756
Opinion of Scalia, J.
(Gilmore) that does not exist. In Bazemore v. Friday, supra, we addressed a dispute parallel in all relevant respects to this one. At issue there was state financing of 4-H and Homemaker youth clubs by the North Carolina Agricultural Extension Service, a division of North Carolina State University. In the Plessy era, club affiliations had been dictated by race; after 1964, they were governed by neutral criteria. Yet "there were a great many all-white and all-black clubs" at the time suit was filed. 478 U. S., at 407. We nonetheless declined to adopt Green's requirement that "affirmative action [be taken] to integrate" once segregated-by-law/still segregated-in-fact state institutions. 478 U. S., at 408. We confined Green to primary and secondary public schools, where "schoolchildren must go to school" and where "school boards customarily have the power to create school attendance areas and otherwise designate the school that particular students may attend." 478 U. S, at 408. "[T]his case," we said, "presents no current violation of the Fourteenth Amendment since the Service has discontinued its prior discriminatory practices and has adopted a wholly neutral admissions policy. The mere continued existence of single-race clubs does not make out a constitutional violation." Ibid.
The Court asserts that we reached the result we did in Bazemore "only after satisfying ourselves that the State had not fostered segregation by playing a part in the decision of which club an individual chose to join," ante, at 731—implying that we assured ourselves there, as the Court insists we must do here, that none of the State's practices carried over from de jure days incidentally played a part in the decision of which club an individual chose to join. We did no such thing. An accurate description of Bazemore was set forth in Richmond v. J. A. Croson Co., 488 U. S. 469 (1989): "mere existence of single-race clubs . . . cannot create a duty to integrate," we said Bazemore held, "in absence of evidence of exclusion by race," 488 U. S., at 503 (emphasis added)—
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