Learn about the case — historical background and documents
Legal Questions Before the Courts
What was the legal basis of the original 1952 lawsuit in Bush v. Orleans Parish School Board?
Attorney A.P. Tureaud, in his complaint filed in federal district court in September 1952, alleged that various Louisiana statutes and constitutional provisions mandating school segregation violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In an earlier lawsuit, Tureaud had argued that the Orleans Parish School Board was in violation of the “separate but equal” doctrine because black schools in New Orleans did not receive the same financial support that white schools received. At this time, federal courts held that racially separate schools were constitutional so long as black and white schools were “equal.” In fact, black and white schools in the South were far from equal—white schools were typically much better supported than black schools. But by the early 1950s, federal courts had consistently refused to order school desegregation even in the face of demonstrated inequality, preferring instead, on a few occasions, to require local school boards to equalize their schools.
Tureaud now argued that racially separate schools were inherently unequal, and he asked a federal court to conclude that state laws mandating school segregation violated the U.S. Constitution. Tureaud agreed to suspend proceedings on the lawsuit until the Supreme Court issued its decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which was pending before the Court.
According to the Supreme Court, was legally mandated school segregation constitutional?
In the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, a case involving challenges to school segregation in Delaware, Kansas, South Carolina, and Virginia, the Supreme Court concluded that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and thus unconstitutional. The Court explained: “Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of law; for the policy separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group.”
This decision meant that any legally mandated racial segregation in the nation’s public schools violated the Constitution. But the Supreme Court did not order segregated school districts to desegregate their schools immediately. Rather, in 1955, it stated that school districts involved in the Brown case should proceed with “all deliberate speed” to desegregate their schools.
Did the Brown v. Board decision require the desegregation of New Orleans schools, as argued by the plaintiffs in Bush v. Orleans Parish School Board?
In 1954, when the Supreme Court held in Brown v. Board of Education that statemandated school segregation violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution, Louisiana required racial segregation in public schools. The Brown decision called into question the legality of pupil assignments in Louisiana and every other state that required segregation. In response to Brown, the plaintiffs in Bush v. Orleans Parish School Board argued that the continuation of school segregation in New Orleans schools was unconstitutional. When the Orleans Parish School Board refused to desegregate their schools after the Brown decision, lawyers representing a group of black parents asked a federal court to order the board to do so. Judge Skelly Wright issued such an order in 1956 and cited the Brown decision as his authority.
The Supreme Court’s Brown decision extended only to states that required racial segregation in public schools or permitted individual schools districts to require segregation. In some states, public schools were racially segregated because of racially segregated neighborhoods. That type of school segregation, often called “de facto” segregation, as opposed to “de jure” (by law) segregation, was not unconstitutional according to the Brown decision. By the 1970s, in cases such as Keyes v. Denver School District No. 1, the Court challenged school segregation that resulted from segregated neighborhoods if the residential segregation was a result of government policy.
Did the Louisiana state legislature, as it asserted, have the authority to control the racial composition of the state’s schools in the aftermath of the Brown v. Board decision?
The various strategies devised by the state legislature to avoid school desegregation were declared unconstitutional by the federal courts.
In response to various court orders to desegregate New Orleans public schools, the Louisiana state legislature approved legislation and proposed constitutional amendments that asserted the state’s authority over governance of the public schools in Louisiana. These laws set up a prolonged contest with the federal courts. Among the most significant actions were (1) passing a statute that gave the state legislature, not the Orleans Parish School Board, authority to determine the racial composition of the New Orleans schools; and (2) passing a state statute that replaced the elected school board with a new school board composed of members of the state legislature.
The federal courts held that the statute that gave the state legislature, as opposed to the Orleans Parish School Board, authority to determine the racial composition of the New Orleans schools did not relieve the school board of its responsibility to comply with Judge Wright’s desegregation order. If this statute were construed to permit the school board to take no action to desegregate, then the desegregation mandate of the federal courts would be undermined.
In response to the statute that replaced the elected school board with a new school board composed of members of the state legislature committed to segregation, the federal courts also held that any action that interfered with the Orleans Parish School Board’s responsibility to desegregate the New Orleans schools was unconstitutional.
Did Louisiana have a right of “interposition” to prevent the federal government from carrying out an action that the state legislature held to be unconstitutional?
The November 30, 1960, decision of the three-judge district court stated that the theory of interposition had been repudiated by the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, which based its authority on “We the people,” not on a compact of states.
