the tests at greater rates than white students.
“These overwhelmingly test-driven systems are now subject to attack, as they should be,” he said.
Thomas H. Fisher, director of testing programs for the Florida Department of Education, disagreed. He said that “meaningful standards” helped all students and could still be defended in court. “Standards give people something to work toward,” he said.
Legal experts and college officials were sharply divided on whether the Supreme Court ruling would help or hurt black colleges.
The lawyers who argued the case on behalf of civil-rights groups and the United States said the decision would help black colleges. Kenneth W. Starr, the U.S. Solicitor General, said: “There is no cause for concern, much less alarm on the part of historically black colleges. It is the policy of the United States and its enforcement agencies that historically black institutions have an important and positive role to play.”
Alvin O. Chambliss, Jr., who represented the civil-rights groups, said black colleges would benefit because the Supreme Court had forced Mississippi to come to terms with its past discrimination. “Everything’s on the table now,” he said.
Mr. Chambliss said that public black colleges throughout the South would benefit from political redistricting, which is expected to lead to the election of many more black legislators. The political clout, combined with the force of the Supreme Court ruling, he said, means that “the system will have to be serious about inclusion and not exclusion.”
Added Mr. Chambliss: “This decision is a great thing. It’s the most important thing since Brown v. Board of Education.”
Edward B. Fort, president of North Carolina A&T University, said he, too, was pleased with the decision. He said that North Carolina had helped his institution add new academic offerings -- including its first doctoral program -- to improve the quality of education for black and white students alike.
Mr. Fort said he expected the decision to lead other states to follow North Carolina’s example.
Others are much more pessimistic about what the future holds for black colleges. Mark D. Musick, president of the Southern Regional Education Board, said that even if states have the money and the will to create new programs, it takes years to plan and start up new academic ventures.
He also said that public black colleges in rural areas would have difficulty attracting white students, regardless of what new programs are added. Noting the location of Mississippi Valley State University, Mr. Musick said: “When you look at Itta Bena, Miss., what programs can you put there that will attract white students?”
Frederick S. Humphries, president of Florida A&M University, said he was worried about the decision’s language suggesting that Mississippi may have too many institutions. “When language like that is used, I certainly think it increases the vulnerability of public black colleges,” he said.
Mr. Humphries added that too many politicians wrongly think that black colleges are an anachronism since predominantly white colleges today recruit black students. But those institutions, he said, tend to go after the top black students, when “it’s the masses of black students that we need to educate.”
Stephen C. Halpern, who wrote a brief in the case on behalf of the Congressional Black Caucus and the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, said he feared many states would use the Supreme Court decision and tight economic times as excuses to close or merge black colleges.
Any mention of the value of black colleges “was conspicuously absent” from the decision, he said, and the Court noted the financial difficulties that states face in operating many different colleges.
“The overarching economic context is not going to be favorable. You can’t enhance black colleges on the cheap,” said Mr. Halpern, a professor of political science at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Mr. Halpern said black colleges and their supporters must become much more politically astute. “They need to organize on a state-by-state basis to insure that in the restructuring that now occurs, their institutions get a fair shake,” he said. “It will ultimately be a political contest, and I don’t know if they have what it takes to come out well in a political environment that has historically been hostile to their interests.”