United States v. Yonkers Board of Education Opinion

    UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS

For the Second Circuit

*

Nos. 832, 833, 834—August Term, 1986 

(Argued: February 9, 1987
Decided: December 28, 1987) 

Docket Nos. 86-6136, 86-6138, 86-6156 

-----------* -----------

Yonkers Rr anch—National .Association for the 
Advancement of Colored Êeoeue^e^ al . ,

Yonkers board of Education; City of Yonkers; 
and Yonkers Community development Agency,

United States of America,
Plaintiff-Appellee,

Plaintiffs-Intervenors-Appellees,

—v.—

Defendants-Appellants.

MAR H  1988, , , , ,

NAACP



City of Yonkers; and Yonkers Community 
Development Agency,

Third Party, Plaintiffs-Appellants,

—v.—

United States Department of Housing and Urban 
Development; and Secretary of Housing and 
Urban development,

Third Party, Defendants-Appellees.

B e f o r e
*

Kearse, Pratt,* and Miner,
Circuit Judges.

*

Appeals from a judgment of the United States District 
Court for the Southern District of New York, Leonard B. 
Sand, Judge, finding the City of Yonkers liable for 
intentional racial segregation in subsidized housing and 
public schools, finding the Yonkers Board of Education 
liable for intentional racial segregation in public schools, 
see 624 F. Supp. 1276 (1985), and ordering, inter alia, 
construction of 200 units of subsidized family housing 
outside of Southwest Yonkers, see 635 F. Supp. 1577 
(1986), and desegregation of school system, including a 
system-wide voluntary magnet school program to be 
funded by the City and implemented by the Board, see 
635 F. Supp. 1538 (1986).

Affirmed.
--------•--------

* Judge Winter, originally a member of the panel, subsequently 
recused himself. Judge Pratt was appointed to the panel pursuant to 
Local Rule § 0.14(b).

6154



Clint Bolick, Washington, D.C. (William 
Bradford Reynolds, Assistant Attorney 
General, Walter W. Barnett, Joshua P. 
Bogin, Marie K. McElderry, United 
States Department of Justice, Washing­
ton, D.C., on the brief), fo r  Plaintiff- 
Appellee.

Michael H. SUSSMAN, Yonkers, New York 
(Sussman & Sussman, Yonkers, New 
York, on the brief), fo r  Plaintiffs- 
In tervenors-A ppellees.

JOHN H. Dudley, J r ., Detroit, Michigan 
(John B. Weaver, Mark T. Nelson, Butzel 
Long Gust Klein & Van Zile, Detroit, 
Michigan, on the brief), fo r  Defendant- 
Appellant Yonkers Board o f  Education.

Rex E. Le e , Washington, D.C. (Carter G. 
Phillips, Mark D. Hopson, Sidley & Aus­
tin, Washington, D.C., Gerald S. Hart­
man, Michael W. Sculnick, Thomas G. 
Abram, Vedder, Price, Kaufman, Kamm- 
holz & Day, New York, New York, Jay B. 
Hashmall, Corporation Counsel for the 
City of Yonkers, Yonkers, New York, on 
the brief), fo r  Defendants-Appellants- 
Third-Party-Plaintiffs-Appellants City o f  
Yonkers and Yonkers Community Devel­
opment Agency.

M. WILLIAM Munno , New York, New York 
(James F.X. Hiler, Ronald A. Nimkoff, 
Heidi B. Goldstein, Seward & Kissel, 
New York, New York, on the brief), fo r

6155



Joseph Galvin, Alfred T. Lam herd, Paul 
Weintraub, Frank Furgiuele, Joseph 
M .A. Furgiuele, Jerald Katzenelson and 
Salvatore Ferdico, and The Crestwood 
Civic Association, Inc. as Amicus Curiae 
on Behalf o f  Defendants-Appellants- 
Third-Party-Plaintiffs-Appellants.

Puerto Rican Legal Defense & Educa­
tion FUND, INC., New York, New York 
(Linda Flores, Jose Luis Morin, Kenneth 
Kimerling, New York, New York, of 
counsel) filed a brief fo r  the Organization 
o f Hispanic Parents o f  Yonkers as A m i­
cus Curiae on Behalf o f  Plaintiff- 
Appellee and Plaintiffs-Intervenors- 
Appellees.

HENRY MARK HOLZER, Brooklyn, New York 
(Daniel J. Popeo, George C. Smith, 
Washington Legal Foundation, Washing­
ton, D.C., of counsel) filed a brief fo r  
the Save Yonkers Federation and the Co­
alition o f  Concerned Yonkers Citizens on 
Behalf o f  Defendants-Appellants-Third- 
Party-Plain tiffs-A ppellants.

*

KEARSE, Circuit Judge:

Defendants City of Yonkers (the “City”), Yonkers 
Community Development Agency (“CDA”), and Yonkers 
Board of Education (the “Board”) appeal from a judg­
ment entered in the United States District Court for the

6156



Southern District of New York following a trifurcated 
bench trial before Leonard B. Sand, Judge, holding the 
City liable for racial segregation of housing in Yonkers, 
holding both the City and the Board liable for racial 
segregation of the Yonkers public schools, and ordering 
each defendant to take steps to remedy the segregation 
for which it was found liable. The district court held that 
the City, by its pattern and practice of confining subsi­
dized housing to Southwest Yonkers, had intentionally 
enhanced racial segregation in housing in Yonkers, in 
violation of Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 
(“Title VIII” or the “Fair Housing Act”), 42 U.S.C. 
§ 3601 et seq. (1982), and the Equal Protection Clause of 
the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Consti­
tution. The court held that the actions of the Board, 
including its decisions relating to individual schools, fac­
ulty assignments, and special education, and its selective 
adherence to a neighborhood-school policy in light of the 
City’s segregative housing practices, combined with its 
failure to implement measures to alleviate school segrega­
tion, constituted intentional racial segregation of the 
Yonkers public schools, in violation of Titles IV and VI of 
the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000c et seq. 
(“Title IV”) and § 2000d et seq. (“Title VI”) (1982), and 
the Equal Protection Clause. The court held that the City 
had contributed to the segregation of the Yonkers public 
schools by means of, inter alia, its segregative housing 
practices, and that its segregative intent was revealed by 
the foreseeable effects of its housing practices, its direct 
involvement with certain schools, and the mayor’s ap­
pointments to the Board of persons firmly committed to 
maintaining the segregated state of the schools that both 
reflected and enhanced the segregated residential pat­
terns. The court thus found the City liable for intentional

6157



racial segregation of the schools in violation of Title IV 
and the Equal Protection Clause.

To remedy the segregation in housing, the district court 
ordered principally that the City provide sites for 200 
units of public housing in nonminority areas; the order 
stated that if the City did not identify sites the court 
would do so. The court ordered that the City reallocate at 
least a substantial portion of its federal housing grant 
funds for the next several years to a fund to be used to 
foster the private development of low- and moderate- 
income housing in a way designed to advance racial 
integration.

To remedy the school segregation, the court ordered the 
Board to take steps toward the desegregation of each 
school within specified numerical parameters by the 1987- 
88 school year. To this end, the Board was ordered to 
create magnet schools and implement a program in which 
it would assign each student to a school from among 
those nominated by his or her parents. The court ordered 
the City to fund the school desegregation plan.

On appeal, the City and the Board raise a variety of 
objections to the district court’s rulings on liability and 
remedies. The City contends principally that the court (1) 
improperly imposed an affirmative duty on the City to 
build public housing outside of the City’s predominantly 
minority neighborhoods; (2) erroneously found (a) that 
Yonkers’s segregated housing patterns were the result of 
the City’s intentional discrimination, and (b) that the 
City’s housing decisions were a cause of school segrega­
tion; and (3) improperly considered the mayor’s Board 
appointments in holding the City liable for school segre­
gation. The Board contends principally that (1) the court 
erred in considering the City’s deliberately segregative

6158



housing practices as a factor relevant to the Board’s 
liability for school segregation, and (2) the court’s finding 
of segregative intent on the part of the Board was clearly 
erroneous.

We conclude that the district court properly applied the 
appropriate legal principles, that its findings of fact are 
not clearly erroneous, and that its remedial orders are 
within the proper bounds of discretion. We therefore 
affirm the judgment in all respects.

A. BACKGROUND

The present litigation, unique in its conjoined attack on 
the actions of state and municipal officials with respect to 
segregation in both schools and housing, brings into 
question acts, omissions, policies, and practices of the 
City and the Board of Education over five decades. The 
case was commenced by the United States in December 
1980, with the filing of a complaint alleging, inter alia, 
that the City and CDA had intentionally engaged in a 
pattern of selecting sites for subsidized housing that 
perpetuated and aggravated residential racial segregation, 
and that the City and the Board had, by their intention­
ally discriminatory acts and omissions, caused and per­
petuated racial segregation in the schools. In June 1981, 
the Yonkers Branch of the National Association for the 
Advancement of Colored People (“NAACP”) and an 
individual minority student, by her next friend, were 
allowed to intervene as plaintiffs on behalf of themselves 
and all others similarly situated, see 518 F. Supp. 191, 
201-03 (S.D.N.Y. 1981), and the action was subsequently 
certified as a class action.

6159



Trial on the liability issues was held over a period of 
some 14 months in 1983 and 1984. During the 90 trial 
days, evidence was heard from 84 witnesses; depositions 
of 38 additional witnesses were introduced; and thou­
sands of documents were received in evidence. In Novem­
ber 1985, in an exhaustive and well documented opinion 
reported at 624 F. Supp. 1276-1553, Judge Sand found 
the City and CDA liable for housing segregation and 
found the City and the Board liable for school segrega­
tion. Following hearings as to the appropriate remedies 
for these violations, the court ordered system-wide, com­
prehensive remedies. See Parts A .I.C. and v4.Il.G. below.

In view of the challenges made in these appeals to the 
sufficiency of the evidence to support the district court’s 
findings of intentional discrimination and the contentions 
that the remedies ordered are overly broad, we summarize 
at some length the evidence supporting both the findings 
and the imposition of system-wide remedies.

I. Housing Segregation

The City of Yonkers, New York, is a section of West­
chester County roughly 4 to 6 miles long by 3 to 3-‘/2 
miles wide, just north of New York City’s Bronx County. 
For purposes of this suit Yonkers is regarded as consisting 
of three basic geographic areas, referred to as East 
Yonkers, Northwest Yonkers, and Southwest Yonkers. 
Southwest Yonkers, which comprises less than one- 
quarter of the City’s land mass, is the City’s most densely 
populated and urban area. Characterized as containing 
the “downtown” or “inner city” area, it is the only 
section having any significant amount of industrializa­
tion.

6160



At trial, there was little dispute that, at least as of 1980, 
when this suit was commenced, the residents of Yonkers 
were largely segregated by race, with the minorities con­
centrated in Southwest Yonkers. United States Census 
figures for 1980 showed that minorities, defined as blacks 
or hispanics, made up 18.8% of Yonkers’s total popula­
tion; minorities made up 40.4% of the population of 
Southwest Yonkers but only 5.8% of East and Northwest 
Yonkers. Southwest Yonkers, while housing only 37.5% 
of Yonkers’s total population, housed 80.7% of 
Yonkers’s minority population.

The minority population of Yonkers grew to 18.8% in 
1980 from 2.9% in 1940. During this period, the concen­
tration of minorities in Southwest Yonkers increased as 
follows:

T ota l
M in o r ity
P ercen ta g e

M in o r ity  
P erc en ta g e  
o f  S o u th w e s t

M in o r ity  
P ercen ta g e  
O u ts id e  o f  
S o u th w e s t

1940. .. 2.9 3.5 2.0
1950... 3.2 4.5 1.6
1960... 4.5 6.7 2.8
1970... 10.2 19.8 3.9
1980... 18.8 40.4 5.8

Concentration has also been evident within the South­
west itself. In 1940, when minorities constituted only 
2.9% of Yonkers’s total population, two of the 10 census 
tracts in Southwest Yonkers had minority populations 
between 10% and 50%. In 1980, when minorities consti­
tuted 18.8% of Yonkers’s total population, four of the 10 
Southwest tracts had minority populations between 20 
and 50%, and five had minority populations of more 
than 50%. A census-tract map showing the 1980 concen­
trations is attached to this opinion as Appendix A.

6161



Northwest Yonkers and East Yonkers contained 14 
census tracts in 1980, divided into 32 sub-tracts. Of the 
32, only two had minority populations of 7% or more. 
One, located in Northwest Yonkers, had a minority popu­
lation of 28.6%, most of whom lived in a neighborhood 
abutting a Southwest Yonkers tract that had a minority 
population of more than 50%. The other, a neighborhood 
in East Yonkers known as Runyon Heights, had a minor­
ity population of 79.8%. Runyon Heights was a middle- 
income community founded early in the century on a 
large tract of land owned by a state senator who regularly 
brought busloads of black residents from Harlem for 
picnics at which he auctioned off parcels of land to them. 
Runyon Heights is bounded to the north by a white 
neighborhood called Homefield. The original deeds for 
many Homefield properties contained restrictive cove­
nants prohibiting the sale of such properties to minorities, 
and as Runyon Heights developed, the Homefield Neigh­
borhood Association purchased and maintained a four- 
foot strip of land as a barrier between the streets of the 
two neighborhoods. “To this day, Runyon Heights streets 
terminate in a dead-end just below this strip.” 624 F. 
Supp. at 1410.

The current location of low-income subsidized housing 
in Yonkers corresponds largely to its concentrations of 
minority residents. As of 1982, the City had 6,800 units 
of subsidized housing; of these, 6,566 units, or 96.6%, 
were located in or adjacent to Southwest Yonkers. A map 
showing the City’s subsidized housing sites is attached to 
this opinion as Appendix B. Only two subsidized housing 
projects were not in or adjacent to Southwest Yonkers. 
One was a family project located in Runyon Heights; the 
other, also in East Yonkers, was a project for senior

6162



citizens, the majority of whose residents had been ex­
pected to be, and were, white. Block-by-block maps for 
1950-1980, showing more detail than the census tracts and 
sub-tracts, revealed that all sites approved by the City for 
low-income or low-and-middle-income family housing 
were in or very near neighborhoods that already had high 
percentages of minority residents.

