1961 US Commission on Civil Rights Report Book 2 - University of ...

Negroes in the same situation." " The court suggested that residence
and academic preparedness have been uniformly approved as appropriate
standards for considering transfers and that there may be others.
Since the record clearly showed that the board had not considered
them on their individual merits, the applications of the 133 plaintiffs
who had exhausted administrative remedies were returned for reconsideration.*
8 *
The condemnation of initial assignment by a dual system of attendance
areas is essentially an interdiction of initial assignment by race.
Elimination of racial assignments in the first instance and the establishment
of definite standards for reassignment, applicable alike to whites
and Negroes, would seem to accomplish a constitutional operation of
the Durham public schools. Some district courts, however, continue to
permit initial assignments by race.
In Griffith v. Board of Education of Yancey County* 9 the Negro
plaintiffs exhausted their administrative remedies as required by the
Fourth Circuit rule and joined in a suit against the board for refusing,
because of their race, to assign them to particular schools. All plaintiffs,
grades i to 12, inclusive, were originally assigned by the board to a
two-room Negro school and their individual applications for transfer
were denied. The court ordered the admission of all of the high school
pupils to one of the two accredited white high schools in the county.
The order as to the high school students seems to have been based on
the inferiority of the two-room Negro school as compared with the white
high schools, rather than on the racial character of the assignments
made by the board. As to the elementary school pupils, the court
said: 70
. . . One would be naive not to feel that the . . . [two-room
school] was constructed for the sole use of the Negro children of
Yancey County who possess the elementary school qualifications,
and on its face it would appear that the board is attempting to
maintain a policy of segregation. . . . Accordingly in the light
of the overcrowded [white school] and the construction of the new
[two-room Negro] school, I am of the opinion that the matter of
the assignment of the minor plaintiffs qualified for admittance to
the elementary schools of Yancey County should be reconsidered
by the board. . . .
By its reference to the overcrowded condition of the white schools
and the apparently ample facilities of the Negro school, the court thus
seemed to countenance a possible initial assignment essentially on racial
grounds. If so, this decision was not in line with the rule later announced
by the Fourth Circuit in the Charlottesville case, condemning
the use of race as a criterion in original assignments. 71 27