344
Opinion of Souter, J.
tion, Plaintiff's Brief on Remand 12; that is, the plan discriminates by abridging the rights of minority voters to participate in the political process and elect candidates of their choice. Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U. S. 30, 46-47 (1986).
The same population shifts that required the Police Jury to reapportion required the elected School Board to do the same. Although the Board had approached the Police Jury about the possibility of devising a joint plan of districts common to both Board and jury, the jury rebuffed the Board, see App. to Juris. Statement 172a (Stipulations 83-84), and the Board was forced to go it alone. History provides a good indication of what might have been expected from this endeavor.
As the parties have stipulated, the School Board had applied its energies for decades in an effort to "limit or evade" its obligation to desegregate the parish schools. Id., at 216a (Stipulation 237). When the Board first received a court order to desegregate the parish's schools in the mid-1960's, it responded with the flagrantly defiant tactics of that era, see id., at 216a-217a (Stipulations 236-237), and the record discloses the Board's continuing obstructiveness down to the time covered by these cases. During the 1980's, the degree of racial polarization in the makeup of the parish's schools rose, id., at 218a (Stipulations 241-243), and the disproportionate assignment of black faculty to predominantly black schools increased, id., at 217a-218a (Stipulation 240). While the parish's superintendent testified that the assignment of black faculty to predominantly black schools came in response to black parents' requests for positive black examples for their children, see App. 289, the black leaders who testified in these cases uniformly rejected that claim and insisted that, in accord with the parish's desegregation decree, black faculty were to be distributed throughout the parish's schools, to serve as models for white, as well as black, students, see id., at 326-327; 2 Tr. 126-128.
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