Given the facts as to Yonkers’s segregated housing 
patterns, most of the trial evidence on housing issues 
concerned whether the City’s subsidized housing deci­
sions bespoke a racially segregative intent.

A. Evidence as to the City’s Subsidized Housing 
Decisions

During the pertinent periods, Yonkers’s governing 
body was its City Council (“Council”), comprising the 
mayor, elected in a City-wide election, and 12 council- 
men, each elected by one of the City’s 12 wards. The 
Yonkers Planning Board (“Planning Board”) consisted of 
seven nonpaid citizens appointed by the mayor. The 
Yonkers Municipal Housing Authority (“MHA”), a public 
corporation organized in the 1930’s pursuant to New 
York State’s Public Housing Law, was the entity autho- 
rized'to propose, construct, and operate public housing in 
Yonkers.

Under state law, federal funding could not be requested 
for a site proposed by MHA until the site was either (1) 
approved by a majority vote of both the Planning Board 
and the Council, or (2) approved by at least three- 
quarters of the Council if less than a majority of the 
Planning Board approved. According to the testimony of 
one member of the Council, the opposition of any coun-

6163



oilman to a project proposed for his own ward was 
routinely honored by the other Council members.

1. Housing Decisions in 1948-1958

Prior to 1949, the City had erected two housing pro­
jects, both in Southwest Yonkers. The second came about 
apparently as community leaders’ response to concerns 
expressed in the late 1930’s about difficulties blacks were 
encountering in obtaining decent and affordable housing 
in the private market. Thus, “the City resolved to build a 
public housing project ‘for Negroes’ and set about find­
ing a suitable site on which to do so. . . . Various sites 
were rejected on the ground that the level of minority 
concentration there was not sufficiently high, and the site 
eventually selected in 1940 was in one of the most heavily 
minority areas of Southwest Yonkers.” 624 F. Supp. at 
1312.

In 1949, pursuant to the National Housing Act of 1949 
(“ 1949 Housing Act”), ch. 338, 63 Stat. 413 (codified, as 
amended, at 42 U.S.C. § 1441 et seq. (1982)), which 
provided federal funds for urban renewal, the City ap­
plied for the reservation of funds to build 750 units of 
low-income housing. Its application was approved, but it 
was not to receive the funds until it had officially desig­
nated specific sites and these were approved by the federal 
Public Housing Administration (a predecessor of the 
United States Department of Housing and Urban Devel­
opment (collectively “HUD”)). The City’s initial deadline 
for submitting approved sites was August 31, 1950. In 
February 1950, MHA began proposing sites for the con­
struction of these units.

MHA’s first proposed site was a vacant, largely City- 
owned, parcel of land located in an overwhelmingly white

6164



area of Northwest Yonkers. The City’s ownership and the 
nonuse of the land would have made it a relatively 
inexpensive building site and avoided any residential dis­
placement and relocation problems. Neighborhood 
groups, however, swiftly opposed designation of this site, 
stating that the new housing would be occupied by per­
sons coming from slum areas and that the old slums 
would continue to exist. The groups recommended clear­
ance of the existing slum areas and the construction of 
new housing on those sites. The Planning Board rejected 
MHA’s proposed site, citing the parcel’s nonconformity 
with planning standards such as sufficiency of school and 
shopping facilities.

The next two sites proposed by MHA in 1950 were 
located in white neighborhoods of Southwest Yonkers. 
Initially, the councilmen of the two wards in which these 
sites were located recommended approval. As to one site, 
however, residents of the area appeared at a Planning 
Board meeting to express their opposition on the ground 
that the terrain was irregular and that the presence of 
such housing would tend to harm property values in the 
area; their councilman withdrew his support for the 
project, and the site was not approved. The other pro­
posed site was initially approved by both the Planning 
Board and the Council. However, when an attempt was 
made to enlarge the approved area, community groups 
opposed both the enlargement and the original site desig­
nation, principally citing the likely deterioration of prop­
erty values. Eventually, the councilman from this ward 
withdrew his support, the Planning Board voted unani­
mously to disapprove the requested expansion, and MHA 
abandoned its proposal for even the originally approved 
project.

6165



By December 1950, the City had approved just one 
project, to which there had been no community opposi­
tion, for 274 units. Its site, previously zoned for industrial 
use, was in a section of Southwest Yonkers having one of 
the highest concentrations of minorities.

After all of the other MHA-proposed sites had been 
rejected, a federal official warned that the City would 
lose its reservation of funding for the remaining 476 units 
unless it acted to put additional units into development 
immediately. The City’s response was to expand the 
previously approved Southwest Yonkers project to 415 
units, notwithstanding a prior Planning Board recom­
mendation that no more than 250 units be placed on any 
site.

In the period 1951 to 1953, MHA proposed 9 more sites 
for subsidized low-income housing in predominantly 
white neighborhoods, four in Southwest Yonkers and five 
in Northwest and East Yonkers. Eight of these proposals 
prompted vigorous opposition by community civic and 
social groups, who sent petitions and resolutions to the 
Planning Board and the councilmen, contending that 
such projects in their areas would “lead to the eventual 
deterioration of the surrounding community by the ele­
ment which they attract.” None of MHA’s proposed sites 
was approved by the City.

In the meantime, between 1,200 and 3,000 applications 
had been received for the 415 units that had been ap­
proved. Notwithstanding recognition by the Planning 
Board and the public of the “desperate need” for addi­
tional subsidized housing, no other sites were approved. 
The City thereby lost allocation of federal funds for the 
remaining 335 units of its original 750-unit allocation 
under the 1949 Housing Act.

6166



In 1956, the City was able to renew its reservation of 
funds for 335 units, and MHA promptly proposed four 
new sites. One of these was quickly rejected because it 
was in the path of a proposed highway. The remaining 
three prompted strong community opposition. Two of 
these, including one described by HUD as “extremely 
desirable” for subsidized housing, were in all-white neigh­
borhoods of East Yonkers. The residents of both areas 
vigorously voiced their opposition at rallies, in petitions, 
by telegram, and by attending Council meetings in num­
bers ranging from 400 to 1,000. The City rejected these 
two sites.

The fourth proposed site was in Runyon Heights, the 
predominantly black community in East Yonkers. Repre­
sentatives of the neighborhood opposed the building of 
low-income housing there on the ground that predomi­
nantly white communities had successfully opposed hav­
ing such projects in their neighborhoods and Runyon 
Heights should not be the only community in which such 
a project would be built. They contended that it would be 
preferable to integrate Runyon Heights into the com­
munities surrounding it and that the placement of low- 
income housing in Runyon Heights would have the 
contrary effect of enhancing its racial isolation. The City 
rejected this site as well.

At least four other sites for low-income housing were 
formally considered in 1957; none was approved by the 
City.

In 1958, MHA proposed five sites, four new ones plus 
one that had previously been rejected because of conflict­
ing highway plans. An MHA official described the sites to 
the Planning Board as “ ‘the least objectionable’ of those 
surveyed” but nonetheless predicted that there would be

6167



“ ‘a lot of objections on the grounds of race or age in 
certain sites.’ ” 624 F. Supp. at 1299.

Two of MHA’s proposed sites in Southwest Yonkers— 
one in a predominantly white area, and the other in a 
predominantly minority area—were disapproved by the 
Planning Board because they lay in the paths of proposed 
highways. The Council, however, by a three-fourths vote, 
overrode the Planning Board’s opposition to these two 
sites; it approved family housing units for the site in the 
predominantly minority neighborhood and senior citizen 
units for the site in the predominantly white neighbor­
hood.

The other three sites proposed by MHA in 1958 were 
approved by the Planning Board. Two of these sites were 
in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods, one in East 
Yonkers and described by the City’s Planning Director as 
“ideal” in terms of transportation, shopping, recreation, 
and schools, and the other in Southwest Yonkers; the 
third site was in Runyon Heights. All met with opposition 
from the residents of their respective neighborhoods. 
From the two white areas, taxpayer and civic groups 
wrote their councilmen shortly before the Council was to 
vote, describing their general opposition as follows:

We personally prefer a public referendum with 
time to acquaint each and every citizen with the full 
facts on public housing. Where will these tenants 
come from? How will we provide schools? How 
much will it cost us over the years? What safeguards 
do we have against our having to absorb the over­
flow from Puerto Rico or Harlem?

The Council voted to reject the sites proposed for the 
white neighborhoods. It approved the project proposed 
for Runyon Heights.

6168



Thus, in 1958, the City finally approved sufficient 
family housing sites to use the remainder of the 750 units 
that had been allocated to it for 1949. All 750 units were 
constructed in neighborhoods of high minority concentra­
tion; the City had rejected all sites proposed for family 
housing in any neighborhood not already having a high 
minority concentration.

2. Housing Decisions in 1958-1967

For the next several years, MHA and the City concen­
trated on finding sites for senior citizen housing. The 
councilmen and the public equated senior citizen housing 
with housing for whites, and in fact, few of the residents 
of Yonkers’s senior citizen housing projects have been 
minorities.

Such housing, so long as not denominated “low- 
income,” was not perceived as being for minorities and 
met with little or no community opposition. In 1961, for 
example, the City approved a senior citizen housing site 
for 300 units in a minority neighborhood of Southwest 
Yonkers; though the site abutted a predominantly white 
neighborhood, the only opposition came when expansion 
of the project was proposed and residents complained of 
area overcrowding. In 1963, however, when MHA pro­
posed eight senior citizen sites, four in East Yonkers and 
four in white neighborhoods of Southwest Yonkers, a 
local news article, headlined “8 Possible Sites Picked for 
Low-Rent Housing,” reported that these locations might 
also be considered to house families displaced by urban 
renewal. Public protests followed, including a letter from 
a community association representing more than 2,000 
families expressing concern that “ [t]o penetrate the com­
munity with subsidized housing would tend to deteriorate

6169



realty values and adversely affect the character of th[e] 
community.” Six of the proposed sites were withdrawn.

In 1964, the City sought federal funds to begin a new 
stage of urban renewal. When its application was rejected 
due to its poor record with respect to building subsidized 
housing for displaced residents, the City began once again 
to look for suitable sites for family housing. In 1965, 
MHA proposed eleven sites, including five in East 
Yonkers or white areas of Southwest Yonkers and four in 
minority areas of Southwest Yonkers. Protests and peti­
tions were lodged against the five white-area sites on 
grounds of potential overcrowding and the effect on 
property values. A news report quoted one resident of 
East Yonkers as complaining that the City wanted to put 
in her neighborhood “ ‘everything [her family had] tried 
to get away from’ ” by moving from urban areas to East 
Yonkers, and another resident as saying “ ‘it wasn’t that 
she didn’t believe in racial or social or economic integra­
tion . . . but [that] those people from Yonkers would feel 
so out of place here . . .  it would not be fair to them.’ ” 
624 F. Supp. at 1303. The Planning Director supported 
the East Yonkers sites; the Planning Board approved only 
the four sites that were in minority areas of Southwest 
Yonkers.

These four minority-area sites were then approved by a 
committee of the Council and one was approved by the 
Council itself. Before any of the sites could be formally 
submitted to HUD, however, HUD wrote the City sug­
gesting “scattered sites” instead of site concentration in 
Southwest Yonkers because “ [relocation feasibility, even 
though quantitatively adequate, falls short of acceptabil­
ity if racial containment will result from the proposed 
provision of relocation housing.” In response, a subcom-

6170



mittee of CDA, the coordinating agency for all of 
Yonkers’s urban renewal projects, compiled a list of 19 
sites scattered throughout Yonkers; however, when this 
list was made public it caused “alarm in the community.” 
According to one news report, at a meeting of Yonkers 
housing agencies, “fear was expressed by several speakers 
that the public is not yet ready to accept the federal 
government’s plan for racial and economic integration on 
a citywide basis.” None of the 19 sites was approved.

In 1967, the Council finally approved three sites from 
among those proposed by MHA in 1965. Despite the 
Council’s awareness of the federal preference for scat­
tered sites, the three sites approved were located in 
densely occupied, heavily minority sections of Southwest 
Yonkers. HUD refused to approve the sites.

3. Housing Decisions in 1968-1974

During the period 1968 to 1974, the City turned to 
other federal programs for subsidized housing. CDA 
sought out private sponsors for a combination of low- 
and-moderate-income family projects; it focused its ef­
forts solely on sites in Southwest Yonkers.

Proposed sites that were in the Southwest’s predomi­
nantly white areas drew heated community opposition. 
Notwithstanding the view expressed by former council­
man Edward O’Neill that race played no role in site 
selections—because “ ‘nothing was ever expressed for the 
record to indicate that it did play a role,’ ” 624 F. Supp. 
at 1311—several City officials testified that race was a 
factor. Some stated that their constituents tended to 
equate low-income housing with minorities. Others “pub­
licly identified the issue before them as being whether the 
residents of Yonkers were ‘ready’ for the economic and

6171



racial integration being urged upon the City” by HUD 
and groups such as the NAACP and the Council of 
Churches. Id. at 1310.

CDA’s director, Walter Webdale, testified to his view 
that the high level of emotionalism exhibited at public 
meetings indicated that residents were concerned about 
far more than mechanical matters such as the size of the 
street or the availability of public utilities, and that 
“racial considerations d[id] come into play.” He gave as 
an example the reaction to a site proposal for the north­
ern end of Southwest Yonkers which, though just a few 
blocks from a predominantly minority area, was immedi­
ately surrounded by a white neighborhood. A Catholic 
Church group, led by their pastor, opposed use of this site 
for family housing and urged that it be used for a senior 
citizen project instead. The group told Webdale they 
opposed family housing because they “feared an influx of 
blacks into the neighborhood.”

