The State of Education in Halifax County 29
in maintaining segregated school districts in Halifax County. The Court’s “White refuge” finding informs a more in-depth analysis of the forces that brought the tripartite system into being and continue it today. Such an analysis would trace the origins of the segregated districts to discriminatory intent, and thus lead to a finding that maintaining the tripartite educational system in Halifax County violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. In sum, desegregation of Halifax County’s schools was never really achieved because both the state and the county permitted the continued existence of the White enclave in Roanoke Rapids.
UNITARY SYSTEM: ELIMINATING RACIAL DISCRIMINATION
“ROOT AND BRANCH”
The notion of “unitariness” has not been defined in detail by the courts; however, the Supreme Court’s 1968 decision in Green v. County School Board pronounced that a unitary system is one that has manifested Brown II’s mandate to eliminate the vestiges of racial discrimination “root and branch.” Green set forth six factors to scrutinize for the vestiges of racial discrimination in order to determine unitary status: faculty, staff, transportation, extracurricular activities, facilities and student assignment. The Court discussed most fully the last factor, as it was addressing whether a “freedom-of-choice” plan constituted adequate compliance with Brown II’s requirement that school boards “achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis.” The Court found given that no White children had requested to attend the former Black school, which was still attended by 85 percent of the county’s Black children, the plan had failed to “fashion steps which promise realistically to convert promptly to a system without a ‘White’ school and a ‘Negro’ school, but just schools.” 203
Cases since Green have addressed these factors and added other “discretionary factors” that courts may consider in determining unitary status, like “good faith” compliance with a desegregation order, student achievement and education quality. In 1999, North Carolina’s Western District Court found that the racial demographics of each school’s student, faculty and staff population should reflect district-wide demographics within a 15 percent margin. In 2002, North Carolina’s Eastern District Court rejected Franklin County school board’s petition for unitary status because, among other things, White principals and staff were assigned primarily to “White” schools and Black principals and staff to “Black” schools. That court also denied unitary status in the area of education quality on the grounds that gifted and talented programs were over 90 percent White, all Advanced Placement classes were over 80 percent White, and over 70 percent of the educable mentally disabled children were Black.
ORIGINS OF THE TRIPARTITE SYSTEM
As discussed above in the historical section of this report, Blacks living in the county – and even some who lived within Roanoke Rapids’ municipal boundaries – were barred from both the economic and educational opportunities that Roanoke Rapids’ White residents enjoyed. This is the reality to which the court referred when it said “[i]f segregation in public schools could be justified simply because of pre-Brown geographic structuring of school districts, the equal protection clause would have little meaning.”204 The creation of racialized school districts in Halifax was not a random geographic phenomenon; it was a direct result of racial oppression.205
The fact that the intentional creation of a White enclave of opportunity in Roanoke Rapids also had a substantial segregative effect on Halifax County and Weldon City school districts is legally significant when assessing whether a court could order an inter-district remedy such as merger.206 The pre-eminent inter-district case is Milliken v. Bradley. In that case, the Court struck down a district court order that consolidated 53 suburban Detroit school districts with the Detroit school system to remedy racial discrimination in Detroit’s dual school system. The district court was motivated by its conclusion that the only way to achieve a desirable racial balance within Detroit was to merge Detroit with Whiter school districts. In overturning that decision, the Supreme Court said that an inter-district remedy was only appropriate where
there has been a constitutional violation within one district that produces a significant segregative effect in another district. Specifically, it must be shown that racially discriminatory acts of the state or local school districts, or of a single school district, have been a substantial cause of interdistrict segregation.207
In Goldsboro City Bd of Ed v. Wayne County Bd of Ed, the City Board of Education filed a Fourteenth Amendment equal protection claim against the Wayne County (N.C.) Board of Education, alleging that the county school board’s refusal to