The Louisiana legislature asserted the right of interposition, claiming that a state could nullify a federal government action that, in the opinion of the state legislature, violated the Constitution. The theory of interposition had its roots in the nullification crisis of the antebellum era and was revived after 1954 by several southern legislatures as a means of resisting court-ordered desegregation. The state legislature of Louisiana concluded that racially segregated schools did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution as the Supreme Court had held in the Brown case, so long as black and white schools were equal. Thus, according to the legislature, when the Court in Brown held that racially segregated schools were inherently unequal, it misconstrued the U.S. Constitution.
According to the legislature’s interposition resolution, when Judge Wright, relying on the Brown decision, ordered the desegregation of the New Orleans schools, he was acting in an illegitimate manner because he was ordering that which the U.S. Constitution did not require. Confronted with what it believed to be an abuse of federal power, the state legislature concluded that it had a duty to “interpose” itself between Judge Wright and the school board of New Orleans—meaning that it must block implementation of Judge Wright’s desegregation order.
The three-judge district court decision of November 30, 1960, concluded that if a conflict arose between the federal courts and a state legislature over the meaning of the U.S. Constitution, the interpretation of the federal courts must control. To allow a state legislature to override the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the U.S. Constitution would cause great harm to the federal union and could lead to anarchy. If the state of Louisiana believed that the Supreme Court had misconstrued the meaning of the U.S. Constitution, the decision stated, the state’s proper recourse was to seek an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, not to disobey the Court’s order.
What did the federal courts decide in related cases?
In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court declared de jure school segregation unconstitutional, but the Court’s order to desegregate applied only to the school districts that were part of the four suits encompassed by Brown. The decision established a precedent, however, to which states needed to conform through voluntary desegregation or be subject to suits asking the federal courts to enforce desegregation. Although some school districts desegregated after the Brown decision without a specific court order requiring them to do so, most southern school desegregation took place as a result of a federal court ordering a school district to comply with the Brown decision. During the five years after the Brown decision, a few federal courts, mostly in the upper South and in Texas, issued orders requiring desegregation, but many of these orders were not immediately enforced. Similarly, although Judge Wright found the New Orleans schools unconstitutionally segregated in February 1956, the New Orleans schools remained racially segregated until November 1960.
In a few instances, resistance to court-approved desegregation was dramatic. In Little Rock, Arkansas, a federal judge approved a school desegregation plan that provided that nine black students would attend the previously all-white Central High School in September 1957. On the first day of school, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus deployed troops from the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the black students from entering the high school. When a federal court ordered Faubus to remove the National Guard, the Governor complied, but a mob then blocked the black students from entering the school. In response, President Dwight Eisenhower called in the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to protect the black students. In February 1958, with the troops still present and racial tensions still high, the Little Rock School Board asked the federal district court to permit the board to remove the black students from Central and to postpone desegregation until September 1960. A judge of the federal district court agreed to the request, citing the extreme hostility to school desegregation among whites in Little Rock. The NAACP appealed that decision of the district court. On September 29, 1958, the Supreme Court, in the case of Cooper v. Aaron, unanimously overturned the district court’s order permitting delay, and the Supreme Court ordered desegregation to proceed immediately. Although the Supreme Court agreed to hear very few school desegregation cases during the first several years after Brown, the Court’s decision in Cooper signaled that it would not permit defiance of federal court orders to subvert the desegregation process.
By 1960, some token school integration had taken place in most of the states that had legally required or authorized segregation. Louisiana was one of only five southern states—along with Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina—to have resisted school desegregation throughout the state. The great majority of school districts that were legally segregated in 1954, however, remained segregated well into the 1960s. In 1963, less than 2% of black students in the states of the former Confederacy attended desegregated schools.
What was the impact of the case?
The New Orleans school desegregation litigation did not establish any new legal precedents. The Supreme Court had already declared in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education that school desegregation was unconstitutional and other federal courts had already ordered school boards to desegregate in compliance with the Brown decision.
But the court-ordered desegregation of the New Orleans schools was nevertheless highly significant. First, New Orleans was the first Deep South city to desegregate its schools, and desegregation succeeded notwithstanding the relentless efforts of the state legislature and other state officials to resist. When the process of desegregation continued in New Orleans despite the fierce resistance of the state’s governor, attorney general, and state legislature, it signaled that opposition to school desegregation in the South would not thwart the federal courts’ orders that the Constitution be followed.
Bush v. Orleans Parish School Board and the Desegregation of New Orleans Schools