Another proposed site called Rockledge, located in a 
predominantly white area of the Southwest, was initially 
supported by the ward councilman, Dominick Iannacone. 
Iannacone testified, however, that he received “flack” 
from his constituents. Some complained about the loss of 
the proposed site as a parking facility; others, “who knew 
him better,” stated that “they didn’t want the housing 
because they didn’t want any blacks there.” 624 F. Supp. 
at 1321. Thereafter, concerned that he would not be 
reelected if he supported Rockledge, Iannacone withdrew 
his support, citing his constituents’ concern about loss of 
parking. Using the informal veto power enjoyed by any 
councilman in whose ward a project was proposed, he 
“buried” the matter in a Council committee of which he 
was chairman. At trial, he “acknowledged that his pub-

6172



licly stated reasons for opposing the project were pretex- 
tual, and that his opposition in fact was in response to his 
constituents’ racially influenced opposition.” Id. at 1322.

In the end, CDA’s efforts resulted in the construction 
of eight low-and-moderate-income family projects; all 
were in Southwest Yonkers and all were in or close to that 
area’s predominantly minority neighborhoods.

Other City activities included consideration in 1969 of 
subsidized housing for the relocation of 1,000 families 
from Southwest to other parts of Yonkers; the City’s goal 
was to ensure plant expansion space in Southwest Yonkers 
for one of the City’s largest employers, which threatened 
to move out of Yonkers. A private consulting firm sur­
veyed 98 possible sites, 76 of which were located in East 
or Northwest Yonkers. A City Council agenda noted that 
consideration of sites in nonminority neighborhoods had 
generated a “great deal of controversy” ; neighborhood 
opposition was expressed by citizens’ committees and the 
presentation of petitions by more than 3,000 residents. 
Proposals from local businesses for different sites, some 
“located deep in Yonkers’[s] ghetto areas,” prompted “a 
passionate debate over racism.”

Alfred Del Bello, mayor of Yonkers from 1970 to 1974, 
testified that he abandoned the 98-site survey and focused 
instead on four sites within a five-block radius of the 
predominantly minority downtown section of Southwest 
Yonkers. The State Urban Development Corporation 
agreed to sponsor these sites despite the known concern 
of the Planning Board that the locations chosen were 
inconsistent with the goal of commercial and industrial 
revitalization of Yonkers; construction was begun without 
consultation with the Planning Board. Del Bello testified 
that he had settled on the four sites in minority areas

6173



because he “was dedicated to producing housing, and [he] 
had to find a political course that would allow us to get it 
constructed.” He stated that “race was definitely a con­
sideration in many of the demonstrations and visible 
opposition that we had.”

In 1971, HUD warned the City that Yonkers would lose 
millions of dollars in federal funding unless it provided a 
more balanced distribution of its subsidized family hous­
ing. City efforts to find sites acceptable to HUD included 
some dozen meetings in nonminority neighborhoods. One 
official described these meetings as chaotic and carrying a 
pervasive feeling of “strong fear” on the part of the 
residents; his perception was that “racial” motivations 
were “very thick in the air.”

Eventually, in 1972, the City approved construction of 
334 units of subsidized housing on a site that was bor­
dered on the north by a heavily minority area and on all 
other sides by neighborhoods that were predominantly 
white. This site was approved over the opposition of 
residents of the predominantly white neighborhoods, the 
only minority housing site approved over such opposi­
tion. Shortly thereafter, the common view being that the 
councilman in whose ward that site was located had little 
chance for reelection, the councilman resigned to take an 
appointed City position. In 1973, a new mayor, Angelo 
Martinelli, was elected, having promised during his cam­
paign to impose a moratorium on all subsidized housing 
in Yonkers. The 334 units approved in 1972 were the last 
subsidized housing for families constructed in Yonkers.

4. Housing Decisions in 1974-1982

In 1974, the Housing and Community Development 
Act (“ 1974 Housing Act”), Pub. L. No. 93-383, 88 Stat.

6174



633 (codified, as amended, in scattered sections of 42 
U.S.C.), replaced previous federal urban renewal pro­
grams. Designed in part to expand housing opportunities 
for minorities, this statute allowed a community, inter 
alia, to receive certificates (called “Section 8 Certifi­
cates”) to be distributed to eligible families or individuals 
who could then choose an apartment in any participating 
building and have part of the rent subsidized by the 
federal government. See 42 U.S.C. § 1437f. In 1975, the 
Yonkers Department of Development, an agency formed 
in 1971 during HUD’s pressure for scattered sites for 
public housing, applied for 100 Section 8 Certificates, 50 
for senior citizens and 50 for families. HUD reserved 
these certificates for the City, pending approval by the 
Council.

The Council, however, refused to approve use of Sec­
tion 8 Certificates by families. Two City officials who 
attended a Council meeting at which the certificates were 
discussed testified that many councilmen had been “con­
cerned about the possibility that members of the minority 
community would, in fact, seek and probably find units 
on the east side of the city.”

Accordingly, during the next several years, the City 
either applied for no Section 8 Certificates for families, 
or applied for and received family certificates but used 
few of them, or was denied further certificates because of 
its nonuse of prior certificates. In 1981, after MHA, at 
the urging of HUD, applied to HUD for Section 8 
Certificates for both families and senior citizens, the 
Council passed a resolution forbidding MHA to apply for 
certificates for families. To the extent that the City 
allowed minority families to use any of the family certifi­
cates it had received, it referred those families only to

6175



buildings that were located in Southwest Yonkers; only 
white families used certificates in East or Northwest 
Yonkers.

The 1974 Housing Act also allowed a community to 
receive funds for housing construction. During the period 
1974 to 1979, the City built four senior citizen housing 
projects using such funds. All four were in Southwest 
Yonkers.

In 1975, an additional senior citizen project was pro­
posed by a private developer for East Yonkers. It was 
supported by the Planning Board as “well suited for 
Housing for the Elderly vis-a-vis public transportation, 
shopping, recreation, etc. as well as its location in the 
eastern half of the city.” The developer, however, had 
filed a fair housing statement with HUD, expressing his 
hope to attract elderly blacks and hispanics from South­
west Yonkers and achieve a 20% minority representation 
in the project. Local residents opposed the project on the 
ground that it contained the “seeds of a ghetto,” and the 
project was killed by the refusal of the City’s Zoning 
Board to grant minor zoning variances for parking, and 
by the Council, which criticized the project on the 
ground—squarely contradicted by the planning experts— 
that it was unsuitable for senior citizen housing because, 
inter alia, there was an “unsightly car lot” nearby. The 
project was not built.

In June 1980, HUD advised the City that continued 
receipt of federal funding would be conditioned on the 
City’s taking “all actions within its control” to construct 
100 units of subsidized housing for families “outside of 
areas of minority concentration.” Although the City 
signed a contract with HUD containing such an undertak­
ing, and several sites were thereafter proposed, no such

6176



housing was built. One such site was disapproved by the 
Council after receiving the “ [c]ustomary community op­
position.” Three others, out of a list of 14 submitted to 
HUD by CDA, were tentatively found acceptable by 
HUD, but their use for low-income housing was thwarted 
by Council zoning actions. For one site, the Council 
approved a zoning change so that it eventually became a 
shopping center instead. For another, the Council refused 
to approve a zoning change to a category consistent with 
development as subsidized housing. The third site tenta­
tively approved by HUD was the site of School 4, which 
had been closed in 1976 and remained vacant, costing the 
City $40,000 to $50,000 per year in maintenance; this site 
was already in a zoning category that would permit a 
housing project. It was also in an area that was 98% 
white. In 1979, as soon as the School 4 property was 
mentioned as a possible site for low-income housing, the 
Council voted to remove it from the multifamily zoning 
category in order “to ‘give the community some peace of 
mind.’ ” 624 F. Supp. at 1359.

In 1982, a developer expressed interest in the School 4 
site for luxury condominiums priced at more than 
$100,000. The Council bypassed the Planning Board and 
took the unprecedented step of creating a citizens’ com­
mittee, composed of five white residents of the area, to 
assess proposals for the use of the property. Four of the 
five committee members had no experience in planning or 
zoning, and the committee was not advised to consult the 
Planning Board. The committee recommended the sale 
because condominiums priced at $100,000 would attract 
the kind of people “that we would like to live in the 
neighborhood.”

6177



Prior to Council action on the proposed sale, a council­
man whose ward was near School 4 wrote his constituents 
urging them to attend the Council meeting, explaining 
that the NAACP opposed the sale on the ground that 
low-income housing should be built instead. At the meet­
ing, a videotape of which is in the record, the predomi­
nantly white audience overflowed the room. The 
discussion was emotionally charged, with frequent refer­
ences to the effect that subsidized housing would have on 
the “character” of the neighborhood. The final speaker 
from the audience, a white proponent of the sale, stated 
that the Bronx had been ruined when blacks moved there 
and that he supported the condominium proposal because 
he did not want the same thing to happen in Yonkers. The 
audience responded with an ovation. During the discus­
sion that followed, when one councilmember pointed out 
that the current zoning of the site was inconsistent with 
the condominium proposal (the Council having, as noted 
above, removed the site from the multifamily zoning 
category as soon as it was suggested for low-income 
housing), another councilmember responded, “ ‘we will 
change that zone when the concept fits the people, not 
before.’ ” 624 F. Supp. at 1363.

The Council voted 11-2 to sell the site for luxury 
housing. A majority of those who voted for the sale 
stated that “the will of the community” should be hon­
ored. Consummation of the sale has been delayed pend­
ing resolution of this suit.

B. The District Court’s Findings as to Housing

After an extensive review of the evidence, Judge Sand 
ruled that, in view of the “consistent and extreme” 
segregative effect of the City’s actions, which catered

6178



consistently to community positions that were in signifi­
cant part racially motivated, plaintiffs had sustained their 
burden of proving that the segregated housing pattern in 
Yonkers had been caused or exacerbated by the City’s 
pattern and practice of discrimination on the basis of race 
in its decisions on the location of subsidized housing. Id. 
at 1369-73. He found that this pattern had begun with the 
City’s first selection of subsidized housing sites under the 
1949 Housing Act and had continued through its 1982 
attempt to sell the School 4 property for luxury housing. 
Id. at 1373.

The court rejected each of the City’s arguments that 
persons and factors other than the City- had been the 
cause of Yonkers’s segregated housing pattern. It found 
that the cause was not HUD encouragement of subsidized 
housing construction in Southwest Yonkers, id. at 1328- 
30; rather, HUD had urged scattered construction sites, 
and the City had repeatedly risked the loss of federal 
funding by its refusal to select more widely distributed 
sites, e.g., id. at 1323, 1347, 1356. Nor was the cause a 
lack of private developer interest in areas outside South­
west Yonkers, id. at 1330-31; CDA had sought out devel­
opers only for Southwest Yonkers, id., and the City had 
thwarted the efforts of a developer who sought to build 
an East Yonkers project intended to attract 20% of its 
residents from minority groups, id. at 1350-51. Nor could 
the housing patterns be attributed to the desire of minor­
ity communities for concentration of subsidized housing 
in Southwest Yonkers; minority groups had begun at least 
as early as 1956 to express concern about the segregative 
effects of locating subsidized housing in heavily minority 
areas and had expressed a desire to “hav[e] the opportu­
nity to live elsewhere in Yonkers.” Id. at 1332-33. Nor was

6179



there, as the City contended, a lack of suitable sites in 
East Yonkers, id. at 1333-37; some of the sites rejected by 
the Council had been considered by the planners to be 
“ideal,” e.g., id. at 1300.

The court also rejected the City’s argument that its site- 
selection decisions were made pursuant to a race-neutral 
“ legitimate planning strategy” for urban renewal, id. at 
1337-42, for the City’s site selections, far from revitaliz­
ing Southwest Yonkers, had brought revitalization efforts 
to a halt, id. at 1310, 1337. Rather, the court found that 
whenever a site was proposed for a predominantly white 
area, strong community opposition emerged. Id. at 1369. 
Though this opposition was not “based wholly upon 
race,” race was “a significant factor,” id. at 1371 (empha­
sis in original); the opposition was “based, at least in 
significant part, upon fear of an influx of minorities into 
what were (and remain today) overwhelmingly white 
neighborhoods,” id. at 1313. The court found that “City 
officials consistently responded to that opposition.” Id. at 
1371. The inference that racial animus was a significant 
element in the community opposition to which City offi­
cials were responding was drawn from, inter alia, direct 
testimony to that effect, evidence of overtly racist com­
ments, the racially divided quality of private housing in 
Yonkers, and a general pattern in which only sites pro­
posed in the predominantly white Northwest or East 
Yonkers or the white areas of Southwest Yonkers engen­
dered opposition. Id. at 1311-12. The court found that 
City officials “came to view racially influenced opposi­
tion to subsidized housing in East Yonkers as a ‘fact of 
life,’ ” id. at 1316, and made “conscious decisions” to 
concentrate on “ ‘politically feasible’ ” sites, id. at 1313. 
In addition, the court found that “numerous City offi-

6180



cials not only responded to, but, in the words of the 
campaign literature of some, ‘led the fight against subsi­
dized housing in East Yonkers.’ ” Id. at 1373.

The court found further evidence of the City’s intent to 
preserve segregation in housing in its conduct with regard 
to Section 8 Certificates. Its cut-off of applications for 
family certificates and its failure to use any already 
obtained family certificates for minority families outside 
of Southwest Yonkers were found “inexplicable except by 
reference to the anticipated race of the certificate hold­
ers,” id. at 1347, i.e., “inexplicable except on the basis of 
fear that minorities might use the certificates to relocate 
to East Yonkers,” id. at 1373. Similarly, with respect to 
the City’s 1982 attempt to sell School 4 for luxury 
housing, the court found that the procedural innovations 
and the nature of the debate made it “difficult to imagine 
a clearer case of an action taken for a discriminatory 
purpose.” Id. at 1363; see also id. at 1518-21.

