Developments in the Law of School Desegregation

Eighteen years after the Brown decision declared that racially dual school systems violate constitutional rights of students and therefore must be abolished,\u27 the developments in this area of life and law still primarily involve efforts to find an answer to the practical problem which arose immediately after the Brown ruling: How does one abolish a dual school system? Today, relatively few people openly contend that public schools ought to be operated on a racially segregated basis, but the problem of identifying and implementing acceptable means of achieving desegregation has proved to be virtually unsolvable. Although the federal courts initially displayed an understandable reluctance to assume the burden of providing an effective solution, some of them lately have searched for answers to this problem with so much imagination and resolution that large segments of the public have been driven into near hysteria and many persons in the executive and legislative branches of the federal government have suffered acute political apprehension