Washington et al. v. Seattle School District No. 1 et al. (458 U.S. 457)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided June 30, 1982 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 458 U.S. 457 · 102 S. Ct. 3187
- Decided
- June 30, 1982
- Term
- October Term 1981
- Vote
- 5–4
- Majority author
- Justice Blackmun
- Issue area
- Civil Rights
- Disposition
- Affirmed
- Outcome
- Petitioning party lost
- Ideological direction
- Liberal
- Constitutional ruling
- State/territorial law held unconstitutional
Opinion excerpt
Justice Blackmun delivered the opinion of the Court. We are presented here with an extraordinary question: whether an elected local school board may use the Fourteenth Amendment to defend its program of busing for integration from attack by the State. I A Seattle School District No. 1 (District), which is largely coterminous with the city of Seattle, Wash., is charged by state law with administering 112 schools and educating approximately 54,000 public school students. About 37% of these children are of Negro, Asian, American Indian, or Hispanic ancestry. Because segregated housing patterns in Seattle have created racially imbalanced schools, the District historically has taken steps to alleviate the isolation of minority students; since 1963, it has permitted students to transfer from their neighborhood schools to help cure the District’s racial imbalance. Despite these efforts, the District in 1977 came under increasing pressure to accelerate its program of desegregation. In response, the District’s Board of Directors (School Board) enacted a resolution defining “racial imbalance” as “the situation that exists when the combined minority student enrollment in a school exceeds the districtwide combined average by 20 percentage points, provided that the single minority enrollment ... of no school will exceed 50 percent of the student body.” 473 F. Supp. 996, 1006 (WD Wash.…
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