In sum, Judge Sand concluded that “the extreme con­
centration of subsidized housing that exists in Southwest 
Yonkers today is the result of a pattern and practice of 
racial discrimination by City officials, pursued in re­
sponse to constituent pressures to select or support only 
sites that would preserve existing patterns of racial segre­
gation, and to reject or oppose sites that would threaten 
existing patterns of segregation.” Id. at 1373. The court 
emphasized that its finding of the City’s segregative intent 
rested not on a failure to act, but on “a thirty-year 
practice of consistently rejecting the integrative alterna­
tive in favor of the segregative—a practice that had the 
unsurprising effect of perfectly preserving, and signifi­
cantly exacerbating, existing patterns of racial segregation 
in Yonkers.” Id. at 1368.

6181



The court concluded that the conduct of the City and 
CDA violated the Equal Protection Clause and that their 
conduct since 1968 violated the Fair Housing Act as well.

C. The Housing Remedy

Having found the City and CDA liable for statutory 
and constitutional violations, the court held a six-day 
hearing as to appropriate remedies. In an order published 
at 635 F. Supp. 1577 (1986) (“Housing Order”) and an 
unpublished Modification to Housing Remedy Order 
(“Modification Order”), dated July 8, 1986, the court 
permanently enjoined the City from, inter alia, intention­
ally promoting racial residential segregation in Yonkers 
and ordered that certain affirmative steps be taken to­
ward a wider distribution of public housing.

The court noted that the City had already committed 
itself to providing sites for 200 units of public housing in 
order to receive its 1983 Community Development Block 
Grant (“Development Grant”) funds but had never ful­
filled that commitment; the City also had entered into a 
Consent Decree with HUD that provided that HUD 
would reduce Development Grant funding if the City did 
not submit for preapproval sites for at least 140 of the 
200 public housing units. The court ordered the City to 
submit an acceptable Housing Assistance Plan to HUD 
and execute a grant agreement with HUD, in order to 
receive the Development Grant funds for 200 units of 
subsidized housing, 635 F. Supp. at 1580; Modification 
Order at 2-4, and to “submit to HUD for preapproval at 
least two sites for 140 [of the agreed 200] units of family 
public housing,” 635 F. Supp. at 1580.

The Housing Order provided that if the City did not 
submit two such sites within 30 days of the court’s order,

6182



the City would be deemed to have submitted the sites of 
three closed schools in East Yonkers, /.<?., School 4, 
School 15, and the Walt Whitman School, or such other 
sites as might be proposed by plaintiffs and approved by 
the court. Schools 4 and 15, closed in 1976, had been 
returned to the City in 1982; Walt Whitman had been 
closed in 1983, and the court ordered the Board of 
Education to return that school to the City as well. The 
court also ordered the City to submit sites selected from a 
specific list for the remaining 60 public housing units. Id. 
at 1581.

In addition, the court ordered the City to create an 
Affordable Housing Trust Fund for the encouragement of 
private development of low-and moderate-income hous­
ing, to be funded initially with at least 25% of the 
Development Grant funds allocated to the City by HUD. 
Id. at 1581-82; Modification Order at 1-2. It also ordered 
the City to establish a Fair Housing Office with pre­
scribed responsibilities, to seek HUD approval for trans­
fer of the administration of the Section 8 Certificate 
program to MHA, and to develop a plan for more 
subsidized family housing units in areas outside of South­
west Yonkers. 635 F. Supp. at 1577-82.

II. School Segregation

Management and control of the Yonkers school district 
were entrusted to defendant Yonkers Board of Education. 
The Board, an independent municipal corporation subject 
to the control of New York State’s Board of Regents and 
Commissioner of Education, consisted of nine members 
appointed by the mayor for staggered five-year terms. Its 
budget was subject to review by the Yonkers City Coun­
cil.

6183



At the liability trial, plaintiffs sought to show that 
students in Yonkers schools were segregated and that that 
segregation had been caused or enhanced principally by 
(1) the Board’s general adherence to a neighborhood- 
school policy, with awareness of the City’s practice of 
maintaining segregated neighborhoods; (2) other segrega­
tive actions of the Board with respect to (a) school 
openings, closings, and boundary changes, (b) faculty 
assignments, (c) special education classes, and (d) voca­
tional programs; and (3) the Board’s failure to take any 
of a number of recommended or otherwise appropriate 
steps to alleviate the growing school segregation.

Plaintiffs contended also that the segregative housing 
practices of the City were designed in part to achieve and 
preserve segregation in the schools. They sought to show 
that the City helped to maintain such school segregation 
also by, inter alia, the mayor’s appointing to the Board 
persons known to advocate preservation of the segregated 
neighborhoods and neighborhood schools.

A. Racial Composition o f  Each School’s Student 
Population

As of the 1980-81 school year, Yonkers had 23 elemen­
tary schools for grades K-5 or K-6; four middle schools 
for grades 6-8 or 7-8; two combined elementary and 
middle schools; four general academic high schools; and 
one vocational high school. In a number of these schools, 
special education classes were conducted for students with 
learning disabilities or emotional disturbances.

1. The General Student Population

In 1980, the student enrollment in Yonkers public 
schools was approximately 37% minority. The percentage

6184



of minority enrollment had approximately doubled from 
1970 to 1980, due in part to an increase in minority 
enrollment and in greater part to a decline in white 
enrollment:

Y onkers P u b lic  S c h o o l S tu d e n t P o p u la tio n

W h ite % W h ite M in o r ity % M in o r ity

1967. .. .. 25,875 85 4,421 15
1970. . . .. 25,049 82 5,583 18
1975 . . . .. 21,514 72 8,195 28
1980... .. 13,840 63 8,023 37

In 1980, only two of Yonkers’s schools, one an elemen­
tary school located in Southwest and the other a middle 
school in Northwest, had student populations whose 
racial compositions approximated that of the system as a 
whole. The next most balanced schools had student popu­
lations that were, respectively, 21%, 45%, and 47% 
minority. The great majority of the schools were either 
disproportionately white or disproportionately minority.

At the elementary level, although 61% of the students 
were white, in 19 of Yonkers’s 25 elementary schools the 
student populations were either more than 80% white or 
more than 80% minority. Some 85% of Yonkers’s minor­
ity elementary school students attended nine schools in 
Southwest Yonkers. In addition, one elementary school in 
Northwest Yonkers had an 88% minority population. 
These 10 schools enrolled 92% of all of Yonkers’s minor­
ity elementary school students. More than 55% of 
Yonkers’s minority elementary school students attended 
just five Southwest schools, whose minority populations 
were 75%, 81%, 90%, 98%, and 98%.

Sixteen elementary schools were located outside of 
Southwest Yonkers. Of these, 14 had student populations 
that were at least 90% white; more than 70% of

6185



Yonkers’s white elementary school students attended 
these 90%-white schools. Of the 11 elementary schools in 
East Yonkers, only one had a minority student population 
of more than 7%.

In Yonkers’s middle schools, 62% of the students were 
white. Two of the six middle schools were located in East 
Yonkers and together enrolled only 62 minority students, 
or 5% of Yonkers’s total middle school minority popula­
tion; these two schools were, respectively, 94% and 96% 
white. Three middle schools were located in Southwest 
Yonkers and had minority student populations of 62%, 
69%, and 94%. Nearly 80% of Yonkers’s middle school 
minority students attended the three Southwest schools. 
Another 15% attended a middle school in Northwest.

About 70% of the students attending Yonkers public 
high schools, including the vocational high school (see 
Part y4.II.A .3. below), were white. Of the four academic 
high schools, two were located in East Yonkers, one in 
Southwest, and one in Northwest. The two located in 
East Yonkers had student populations that were 91% and 
98% white. The high school in Southwest had a student 
body that was 62% minority; it enrolled nearly two-thirds 
of all Yonkers minority students attending academic high 
schools.

2. Special Education Classes

The Yonkers special education program provided spe­
cial classes for students with mental or physical handi­
caps, including those with learning disabilities or 
emotional disturbances. Beginning in the 1960’s, there 
was a growing and disproportionate number of minority 
students in special education classes. These classes, espe­
cially those for the emotionally disturbed, were viewed by

6186



many teachers, school officials, and community members 
as a “dumping ground for black children.” In general, 
white children would be placed in a special class only 
after having been referred first to a school psychologist 
for an evaluation, then to the principal for review of that 
evaluation, then to the school district’s special education 
screening committee on the handicapped for a final deci­
sion as to what type, if any, special program was appro­
priate. A black child whose teacher considered him or her 
“disruptive,” however, would often (“for the sake of 
discipline”) be consigned immediately by the teacher and 
the principal to a class for the emotionally disturbed, 
without prior reference to a psychologist and with no 
effort to determine whether other options might meet the 
child’s needs.

As a result, in 1961, when regular classes in Yonkers 
elementary schools had a system-wide minority popula­
tion of 10%, minorities made up 22% of the special 
education classes. By the 1971-72 school year, when the 
system-wide minority population was 20%, the minority 
children made up 40% of all special education classes and 
more than 70% of the classes for those with emotional 
disturbances.

Location of the special education classes did not follow 
the Board’s usual neighborhood-school policy; rather, 
these classes were placed in schools that had space availa­
ble to accommodate them. Since most of the schools with 
high minority populations tended to be more crowded, 
most of the available space was found in schools having 
virtually all-white student populations. The principals of 
many of the latter schools resisted the placement of 
special education classes in their schools for reasons that, 
in the opinion of a former director of the program, were

6187



race-related. Nonetheless, most of the special education 
classes were placed in schools having few other minority 
students. In 1972, for example, classes for some 78% of 
the children classified as emotionally disturbed were con­
ducted in schools whose regular student populations were 
at least 97% white. Three-quarters of the students in 
these special classes were minorities.

In most of the schools, there was no mainstreaming of 
the special education classes into the general school popu­
lation. Because special education assignments were made 
without regard to residence, the students were often 
bused long distances, often well over an hour’s trip, and 
sometimes up to two hours, in each direction. Thus they 
arrived at school later than the regular students and 
departed earlier. In some instances they entered the school 
through separate entrances and were kept in classrooms 
located in secluded areas of the school. In one school, for 
example, they had to file down two flights below ground 
and pass through a boiler room to reach their classroom 
in the subbasement. Special education students also gen­
erally took their lunch, gym classes, and recesses sepa­
rately from the regular students. To the extent that school 
officials allowed contact between the two groups, the 
interaction was often purposely negative. One witness 
who had been a regular student at a 98%-white elemen­
tary school in the late 1960’s recalled her perception that 
all special education students were black and that they 
were held up to the regular students as examples of “poor, 
bad behavior.” Thus the special education students were 
perceived as “different” and “bad.” Another witness, a 
parent and PTA president, testified that her children had 
thought the words “retard” and “nigger” were inter­
changeable because the children’s only knowledge of

6188



blacks was of special education students bused into their 
school.

Nor was the negative reaction to special education 
students limited to the school’s other students. One of the 
special education teachers and coordinators testified that 
parents and community members had thrown rocks at her 
car and shouted “Take your niggers and get out.”

In 1972, the Board hired Dr. Gary Carman, a special 
education expert, to direct the program. At trial, he 
testified that Yonkers, by busing its special education 
students long distances and physically segregating them 
from the regular student population, “had the most 
inhumane program for handicapped children [he] had 
ever seen anywhere.” Dr. Carman “knew of no causes, 
medical causes, social causes, biological causes that could 
possibly account” for the disproportionate number of 
minorities placed in the classes for the emotionally dis­
turbed. The disproportionate referral of minority stu­
dents to special education classes eventually prompted an 
investigation by state and federal education officials. The 
conclusion of the United States Department of Education 
was that the Yonkers special education program subjected 
minority students to discrimination and violated their 
civil rights.

From 1972 to 1975, Dr. Carman attempted to improve 
the special education program by reducing the amount of 
busing, returning some special education students to reg­
ular classes, to an extent mainstreaming the special educa­
tion students into the general school population, and 
reducing the incidence of virtually all-minority special 
classes in virtually all-white schools. After Dr. Carman 
left in 1975, however, these efforts lapsed and the system 
reverted to one of long-distance busing and placement of

6189



blocs of minority special education students in virtually 
all-white schools. Dr. Carman testified that where the 
total experience of white children with blacks was their 
exposure to those in special education classes, the white 
children would view the special education children as 
“less worthy” and could well “generalize that to all 
blacks.”

3. Vocational High Schools

Prior to 1974, Yonkers had two specialized vocational 
high schools, Saunders Trade and Technical High School 
(“Saunders”), and the High School of Commerce (“Com­
merce”). Saunders offered technical courses such as auto 
mechanics, carpentry, and electricity; Commerce, which 
was closed in 1974, offered courses such as stenography, 
bookkeeping, cosmetology, food trades, and dressmak­
ing. Both schools were located in Southwest Yonkers. 
Neither was subject to the Board’s neighborhood policy 
and each accepted students from anywhere in the City.

Although precise statistics with regard to vocational 
school enrollment by race are not available for years prior 
to 1967, the trial testimony indicated that, prior to 1958, 
Saunders had a large minority enrollment. From the 
1930’s until approximately 1958, it had a reputation as “a 
school for problem kids” or for “academically retarded 
pupils,” or as a “dumping ground for minority students.” 
Many black students from Runyon Heights attended 
Saunders or Commerce instead of Roosevelt, the school 
nearest their homes, often encouraged by their guidance 
counselor to do so even if they wanted an academic 
program. Similar steering usually did not occur with 
respect to academically undistinguished white students.

6190



In 1958, the Board decided to establish entrance re­
quirements for Saunders and Commerce based on grades, 
achievement and aptitude test scores, recommendations, 
and discipline records. The criteria for admission were 
not precise, however, and final decisions lay within the 
discretion of the respective principals. Apparently these 
entrance requirements had the effect of changing the 
community’s perception of the schools as inferior, and by 
the early 1970’s, Saunders, whose capacity was roughly 
one-half that of the smallest academic high school, was 
receiving nearly twice as many applications as it could 
accept.

