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

In Northcross v. Board of Education of Memphis 72 a Federal district
court dismissed a suit asking for relief from the segregated operation
of the Memphis schools, on the ground that plaintiffs had not exhausted
their administrative remedies under the Tennessee pupil placement law.
It also held that the board's announced intention of using the placement
law was equivalent to a start toward desegregation, even though it
continued to make all assignment by race: 73
The Memphis Board . . . has fully realized it is under a clear
legal duty to initiate and to bring about an elimination of racial
segregation. The court finds it has already done that, as a matter
of fact, when they set up operations under the Tennessee pupil
placement plan.
The court expressly followed the Fourth Circuit rule with regard to
exhaustion of legal remedies. (That circuit's rule condemning initial
assignments based on race (the Charlottesville case) was not available
since it was handed down on the same day.) The Sixth Circuit, to
which Tennessee belongs, has not had occasion to rule on these questions.
Need for classifying schools.—Courts have found error in the rejection
of Negro applications for transfer to a white school when the grounds
for rejections were not applied to white students seeking admission to,
or already in, the school. 74 Among the grounds for rejection that
have been struck down are overcrowding, if new white students were
being admitted; 75 lack of mental or emotional stability or other psychological
criteria, when not shown to be apposite; 76 and low academic
achievement or mental capacity, when some white students in the school
had the same or lower achievement or mental capacity. 77
Underlying these decisions, although not expressly recognized in them,
appears to be the lack of a classification of schools to match the admission
criteria that were being applied. In the absence of such a classification
of schools, the school board that applies academic criteria to
Negroes seeking to enter a white school appears to be in the untenable
position of having implicitly classified all white schools as for superior
students only, and all Negro schools as for inferior students only, and
as having at least preliminarily determined that all white pupils are
superior to all Negro pupils. This, of course, would be an arbitrary
classification based on race alone. In the second Little Rock case, for
instance, it appeared that citywide tests showed a graduation in the
median IQ and achievement scores from Mann (the Negro school),
through Technical (the trade school), to Central and Hall (the white
schools), in that order. 78 But it was conceded in testimony "that in
all schools there would naturally be students who fell below and rose
above these median figures, and that there are bright, average, and dull
students in all of the schools." 78
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