Freeman v. Pitts, 503 U.S. 467, 44 (1992)

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510

FREEMAN v. PITTS

Blackmun, J., concurring in judgment

I write separately for two purposes. First, I wish to be precise about my understanding of what it means for the District Court in this case to retain jurisdiction while relinquishing "supervision and control" over a subpart of a school system under a desegregation decree. Second, I write to elaborate on factors the District Court should consider in determining whether racial imbalance is traceable to board actions and to indicate where, in my view, it failed to apply these standards.

I

Beginning with Brown, and continuing through the Court's most recent school-desegregation decision in Board of Ed. of Oklahoma City Public Schools v. Dowell, 498 U. S. 237 (1991), this Court has recognized that when the local government has been running de jure segregated schools, it is the operation of a racially segregated school system that must be remedied, not discriminatory policy in some discrete subpart of that system. Consequently, the Court in the past has required, and decides again today, that even if the school system ceases to discriminate with respect to one of the Green-type factors, "the [district] court should retain jurisdiction until it is clear that state-imposed segregation has been completely removed." Green v. School Bd. of New Kent County, 391 U. S. 430, 439 (1968) (emphasis added); Raney v. Board of Ed. of Gould School Dist., 391 U. S. 443, 449 (1968); see ante, at 491.

That the District Court's jurisdiction should continue until the school board demonstrates full compliance with the Constitution follows from the reasonable skepticism that underlies judicial supervision in the first instance. This Court noted in Dowell: "A district court need not accept at face value the profession of a school board which has intentionally discriminated that it will cease to do so in the future." 498 U. S., at 249. It makes little sense, it seems to me, for the court to disarm itself by renouncing jurisdiction in one aspect of a school system, while violations of the Equal Protec-

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