At the same time, Saunders’s minority enrollment was 
decreasing substantially, due in part to the heightened 
entrance requirements, the acknowledged inferiority of 
the educational programs available in Southwest Yonkers 
schools, the subjectivity of the school officials’ evaluation 
of the applicants’ credentials, and the absence of any 
effort on the part of the Board to see that minority 
students, most of whom attended schools in Southwest 
Yonkers, had an equal opportunity to get into Saunders. 
Robert Alioto, the school system’s superintendent from 
1971 to 1975, and other school district officials believed 
that Saunders’s selection process “ ‘appeared to systemat­
ically exclude minority youngsters.’ ” 624 F. Supp. at 
1450. The Board, “though aware of the systematic exclu­
sion of minorities which resulted from the Saunders 
admissions process, did relatively little until the late 
1970’s to eliminate the discriminatory impact of the 
methods by which students were chosen.” Id. at 1452.

6191



B. Facility and Faculty Disadvantages o f  the 
Predominantly Minority Schools

In support of their contention that Yonkers’s segre­
gated school system provided minorities with lower qual­
ity education than was given to whites, plaintiffs offered 
evidence of inferior and generally overcrowded facilities 
at schools with high minority populations, and of high 
faculty turnover and a lower overall level of teacher 
experience in such schools.

1. Plant Facilities

School officials testified that adequate facilities at a 
school are important not only to a student’s physical 
development but also to his ability to benefit from the 
instructional aspects of the educational process. Inade­
quate physical facilities, including space for recreation, 
can cause disciplinary problems and cause the community 
to perceive the school as inferior. According to Alioto, 
the Southwest Yonkers schools “had probably the worst 
facilities that one could imagine.”

The predominantly minority schools had smaller build­
ings and sites, particularly in the amount of playground 
and recreation areas for each school, than the predomi­
nantly white schools. For example, the site size of the five 
most heavily minority elementary schools averaged 1.83 
acres; the average site size of the nine most heavily white 
elementary schools was 4.84 acres. At the minority 
schools averaging 1.83 acres, the average school popula­
tion was 413 students. At the white schools averaging 4.84 
acres, the average school population was 308 students.

The three predominantly minority middle schools, all 
in Southwest Yonkers, were located on property totaling 
7.2 acres. The two predominantly white middle schools

6192



located in East Yonkers were on a total of 19 acres. The 
total number of students attending each group of schools 
was nearly identical: 1299 in the Southwest schools, and 
1312 in the East Yonkers schools. During the 1970’s, 
crowded conditions forced one Southwest middle school 
to use storage closets as classrooms.

The 62% minority high school in Southwest Yonkers 
was located on 8.0 acres. The high school in Northwest 
Yonkers, 47% minority, was located on 6.38 acres. The 
two high schools in East Yonkers, averaging 95% white 
student populations, were located on 12.64 and 23.41 
acres respectively. A total of some 350 fewer students 
attended these two East Yonkers schools than attended 
the Northwest and Southwest schools.

2. School Staffing

Educators testified that it is generally desirable for a 
school to have a balance of experienced and newer teach­
ers on its faculty and for its staff to be relatively stable 
from year to year. Relatively high rates of turnover and 
low levels of faculty experience are factors that contribute 
to a school’s lower level of educational effectiveness. The 
evidence regarding the Yonkers public school system re­
vealed that the predominantly minority schools in South­
west Yonkers had low levels of faculty stability, lower 
levels of teacher experience than the system-wide average, 
and produced the students with the lowest academic 
achievement test scores in the system. These schools also 
had much higher than average concentrations of minority 
staff as a result of a Board practice of race-based assign­
ments.

The first minority teachers employed by the Yonkers 
school system, hired between 1946 and 1950, were as-

6193



signed to School 1, then the only predominantly minority 
school in the system (91% minority student population in 
1950). Until the late 1960’s, the system had few minority 
teachers and no minority principals. The Board then 
began to recruit minorities, and the number of minority 
staff members (i.e., teachers, principals, and assistant 
principals) rose from 95 in 1967 (out of a total of 1416), 
to 174 by 1975. Consistently over the years, most of the 
minority staff members were assigned to the schools 
having the highest percentages of minority students. For 
example, in the 1967-68 school year, Yonkers had 28 
elementary schools; seven of the eight with the highest 
percentages of minority students were assigned 40% of 
the minority staff members. In the 1972-73 school year, 
Yonkers had 30 elementary schools, including six whose 
student populations were predominantly minority. The 
Board assigned 61% of its minority staff members to 
these six schools. In the 1975-76 school year, Yonkers had 
31 elementary schools, including nine whose minority 
student populations ranged from 60% to 98%. These 
schools enrolled 29% of all elementary students; they 
were assigned 75% of all elementary level minority teach­
ers.

Similar patterns were evident in the middle and high 
schools. For example, in the 1972-73 school year, Yonkers 
had seven middle schools; the three that had the highest 
percentages of minority students had 34% of the City’s 
total middle school enrollment but were assigned 69% of 
the Board’s middle school minority staff members. In 
1975-76, the City had eight middle schools; the four 
having the highest percentages of minority students, 
though enrolling only 43% of all middle school students, 
had assigned to them 81% of all middle school minority 
teachers.

6194



The Board followed a similar practice in its assign­
ments of minority principals. For example, at the elemen­
tary level in the 1973-74 school year, the City had six 
minority principals; four were assigned to schools whose 
minority student populations ranged from 68% to 96%. 
In the 1974-75 and 1975-76 school years, the City had five 
minority elementary school principals; in 1975-76 it also 
had one minority assistant principal; all of these persons 
were assigned to schools having minority student popula­
tions of 66% or higher.

While at no time was the faculty of any Yonkers school 
predominantly staffed by minority teachers, the dispro­
portionate assignment of minority staff to schools having 
predominantly minority student populations increased the 
identification of those schools in terms of race. And to 
the extent that minority teachers were assigned to the 
virtually all-white schools of East Yonkers it was often to 
teach the special education classes, which themselves had 
become known as dumping grounds for minority stu­
dents. The minority special education teachers “were 
deliberately assigned to such schools because of the dis­
proportionate number of minority students in Special 
Education classes.” 624 F. Supp. at 1465.

Not surprisingly, in view of the assignment of a dispro­
portionate number of the more recently hired minority 
teachers to the predominantly minority schools, the aver­
age level of teaching experience at those schools was 
usually lower than the system-wide average. In the year 
1967-68, the system-wide average level of teacher experi­
ence was 8.45 years. In the elementary schools having 
minority student enrollments of 40% or higher, the 
teacher experience level averages ranged from 5.61 to 7.88 
years. The only schools whose teachers averaged more

6195



than 10 years in experience were schools having 11% or 
less minority enrollment, four of which were less than 4% 
minority.

The disparity in teacher experience levels was aggra­
vated in 1969 when the Board entered into a new collec­
tive bargaining agreement with the teachers’ union. 
Notwithstanding the already clear trend of concentration 
of minority teachers in schools having predominantly 
minority student bodies, the Board agreed that before 
assigning any teacher hired from outside the school dis­
trict to any vacant position within the system, teachers 
already employed within the system would be given the 
option, in order of their seniority, of transferring to the 
vacant position. Thus, as positions became available in 
East Yonkers schools, the most experienced teachers in 
Southwest Yonkers schools could, and often did, opt to 
change schools.

The effects in terms of minority staff concentration, 
staff turnover, and teacher experience levels were predict­
able. For example, School 10 was opened in 1972 as a 
predominantly minority, physically inferior elementary 
school in Southwest Yonkers (see Part ^4.II.E.2. below). 
Of the original 17 teachers, 15 were white; within two 
years, 14 had left the school. In the period 1971 to 1975, 
the total number of minority staff members employed by 
the City increased from 133 to 174; but in none of the 17 
elementary schools having white student populations in 
excess of 90% did the number of minority teachers 
increase. Indeed, in 10 of these schools, the number of 
minority teachers actually declined; and the four schools 
that had had no minority teachers prior to 1971 still had 
none.

6196



In 1971-72, when the system-wide average teaching 
experience was 7.15 years, the average levels of experience 
at six of the seven elementary schools having minority 
student enrollments of 40% or higher ranged from 3.33 to 
6.19 years. In contrast, only two of the 13 elementary 
schools having white student enrollments of more than 
95% had below-average teacher experience levels; four of 
the 13 had staffs averaging more than 10 years’ experi­
ence. The disparity in teaching experience levels was, to 
an extent, decreased in 1976 when, because of the City’s 
fiscal crisis, the Board laid off 250 teachers, a great 
number of whom were relatively inexperienced. But even 
by the school year 1979-80, when the system-wide average 
was 14.2 years, the average levels at the predominantly 
minority elementary schools ranged from 9.9 to 13.4 
years.

In the 1969 collective bargaining agreement that gave 
teachers an option to transfer, on the basis of seniority, to 
vacant positions elsewhere in the system, the Board had 
reserved the right to compel a teacher to change schools, 
in certain enumerated circumstances, “when judged to be 
in the best interest of the school system.” The Board 
never sought to use this provision in order to decrease the 
concentration of minority teachers in schools with pre­
dominantly minority student populations. Indeed, in 
1977, the Board agreed to additional limitations on its 
right to implement involuntary transfers of teachers.

As a result of the Board’s race-based assignment prac­
tices, the eastward flow of the more senior teachers, and 
the Board’s failure to take any steps to halt that flow or 
to correct the imbalance of its assignments, by 1980 most 
of the City’s minority staff members were concentrated in 
one-quarter of the system’s 36 schools. Of the City’s 25

6197



elementary schools, five that had minority student popu­
lations of 75-98% were assigned at least half of the 
system’s elementary level minority teachers; no minority 
teachers whatever were assigned to five other schools, all 
of whose white-student enrollments exceeded 92%. Of the 
City’s six middle schools, the three in Southwest Yonkers, 
which had minority student populations ranging from 62- 
94% and accounted for 42% of the total number of 
middle school students in the system, had 62% of the 
system’s middle school minority teachers. Of the five high 
schools, the two that had the highest minority enroll­
ments (47% and 62%) accounted for 46% of all the high 
school students in the system but had 77% of the system’s 
high school minority teachers.

C. The Board’s Decisions as to School Closings, 
Openings, and Attendance Zone Changes

During the decades on which this litigation focused, the 
Board made many decisions with regard to opening and 
closing schools and realigning their attendance zones. 
Plaintiffs sought to show that many of these decisions 
evinced an intent to create or maintain segregation in the 
Yonkers public schools.

1. Attendance Zone Changes

Among the attendance zone changes were several af­
fecting Schools 16 and 25, elementary schools located in 
Northwest Yonkers, less than one mile apart. Between 
1953 and 1968, the Board redrew the boundary between 
these two schools four times. In 1953, School 25 had a 
minority student population of 4%; that of School 16 was 
0%. The 1953 boundary change resulted in the reassign­
ment of 35 white students, and no minority students,

6198



from School 25 to School 16. Ten years later, the minority 
population of School 25 had risen to 14%; School 16 still 
had no minority students. A 1963 boundary change re­
sulted in the reassignment of nine white students, and no 
minority students, from School 25 to School 16. In the 
following year, a boundary change resulted in the reas­
signment from School 25 of 23 white students and nine 
minority students, thereby bringing the minority popula­
tion of School 16 to 2%. By 1968, Yonkers’s system-wide 
percentage of minority students was about 15%, and 
School 25 had a minority population of 42%. A bound­
ary change in that year resulted in the reassignment of six 
of its white students, and no minority students, to School 
16. School 16’s minority population was 1%.

The Board argued that these changes had been designed 
to avoid having the reassigned children traverse a steep 
hill between their homes and school. Board reassignments 
in other sections of the City, however, had been made 
though they forced the reassigned students to cope with 
similar topographical conditions, and in fact two of the 
boundary changes between School 25 and School 16 made 
the trip to school harder, not easier, for the students who 
were reassigned. No other explanation was offered by the 
Board.

A 1963 attendance zone change between Southwest 
Yonkers Schools 9 (15% minority) and 12 (42% minority) 
was similarly unexplained by race-neutral criteria. The 
attendance zone for School 9 was directly north of that 
for School 12. In 1963, the Board moved the boundary 
line farther north. While this change slightly lowered the 
minority percentage enrolled in School 12, it substantially 
lowered School 9’s 15% minority percentage as it reas­
signed some 40% of School 9’s minority students to

6199



School 12; even prior to the reassignment, School 12 had 
had the second-highest minority concentration in 
Yonkers. This boundary change was contraindicated by 
the relative student-capacities of the two schools. Accord­
ing to the Board’s figures, prior to the change, only 77% 
of the capacity of School 9 was utilized; School 12 was 
96% full. The boundary change caused School 12 to be 
overcrowded.

2. The Failure To Close or Rezone Longfellow

The Longfellow Middle School, located in Southwest 
Yonkers, has long been the Yonkers middle school with 
the highest percentage of minority students. In 1950, 
though only 12% of its students were minorities, these 
students constituted 41% of the City’s entire minority 
middle school population. Housed in a relatively small 
facility with no outdoor recreational space, by 1969 the 
school had become underutilized as Burroughs Middle 
School was opened one mile away and the attendance 
zone for Longfellow shrank. The drawing of the attend­
ance zone line between Longfellow and Burroughs de­
creased the number of white students attending 
Longfellow, and the increasing minority population of 
Southwest Yonkers led to increasing numbers of minority 
students. In 1967, Longfellow’s student population was 
38% minority; after the opening of Burroughs in 1969, 
Longfellow became 50% minority. By 1973, Longfellow 
had become 79% minority.

The combination of its disproportionately high minor­
ity student population, its inferior physical facilities, and 
its underutilization caused many education officials and 
community leaders to urge repeatedly, beginning at least 
as early as 1967, that Longfellow be closed. The Board

6200



rejected all proposals either to close Longfellow and 
transfer its students to other schools that were less heavily 
minority, or to expand Longfellow’s attendance zone so 
as to achieve a desegregative influx of nonminority stu­
dents. For example, in 1977, when the Board planned to 
close the nearby Burroughs as a middle school, the 
Longfellow PTA urged the Board to return to Longfellow 
the predominantly white area that had been rezoned from 
Longfellow to Burroughs in 1969; such a realignment 
would have made use of Longfellow’s excess capacity and 
had a desegregative effect. The Board rejected this sug­
gestion, deciding instead to reassign the Burroughs 
students—even those who lived within one mile of 
Longfellow—to Emerson Middle School, two miles away 
near the northwest corner of the City, or to Whitman 
Middle School, four miles away near the northeast corner 
of the City. Though the Board initially reached this 
decision while an overall school reorganization plan rec­
ommending the closing of Longfellow was under consid­
eration, it adhered to the decision after the reorganization 
plan had been rejected, stating that Longfellow might still 
be closed.

