356
Opinion of Souter, J.
D
In sum, for decades the School Board manifested sedulous resistance to the constitutional obligation to desegregate parish schools, which have never attained unitary status and are still subject to court order. When faced with the need to act alone in redrawing its voting districts, the Board showed no interest in the Police Jury plan, which made no sense for school purposes and was at odds with normal districting principles applied by the Board. The Board hired a cartographer in anticipation of drawing district lines significantly different from the Police Jury lines, and the Attorney General's preclearance of the Police Jury plan for the jury's use produced no apparent Board interest in adopting that same plan. When minority leaders sought a role in proposing a plan, the Board ignored them and when they produced concrete proposals prepared by the NAACP, the Board sidestepped with successive technical reasons culminating in a patently pretextual objection. It was only then, as its pretexts for resisting the NAACP were wearing thin, that the Board evidently scrapped its intention to obtain an original plan tailored to school district concerns and acted with unwonted haste on the year-old proposal to adopt the manifestly unsuitable Police Jury plan. The proposal received no public hearing support and nothing but objection from minority voters, who pointed out what the Board now agrees, that the Police Jury plan dilutes minority voting strength. The objections were unavailing and the Board adopted the dilutive plan.
There is no reasonable doubt on this record that the Board chose the Police Jury plan for no other reason than to squelch requests to adopt the NAACP plan or any other plan reflecting minority voting strength, and it would be incredible to suggest that the resulting submergence of the minority voters was unintended by the Board whose own expert testified that it understood the illegality of dilution. If, as I conclude below, see Part III, infra, dilutive but nonretrogressive in-
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