Other proposals recommended closing Longfellow and 
reassigning its students to Mark Twain Middle School, 
located in the southeast corner of East Yonkers, some 
three miles from the site of Longfellow. The proposal had 
both fiscal and desegregative merit, for Twain was operat­
ing at less than its stated capacity, and it had only a 2°7o 
minority population. The Board refused, however, stating 
that the distance the students would have to travel to 
reach Twain would be too great and that Longfellow 
students’ parents would not have the ability to carpool 
their children or pay for the necessary transportation. In

6201



fact, however, many students already within the Twain 
attendance zone were required to travel some 2 - ‘/2  miles 
to school, and a one-way distance of some four miles had 
not deterred the Board from reassigning some Burroughs 
students to Whitman. Further, though the Board had 
arranged transportation several times in other circum­
stances, it made no effort to explore this possibility with 
respect to the proposed reassignment of Longfellow stu­
dents to Twain. Finally, the net cost of providing trans­
portation for reassigned Longfellow students would have 
been relatively low, both because the Board could have 
saved some $500,000 per year in operating and faculty 
costs by closing Longfellow, and because under New York 
law the state would have provided 90% reimbursement 
for transportation expenses incurred for purposes of 
school desegregation.

In sum, from the late 1960’s, the Board rejected pro­
posal after proposal for the reassignment of more white 
students to Longfellow or of Longfellow minority stu­
dents to schools with lower percentages of minorities. It 
declined to desegregate Longfellow on the ground that 
the school might be closed; but Longfellow was not 
closed, even in 1976 when the City’s well publicized fiscal 
crisis required the Board to close several schools. At the 
time this suit was commenced, Longfellow remained in 
inferior physical facilities, operated at 31-40% of its 
capacity, and had a minority population of 94%.

3. The Opening o f  Commerce Middle School

In 1973, in conjunction with the closing of the High 
School of Commerce, located in Southwest Yonkers a few 
blocks from the downtown area, the Board opened a new 
Commerce Middle School (“Commerce Middle”). Its stu-

6202



dent body consisted of junior high school students who 
theretofore had attended Gorton, a combined junior and 
senior high school located in the southern part of North­
west Yonkers. The initial enrollment in Commerce Middle 
was 53% minority.

Prior to deciding on Commerce Middle’s attendance 
zone, the Board had been presented with a number of 
proposals that would have avoided this creation of yet 
another predominantly minority school in Southwest 
Yonkers. These proposals principally involved Emerson, a 
combined elementary and middle school in Northwest 
Yonkers located about I-V2 miles north of Gorton. Emer­
son then had a middle school minority population of 8°7o. 
One proposal was to assign to Commerce Middle the 
middle school students from Emerson who lived in the 
southernmost part of the Emerson attendance zone. 
There was strong opposition from white residents, how­
ever, to any relocation of white students to form an 
integrated Commerce Middle, opposition that the Board 
perceived as grounded principally in racial concerns. The 
Board was also well aware that transferring Gorton stu­
dents to the proposed new Commerce Middle without 
reassigning students from any other school would have a 
distinctly segregative effect: memoranda assessing this 
alternative noted, “Commerce may become an all-black 
school” ; “Commerce could be all black” ; “Commerce 
becoming basically a black school” ; “ Racial Dis­
tribution—all black.” It decided to assign to Commerce 
Middle no students other than those from Gorton.

It also rejected proposals to reassign the Gorton junior 
high school students—41% minority—to Emerson in­
stead of to Commerce Middle, a course that apparently 
was both feasible in terms of Emerson’s capacity and

6203



consistent with repeated proposals from school officials 
and community members to convert Emerson from a 
combined elementary and middle school to an exclusively 
middle school. The Board declined to reassign Gorton 
students to Emerson, on the ground that “tensions” 
would be created, apparently a reference to racial con­
cerns, for in 1973, one-third of the Emerson’s middle 
school minority students were transferred to Burroughs

in response to race-related concerns of the Emerson 
community regarding the presence of minority stu­
dents at the school. According to [school administra­
tion officials], this transfer was effectuated for the 
purpose of insuring the safety of minority students 
who had been enrolled at the school in light of 
altercations which had occurred between students at 
the school and the Emerson community’s opposition 
to the attendance of minority students at Emerson.

624 F. Supp. at 1481.

After opening Commerce Middle as a 53% minority 
school in 1973, instead of expanding Commerce Middle’s 
attendance zone northward to draw in any predominantly 
white neighborhoods, the Board redrew the zone bound­
ary farther south, thereby reassigning to Commerce Mid­
dle students from Longfellow and another predominantly 
minority school. Commerce Middle’s minority popula­
tion thus increased to 70% in 1974 and to 77% in 1975. In 
1976, the school was closed as part of the Board’s 
response to the City’s fiscal crisis.

4. Other Board Actions

Other Board decisions challenged by plaintiffs included 
the early rezoning and 1954 closing of School 1 in

6204



Runyon Heights, the 1969 opening of the Martin Luther 
King, Jr., School in Southwest Yonkers, and the fiscal- 
crisis-related closings of several schools in 1976.

School 1 was located in Runyon Heights, the predomi­
nantly black community in East Yonkers. For a time in 
the 1930’s it was attended by students from the Home- 
field section immediately to the north as well as by 
students from other largely white neighboring areas; 
white students then made up one-half to two-thirds of its 
student population. In 1938, however, the Board redrew 
the School 1 zone to correspond more precisely with the 
boundaries of Runyon Heights. Students from Homefield 
were reassigned to School 22, increasing the distance of 
their trip but sending them to a virtually all-white school; 
students south of Runyon Heights were sent to the then- 
virtually all-white School 5. By 1950, School 1 was 91% 
minority; at the time of its closing in 1954, it was 99% 
minority.

As a result of the 1938 rezoning, described by the court 
as “deliberate, racially motivated gerrymandering, done 
in a manner which carefully incorporated privately cre­
ated residential segregation,” 624 F. Supp. at 1411, the 
School 1 zone was the smallest in the City, and the school 
operated at less than 42% of its capacity. Meanwhile, two 
nearby virtually all-white schools, Schools 8 and 22, 
became overcrowded. Runyon Heights community mem­
bers sought "to have the Board expand the School 1 
boundaries in order to draw in students from the sur­
rounding areas, thereby decreasing its underutilization, 
relieving the surrounding schools’ overcrowding, and 
having a desegregative effect on School 1. Instead, in 
1954 the Board decided to close School 1 and send its 
students to Schools 5 and 24, which had a desegregative

6205



effect on those schools. None of the Runyon Heights 
students were sent to School 22, which remained virtually 
100% white, thereby “preserving] an all-white school 
experience for Homefield students, consistent with the 
Board’s deliberately segregative attendance zone bound­
ary changes of prior years.” 624 F. Supp. at 1413.

With respect to the Martin Luther King, Jr., School 
(“King”), the court found that the initial hope of the 
Board was, unlike its segregative intent in rezoning 
School 1, that the opening of King would serve as a 
significant step toward correcting racial imbalance in the 
schools of Southwest Yonkers. King was opened in 1969 
for grades 4-6 with students reassigned from Schools 6 
and 12, both of which were overcrowded and predomi­
nantly minority. The population of King at this point was 
57% minority. The following year, in accordance with the 
Board’s original plan, students from the predominantly 
white School 9 were added, thereby decreasing the minor­
ity population of King to 49%.

The assignment of children who had attended School 9 
prompted a December 1970 petition signed by 434 of their 
parents to have the Board restore the prior attendance 
zones. The Board held fast for a year and then relented. 
In the interim, white students from the School 9 area 
began to withdraw from King, apparently either relocat­
ing or entering private schools, reducing the number of 
white students at King from 392 in 1970-71 to 224 in 
1971-72.

In 1972, School 9 was eliminated as a King feeder 
school, and third-graders who would otherwise have gone 
on to King for fourth grade remained at School 9. Some 
60% of this group were white. In 1973, King was con­
verted from a grade 4-6 school to a K-5 school; its

6206



students came from the predominantly minority areas 
previously served by Schools 6 and 12, but not the 
predominantly white areas of School 9. King’s minority 
enrollment rose from 49% in 1970, to 70% in 1971, to 
78% in 1972, to 87% in 1973. By the time of this lawsuit, 
it had a minority student population of 98%.

Although the district court viewed the consequences of 
some of the Board’s decisions with regard to King as 
“foreseeably segregative,” 624 F. Supp. at 1402, it was 
unpersuaded, in light of the surrounding circumstances 
and the Board’s initial desegregative intent, that the later 
decisions of themselves bespoke a segregative intent.

The court explored Board decisions with respect to 
opening and closing other schools, including those closed 
in 1976 in response to the City’s fiscal crisis. Most of 
these decisions had some segregative and some desegrega­
tive effects and the court was unpersuaded that the 
decisions themselves demonstrated a Board intent to pre­
serve segregation. Rather, the court concluded that a 
major indicator of segregative intent was the Board’s 
failure to adopt any proposal or plan to alleviate the 
segregated patterns its prior actions had achieved.

D. The Board’s Rejection o f  A ll Proposals Involving 
Desegregation

The first significant official recognition of the need to 
address the racial imbalance of the Yonkers public schools 
occurred during the 1968-1970 superintendency of Paul 
Mitchell, who expressed his concern that the racial segre­
gation of the schools prevented equality in educational 
opportunity. During his tenure came the opening of King 
and School 10 (see Part A .ll.E .2 . below) in Southwest 
Yonkers, both of which, though they quickly became

6207



minority schools, had been planned by the Board as 
racially integrated schools. The Board also conducted a 
series of human relations workshops and sought the 
assistance of state education officials in addressing the 
problem of racial imbalance. Mitchell’s successor, Alioto, 
hired a special consultant to serve as a liaison between 
school officials and community members, with particular 
emphasis on communicating the concerns of the minority 
community to school officials and alleviating the tensions 
at the racially troubled Gorton School.

Nonetheless, while Alioto recognized the increasing 
racial imbalance in the schools and the inequality of 
educational opportunity within the system, particularly 
with respect to the inadequate facilities and inexperienced 
teachers that characterized many of the Southwest 
Yonkers disproportionately minority schools, he and 
other officials noted that there was strong community 
opposition to desegregation. For example, the education 
specialist sent to Yonkers by New York State described a 
“very hostile audience” at one PTA meeting in East 
Yonkers and testified that white parents had stated explic­
itly, “ ‘We don’t want desegregation, I don’t want my 
children going to school with black children.’ ” Accord­
ingly, Alioto, having instructed his special consultant to 
gather information on the extent of racial imbalance in 
the schools, instructed him to cease work in this area 
because Alioto believed it would be politically infeasible 
to proceed with desegregative efforts in the schools at 
that time. The state specialist testified that Alioto in­
formed him that “there was great community resistance 
and that it was unfeasible to try to develop a desegrega­
tion plan and then implement it.” A former Board mem­
ber testified, “There is no question [Alioto] said it and he

6208



said it to many people. He said it could never be sold in 
the Yonkers community. Any kind of totally city-wide 
racially balanced program would be politically infeasi­
ble.”

1. The N YU  Report and the 1973 Reorganization

In October 1971, the Board commissioned a study of 
the Yonkers public school system by the New York Uni­
versity (“NYU”) School of Education’s Center for Edu­
cational Research and Field Services. The study team was 
not asked to address the issue of racial imbalance.

The NYU Report, delivered in 1972, made several 
recommendations, some of which, though not addressing 
racial issues directly, had desegregative implications. In 
this category were recommendations to (1) reorganize all 
schools into a uniform K-5, 6-8, and 9-12 grade configu­
ration, one facet of which would involve a potentially 
desegregating school attendance zone change for students 
from Homefield; and (2) decentralize the vocational edu­
cation program by (a) closing the High School of Com­
merce and having a new set of courses offered at 
Saunders, (b) having two complete sets of the existing 
vocational courses taught in the academic high schools, 
one set divided between the two high schools located in 
the northern part of the City and the other set divided 
between the two high schools located in the southern part 
of the City, and (c) allowing a student to take any of the 
vocational courses taught either in his own school or in 
the paired school located to the east or west (the “variable 
access plan”).

The NYU Report prompted strong community opposi­
tion to any revision of the vocational program that would 
either cause the predominantly white students from East

6209



Yonkers to have to attend classes in the disproportion­
ately minority high schools in the western half of the City 
or allow the minority students from the west to attend 
classes at the 94-97% white high schools in East Yonkers. 
School officials characterized these objections as reflect­
ing a “ [f]ear of racial encro[a]chments.”

Two weeks after the last public hearing on the NYU 
Report, Alioto presented his 1973 Reorganization Plan to 
the Board. In general, substantially as a result of commu­
nity opposition to the desegregative facets of the NYU 
recommendations, the plan included the most segregative 
proposals that had been made either in the NYU Report 
itself or in the ensuing alternative suggestions. Thus, the 
plan adopted the suggestion to decentralize the Saunders 
vocational programs, but only in part: It rejected the 
east-west pairing-and-sharing proposal of the NYU Re­
port, and instead incorporated the significantly more 
expensive approach of duplicating certain of Saunders’s 
vocational courses in each of the four academic high 
schools. The opening of Commerce Middle as a predomi­
nantly minority school, discussed in Part A .II.C.3. 
above, was also part of this proposed 1973 Reorganiza­
tion Plan. The Board promptly adopted the plan as 
recommended by the superintendent.

The only potentially desegregating feature of the NYU 
recommendations that was adopted was that part of the 
suggestion to standardize the grade configurations which 
entailed reassigning students from the predominantly 
white Homefield neighborhood, then attending the over­
crowded Roosevelt High School (then 6% minority) in 
East Yonkers, to the soon-to-be-underutilized Gorton 
(high school population 24% minority). This recommen­
dation was adopted over opposition of Homefield parents

6210



that school officials inferred was partly race-related. 
However, the major desegregative effect of even this 
change was delayed, as in the first year thereafter the 
Board permitted nearly half of the 132 reassigned Home- 
field students to remain at Roosevelt; later some Home- 
field students began using false addresses to avoid having 
to attend Gorton. In all,

the evolving segregation of the district’s schools 
remained substantially unaltered. No student move­
ment between the district’s regular high schools was 
effectuated despite the recognition that racial inte­
gration would be an advantageous result of the 
variable access plan. The Saunders facility remained 
intact despite the realization that the school’s physi­
cal inadequacies and screening process [were] pres­
ently resulting in the inaccessibility of vocational and 
occupational education opportunities to many mi­
nority students. The racially balanced High School 
of Commerce was closed and was replaced by a 
predominantly minority middle school. No desegre­
gative reorganizations were effectuated at the ele­
mentary school level, as would have occurred under 
some of the NYU Report proposals.

624 F. Supp. at 1475-76.

2. Phase II

A serious official proposal for the desegregation of the 
Yonkers public schools was made in 1977 by then- 
superintendent Joseph Robitaille. In late 1975, in re­
sponse to concerns expressed by the Yonkers NAACP 
over the increasing racial imbalance in the schools, the 
Board had established a Task Force for Quality Educa­
tion (“Task Force”) to explore the system’s problems,

6211



including declining enrollment, underutilization of school 
facilities, and fiscal constraints. Announcement of the 
initial formation of the Task Force omitted any mention 
that the group would explore racial problems, an omis­
sion designed to avoid arousing community hostility. 
Nonetheless, public resistance quickly materialized, with 
East Yonkers residents expressing concern that transfer of 
western Yonkers students into their schools would lead to 
a decline in educational standards and student achieve­
ment and create disciplinary problems; they took the 
position that the Task Force should be more concerned 
with improving the schools’ overall educational quality 
than with correcting racial imbalance. Nonetheless, the 
Task Force’s final report, concluding that the Yonkers 
schools were “racially and ethnically segregated . . . due 
to segregated housing patterns, socio-economic depriva­
tion, and systematic racism,” made a number of remedial 
recommendations.

In August 1977, Robitaille issued his Phase II School 
Reorganization Plan, which recognized the interrelation­
ship among the system’s fiscal, enrollment, utilization, 
and racial problems, and incorporated some of the Task 
Force’s recommendations. The principal changes pro­
posed in the Phase II plan were (1) the reorganization of 
the below-high-school grade configuration to K-6 and 7- 
8; (2) the closing of three middle schools, Longfellow, 
Fermi, and Burroughs; (3) the relocation of Saunders to 
the to-be-vacated Burroughs facility; (4) the closing of 
Southwest Yonkers’s School 6, then 98°7o minority, and 
reassignment of its students to underutilized elementary 
schools to the north, with a view to improving racial 
balance; and (5) the “Yonkers Plan” for school desegrega­
tion. The Yonkers Plan was essentially to limit the size of

6212



each elementary and each middle school, drawing its 
attendance zone accordingly, and to bus students residing 
outside the redrawn zone lines to other schools in a 
pattern that would improve the overall racial balance of 
the system. It was anticipated that no more than 20% of 
the students would have to be bused and that the greater 
efficiencies would result in savings to the City, over a 10- 
year period, of nearly $29 million.

Phase II in general, and the Yonkers Plan in particular, 
met with overwhelming community opposition. Many 
statements from residents of East Yonkers focused on the 
loss of neighborhood schools, the lack of any planned 
improvement in the quality of education, and the failure 
to present possible alternatives to busing, such as the use 
of magnet schools. Residents of Southwest Yonkers ob­
jected to the plan because of the loss of neighborhood 
schools and because the burdens of traveling to school by 
bus would be borne disproportionately by the minority 
students from that area.

Some statements from East Yonkers residents presented 
explicitly race-related opposition, including flyers protest­
ing the busing of East Yonkers students and busing of 
“the black children (3,000 in number) to our neighbor­
hood schools” ; a letter from a community group that was 
“unalterably opposed” to “compulsory (non-voluntary) 
busing for racial purposes as an end in itself” ; a letter 
expressing concern that busing “ ‘blacks & hispanics’ into 
our east side schools” would be detrimental to the neigh­
borhood, and suggesting that the Task Force be renamed 
“ ‘Racist Force us’ to take our children and go!” ; and a 
letter from a neighborhood association stating the resi­
dents’ desire to “preserve the nature of our neighbor­
hoods” and their opposition to “movfing] children about

6213



for the sole purpose of ethnic and racial mixing” (empha­
sis in original).

Similarly, at community meetings in East Yonkers, 
school officials were presented with comments expressing 
concern that the plan would result in Yonkers’s becoming 
“another Bronx,” referring to the perceived community 
deterioration and slum-like conditions that speakers asso­
ciated with the increase of minority population in that 
New York City borough. The audience punctuated these 
and similar statements by local residents with cheers and 
applause. In contrast, proponents of Phase II were booed 
and hissed upon introduction, upon mentioning such 
matters as the inferior books used in Southwest Yonkers 
schools, and throughout their presentations. One elderly 
black woman, upon mentioning the prospect of busing 
students from west to east and stating that children 
should learn from one another, was booed and shouted at 
to such an extent that a recess had to be called.

. While no explicit racial epithets were used by persons 
making public statements at the hearings, several trial 
witnesses testified that community members made specific 
racial slurs both inside and outside the hearing room, 
such as, “they are going to send blacks, and they are 
going to send niggers and they are going to send spicks 
out here,” and “we don’t want those children.”

Without ever taking a formal vote, the Board unani­
mously disapproved of all of the desegregative aspects of 
Phase II. The Yonkers Plan was rejected; School 6 was 
not closed; Longfellow was not closed; no students were 
bused.

The stated basis for the rejection of Phase IPs desegre­
gative components was the Board’s preference for the use

6214



of magnet schools and open enrollment plans for achiev­
ing voluntary desegregation. Although it appears that all 
of the Board members acknowledged that at least some of 
the community opposition to Phase II was racially moti­
vated, and some believed that racism was the principal 
basis of that opposition, there was no express discussion 
by Board members of the race-related community opposi­
tion to Phase II except by Quentin Hicks and Anne 
Bocik, members whose recent appointments to the Board 
had been extremely controversial, see Part /4.II.E.3. be­
low. Hicks, a black whose appointment had been pro­
tested by members of the black community because he did 
not represent their interests, stated that black parents 
were concerned about having their children transported 
out of their neighborhoods into a “white jungle.” Bocik, 
a former principal who had been forced to retire in part 
because of “her use of racial slurs and other racially 
insensitive behavior toward minority students,” 624 F. 
Supp. at 1507, stated that minority students and adminis­
trators from minority schools “would like to be with their 
own.”

Notwithstanding its stated preference for voluntary 
methods of desegregation, the Board took no steps to 
develop or implement any of the desegregative alterna­
tives suggested by its own members or by members of the 
commmunity. Thus, despite its professed enthusiasm for 
magnet schools or open enrollment, no magnet school, 
open enrollment, or other voluntary plan for desegrega­
tion was implemented at any time.

As a result, in 1980, the schools of East Yonkers, many 
of which were operating at less than 60°7o of their planned 
capacities, remained predominantly (overall 95%) white 
in student population, with superior and spacious physi-

6215



cal plants, and experienced faculties. The schools of 
Southwest Yonkers remained predominantly (overall 
67%) minority in student population, some overcrowded 
and some seriously underutilized, housed in inferior phys­
ical facilities, staffed with less-experienced staff members 
and more than half of the minority teachers employed by 
the school system, and providing their students with 
concededly inferior educational opportunities.

E. The City's Activities With Respect to School 
Segregation

In contending that the City as well as the Board should 
be held liable for segregation in the Yonkers public 
schools, plaintiffs pointed to, inter alia, the interrelation­
ship between housing segregation and school segregation, 
the City’s control over school budgeting and plans, and 
the mayor’s appointments to the Board of persons op­
posed to desegregative action.

1. The Interrelationship Between Schools and Housing

In an effort to refute the contention that its actions in 
concentrating subsidized low-income housing in South­
west Yonkers had had the effect of enhancing school 
segregation, the City offered a study that concluded that 
if none of the subsidized housing projects in Southwest 
Yonkers had been built and each of the project sites had 
remained vacant, the racial balance in Southwest 
Yonkers’s schools would not have differed significantly 
from the actual 1980-81 figures. In contrast, plaintiffs’ 
expert testified that building low-income housing to be 
occupied principally by minority families tends to create a 
school that, while not necessarily showing an immediate 
dramatic increase in minority students, soon becomes

6216



identified as a “minority school.” Such an identification 
encourages resident white families to move out of the 
neighborhood and discourages other white families from 
moving in.

The relationship between schools and housing was 
hardly lost on the City while it was making its various 
decisions as to whether and where to construct subsidized 
housing. One Council member testified that nearly all of 
the East Yonkers councilmen had indicated that their 
constituents objected to subsidized low-income housing 
partly because “ [i]n order to keep the schools nice, you 
know, you’d have to keep out the minorities.” Further, as 
described in the previous section, a common theme of 
East Yonkers residents’ opposition to the Yonkers Plan 
for school desegregation was the desire to “preserve the 
nature of our neighborhoods.” As described in Part 
/l.II .E .3. below, Mayor Martinelli explicitly opposed de­
segregation of the schools by busing in part because it 
would diminish the stability of the residential patterns.

There was also evidence that City officials had re­
quested that the Board make several school attendance 
zone changes that would have enhanced segregation at the 
schools to be affected. For example, in 1974, Martinelli 
urged that a small nonminority area of a neighborhood be 
moved from the attendance zone of an elementary school 
that was 60% minority to one that was 88% white. A few 
months later a Council member suggested that several 
predominantly white blocks be redistricted from a school 
that was 28% minority to one that was 97% white. In 
1976, another City official made a similar request at the 
behest of a landlord who had complained that his ability 
to attract tenants was detrimentally affected by the loca­
tion of his property within the zone of a school that had a

6217



substantial minority enrollment. The Board declined to 
implement any of these requested changes.

2. City Influence on the Board

Under state law, the Yonkers school district is fiscally 
dependent upon the City, and the Board’s annual budget 
is subject to approval, line by line, by the Council. N.Y. 
Educ. Law § 2576 (McKinney 1981). Because of the 
Council’s fiscal control over the Board, “in the public 
mind there [were] two boards of education actually oper­
ating,” with citizens often looking directly to the Council 
in school matters. There was no evidence, however, that 
the Council in any particular instance disapproved a 
school budget that included a desegregation plan; there 
could be no such evidence because the Board never sought 
to implement a plan that had any significant desegrega- 
tive elements.

The Board’s willingness to put specific proposals be­
fore the Council was not constrained solely by fiscal 
considerations. For example, in 1973, the superintendent 
recommended to the Board, and the Board submitted to 
the Council, recommendations for vocational program 
modifications that were more expensive than the pairing- 
and-sharing proposal of the NYU Report. Both the East 
Yonkers community and a number of Council members 
had publicly opposed the NYU Report’s recommenda­
tion. The Board’s spurning of the less expensive NYU 
proposals “was influenced by the perceived infeasibility 
of obtaining City Council approval.” 624 F. Supp. at 
1506. Similarly, in the Phase II proposals, the school 
closings and the state’s substantial subsidization of trans­
portation costs would have resulted in a net reduction of 
the school system’s annual expenditures, and fiscal con-

6218



cerns thus could not explain the Board’s rejection of 
those proposals. As a practical matter, however, East 
Yonkers community opposition to Phase II was strong, 
Council members and the mayor had publicly expressed 
their opposition, and the Board always had an eye on 
what was “politically,” not just fiscally, feasible. As one 
Board official put it, “we, in essence, had to convince 
another series of people, most of whom were elected by 
the community, and to the extent that the community 
resisted the idea, any idea, it seems to me that that would 
have some impact upon the people who owed election to 
those same individuals.”

The City’s influence on the Board was also visible in 
certain decisions as to school sites and configurations. 
For example, in the late 1960’s the Board commenced 
plans for School 10, which it intended to open as an 
integrated elementary school in Southwest Yonkers, draw­
ing students from School 3 (then 34% minority), School 

, 19 (then 68% minority), and School 27 (then 5% minor­
ity). Planned as an experiment in the “open school” 
concept, in which the interior space would be flexible, 
unstructured, and without walls, the building was to be 
located on a five-acre site having a general openness of 
environment harmonious with the openness to be found 
within. As eventually constructed, however, School 10 
was a mean and inadequate ghetto school, due largely to 
changes urged by the City which the Board grudgingly felt 
compelled to accept.

Without recounting the many events that occurred en 
route to the birth of School 10, which are described in 
detail in the district court’s opinion, 624 F. Supp. at 1403- 
10 and 1542-43, suffice it to say that first, the Board 
agreed to change its preferred site to one in the middle of

6219



an urban renewal project (in order to allow the City to 
use the construction of School 10 as a statutorily permit­
ted noncash contribution to the urban renewal area); later 
it accepted a one-acre site instead of the originally ap­
proved five acres (because the City decided to erect 
additional apartments on part of the site); as the site was 
developed, the front of the school could not be seen from 
the street (because the City wanted that frontage for an 
apartment-retail-store complex); and in the end, the 
school had virtually no outdoor recreation area (because 
the City needed more garage space for apartment resi­
dents). Though the Board objected to the City’s inroads 
into the School 10 facilities, it eventually capitulated to 
each demand.

Because of its location behind other buildings and its 
lack of outdoor play area, School 10 became known as 
the “airshaft” school and was characterized immediately 
as a “new ghetto school.” By 1980, it had the fourth 
largest minority percentage enrollment in the City.

3. The M ayor’s Appointments to the Board

Although the Board was an independent municipal 
corporation under state law, its nine members were ap­
pointed by the mayor. Prior to the election of Mayor 
Martinelli, many Board members served more than one 
term, frequently being reappointed by a mayor other than 
the one who had originally appointed them. In the 25 
years just prior to the advent of Martinelli, two-thirds of 
the Board’s 33 members had been reappointed by a 
successor mayor. In 1973, after HUD had made clear that 
further federal funds for housing would be withheld 
unless the City allowed low-income housing to be con­
structed outside of Southwest, Martinelli won election on

6220



a campaign platform that included a promise that no 
more subsidized housing would be constructed in 
Yonkers. Once in office, Martinelli, who opposed busing 
and favored the policy of neighborhood schools, set out 
to appoint members “based on his philosophy of educa­
tion,” so that “it would be his Board.” He did not 
reappoint a single person who was serving on the Board 
at the time he was elected. Many of his appointments 
were controversial.

His first appointment, in 1974, was Angelo Paradiso, 
who had been the principal at Saunders from 1964 to 
1973. Paradiso had resigned in 1973 after a dispute with 
Alioto concerning the Saunders screening process and 
Paradiso’s unwillingness to address the problem of dis­
proportionately low numbers of minority students at the 
school and what Alioto perceived as the systematic exclu­
sion of minorities.

In 1975, Martinelli appointed as Board members Mor­
ton Wekstein and Anne Bocik. Wekstein was the Mayor’s 
personal attorney, and his appointment drew criticism in 
part because Wekstein’s law partner was then represent­
ing a number of school administrators who had been 
considered ineffective by Alioto. A year later, Wekstein 
resigned because of a conflict of interest.

Bocik was a former teacher and elementary school 
principal who had retired in 1974 after Alioto requested 
her resignation. As a principal, Bocik had vowed that 
there would never be a full-time minority teacher of 
academic subjects in her school; she had received unfa­
vorable job evaluations because of her ineffectiveness in 
planning and her common use of racial slurs and other 
racially insensitive behavior toward minority students. 
Bocik’s treatment of minority students in this manner had

6221



been the subject of complaints to school administrators 
from both minority and white teachers; at trial, one 
teacher described in detail incidents in which Bocik ter­
rorized or humiliated minority students, used racial epi­
thets in referring to minority children, described them as 
animalistic, and threatened to “buy bleach, Clorox, 
Purex to bleach them, their skins, because perhaps that 
would improve their behavior.” Soon after Bocik’s forced 
retirement, a state senator wrote Martinelli, recommend­
ing that she be appointed to the Board based on her 
experience and her Slavic background; her appointment 
was supported by the United Slavonian American 
League. It was opposed by the Board’s president, by 
Alioto, and by community members, especially from the 
minority community. Martinelli appointed Bocik to the 
Board and defended the appointment by reference to her 
ethnic background.

The mayor made several appointments in 1976. First, 
after Wekstein resigned, Martinelli was asked to consider 
appointing an hispanic to the Board. Notwithstanding his 
recent justification of the Bocik appointment on grounds 
of her ethnicity, he responded by stating that his appoint­
ment would be “based on the quality of the individual 
irregardless [s/'c] of racial background.” He appointed to 
the recently vacated seat a white realtor from Northeast 
Yonkers.

In the same year, the mayor replaced two Board mem­
bers who had been movers behind the Task Force and 
were generally regarded as being among the Board’s 
strongest advocates of school desegregation in Yonkers. 
Both members had expressed their interest in continuing 
to serve on the Board, and the reappointment of one or 
both was supported by the Council of PTAs, the Yonkers

6222



NAACP, the new superintendent Robitaille, and the 
Clergy of Yonkers. Martinelli appointed instead John 
Romano, a candidate supported by the Congress of 
Italian-American Organizations, and Joseph Spencer, a 
supporter of the mayor in his previous election cam­
paigns. Once on the Board, Romano and Spencer 
promptly voted against even applying for state funding 
for the Task Force; Romano opined that state funding 
was a “waste[ ]” because Yonkers has no “racial problem 
. . . .  unless the state hands down a ruling stating there 
is a problem.”

By the time of the 1977 Phase II proposal, Martinelli 
was routinely quizzing prospective Board members about 
their views on busing; he admitted at trial that these views 
“probably weighed very heavily with [him]” in deciding 
whether or not to appoint. In 1977 and 1978, Martinelli 
appointed four persons, all of whom were opposed to the 
Phase II Plan. They included Quentin Hicks, a black 
opposed to busing, whose appointment was immediately 
protested by members of the black community on the 
ground that his views did not represent theirs; the ap­
pointment was later acknowledged by the mayor to have 
been an embarrassment to the black community.

By May 1978, the Board was composed solely of 
Martinelli’s appointees. In that month, the Board held a 
special workshop at which Board members unanimously 
expressed their opposition to the desegregation proposals 
of Phase II. As indicated in part .4.II.D.2. above, the 
Board neither accepted any desegregative aspect of these 
proposals nor took any other steps, including those it 
avowedly preferred, toward desegregating the Yonkers 
public schools.

6223



In 1979, Martinelli lost his bid for reelection. In his 
valedictory State-of-the-City address, he began his de­
scription of his administration’s achievements in educa­
tion by stating that “ [discussion of neighborhood 
stability would not be complete without attention to our 
public school system.” After mentioning three factors 
that he predicted would ensure sound and healthy 
schools, he stated, “ [m]ost importantly, we now have a 
Board of Education fully committed to neighborhood 
schools which is of critical importance to neighborhood 
stability in this city!”

F. The District Court’s Findings as to School
Segregation

The district court found that the Yonkers public school 
system as a whole was in fact racially segregated, with few 
of the public schools in Yonkers fairly reflecting the racial 
balance of the City’s overall student population. Using 
the term “minority” to include both blacks and hispanics, 
the court found that most schools in the district were 
either identifiably white or identifiably minority. Most of 
the schools in Southwest Yonkers had student populations 
that were predominantly minority, and the community 
and the Board’s administrative personnel generally associ­
ated Southwest Yonkers with minority schools. 624 F. 
Supp. at 1384-87.

School authorities acknowledged that the quality of the 
education available at the identifiably minority schools 
was inferior to that available at the identifiably white 
schools, due in part to the inferior physical facilities and 
the concentration of less experienced teaching staffs at 
the former. Id. at 1530. The court found that the identifi- 
ability of certain Southwest Yonkers schools as minority

6224



schools had become inseparable from the perception of 
those schools as educationally inferior, and that “ [t]his 
confluence of racial identifiability and relative educa­
tional opportunity has served to reinforce the segregative 
demographic patterns which have evolved in the City.” Id. 
at 1444.

The court found that the segregation of the schools was 
attributable to the conduct of both the Board and the 
City and that each defendant had acted with the intent to 
perpetuate or enhance school segregation.

1. The Board’s Liability

The court found that the Board was well aware of the 
City’s practice of confining subsidized low-income hous­
ing to Southwest Yonkers and indeed had urged the City 
to select scattered sites for such housing. It found that the 
Board’s adherence to a neighborhood-school policy in the 
face of the City’s known segregative practice suggested an 
intent on the part of the Board to preserve a similar 
segregation in the schools. Id. at 1535-37. It found 
confirmation of segregative intent in many of the Board’s 
affirmative acts.

The Board’s disproportionate assignment of minority 
teachers and staff members to the predominantly minor­
ity schools served to enhance the racial identifiability of 
those schools as minority schools; the enhanced identifia­
bility had the effect of perpetuating and increasing the 
predominance of minorities in the student populations of 
those schools. Id. at 1527-28. The staff assignments were 
not explainable by reference to rationales offered by the 
Board to explain its assignments of students, for neither 
the neighborhood-school concept nor concerns for trans­
portation played a role in staff assignments. Id. at 1467.

6225



Nor was the court persuaded by the Board’s reliance on 
its agreement with the teachers’ union as an explanation 
for the staffing pattern, first because the racial skewing 
of the staff assignments predated that agreement, and 
second because the agreement gave the Board a certain 
amount of retransfer power that the Board never at­
tempted to use. Id. at 1463-67. The court found that

[t]he foreseeability of the increased racial segregation 
of staff members and the district’s limited efforts to 
alleviate the imbalance together suggest that the 
resulting assignment of minority staff to minority 
schools was a practice which the Board approved of 
and intended to continue. . . . Given the school 
district’s deliberately segregative pattern of adminis­
trative staff assignments and the racial dispropor- 
tionality in teacher assignments prior to the collective 
bargaining agreement, it is reasonable to infer that 
the subsequent pattern of assigning minority teachers 
to disproportionately minority schools was consid­
ered desirable and was deliberately unaltered.

Id. at 1464-65.

The court also found that the Board’s special education 
program, which resulted in the placement of a dispropor­
tionate number of minority children in classes for the 
emotionally disturbed, was “operated in an unlawfully 
discriminatory manner.” Id. at 1461. The evaluative pro­
cess was particularly prone to unwarranted racial assump­
tions and was unusually discriminatory in its impact. No 
race-neutral factor was likely to explain the dispropor­
tionately high numbers of minority children in such 
classes, id. at 1454, and the discriminatory treatment and 
the consequent stigmatization of the children so placed

6226



was not educationally justifiable, id. at 1461. In addition, 
the assignment of these disproportionately minority- 
populated special classes to schools that were predomi­
nantly white, and the isolation of and refusal to 
mainstream the special class students increased the stig­
matization. Id. at 1455. Minority students enrolled in 
regular school programs have had difficulty in gaining 
acceptance among their white schoolmates as a result of 
the Board’s placement of disproportionately minority 
special education classes in the school. Id. at 1456. Even 
without reference to the special education program, the 
court noted that a Board study revealed significantly 
more racial prejudice among students attending schools 
that were disproportionately black or disproportionately 
white than among students attending schools that were 
racially balanced. Id. at 1444.

The court also found that many of the Board’s actions 
and inactions with regard to school openings, closings, 
and attendance zone changes evinced a segregative intent. 
It found, for example, that the racial imbalance between 
School 16 (90% white) and the nearby School 25 (88% 
minority) had been caused in part by the Board’s deliber­
ately segregative conduct in repeatedly redrawing the 
attendance zone boundary between the two schools. It 
found that the Board’s proffer of a race-neutral basis for 
the rezoning was pretextual. Id. at 1526-27.

Though the court was unpersuaded that the isolated act 
of closing School 1 in 1954—by then 99% minority— 
evinced a segregative intent, it found that the Board’s 
earlier changes in the attendance zone of School 1, whose 
student population had theretofore been as much as two- 
thirds white, had “constituted deliberate, racially moti-

6227



vated gerrymandering” for which there was no evidence 
of any race-neutral justification. Id. at 1411.

The court found that the Board’s refusal to close or 
desegregate Longfellow, the underutilized, inferior mid­
dle school with a heavy minority population, was “diffi­
cult to explain in race-neutral terms,” id. at 1426, and 
found the Board’s proffered explanations fiscally un­
sound, inconsistent with other Board actions, and pretex- 
tual. It found that by the late 1970’s, racial considerations 
played an increasing role in the Board’s refusal to close 
the school. Id. at 1426-28. It also found that “racial 
factors played a significant role in the Board’s segregative 
opening of Commerce Middle School.” Id. at 1482; see 
also id. at 1472-79.

The court found that the Board’s rejection of the NYU 
Report’s recommendation of a “variable access” voca­
tional program was designed to be responsive to racial 
concerns. The community opposition, which argued that 
any east-west pairing of schools would result in a decline 
of the quality of education offered at the schools in East 
Yonkers, took on a pretextual hue in the context of 
vocational courses. Though test scores indicated a dispar­
ity between whites and minorities in achievement levels in 
academic courses such as English and mathematics, no 
such disparity was indicated with regard to vocational 
courses such as auto mechanics. The court found that the 
Board recognized that community opposition to the 
pairing-and-sharing proposal stemmed from racial con­
cerns and that the Board’s selection of the more expensive 
alternative of duplicating the vocational courses in each 
of the four academic high schools reflected a desire not to 
take steps that would be desegregative. Id. at 1476-78.

6228



The court found that the Board’s persistent rejection of 
other desegregative proposals, including those recom­
mended in Phase II and all proposed alternatives that 
would have had any desegregative effect, was similarly 
the result of the Board’s responsiveness to race-based 
community resistence to school desegregation. Id. at 
1497. The court found it significant that the Board did 
not always yield to public pressures, most notably in 
connection with its decisions as to what schools to close in 
connection with the City’s fiscal crisis. Thus, when the 
Board proposed to close Schools 4 (98% white) and 15 
(100% white), there was massive protest from the af­
fected communities, from councilmen, and from the 
mayor. These protests were not construed by the Board as 
principally race-based, and the Board held firm and 
closed the schools. Id. at 1416-17. Whenever a proposed 
change was for purposes of desegregation, however, and 
the pressure was perceived as racially motivated, the 
Board acquiesced. Id. at 1493-94.

The court found several indications that much of the 
community opposition to busing was race-related and 
that its phrasing in race-neutral terms was pretextual. For 
example, East Yonkers parents’ emphasis on allowing 
their own children to attend schools in their neighbor­
hoods and on not usurping after-school recreational time 
by requiring busing, could not explain their opposition to 
having Southwest Yonkers children attend schools in East 
Yonkers. Moreover, the allegedly race-neutral objections 
would, in many instances, have been equally applicable to 
the objectors’ proposed alternatives such as the forma­
tion of magnet schools and open enrollment. The sincer­
ity of their advocacy of magnet schools was further belied 
by their earlier vehement opposition to the NYU Report’s

6229



pairing-and-sharing proposal, which would have effected 
a limited magnet-school program. All of these factors 
persuaded the district court that the stated preferences of 
both the community and the Board for such busing 
alternatives as magnet schools were pretexts designed to 
obscure the race-based nature of their opposition to 
desegregative changes. Id. at 1489-90. The court’s infer­
ence that the Board’s own stated preference for such 
alternatives was pretextual was also drawn from the 
Board’s failure, for more than three years following its 
rejection of Phase II’s desegregative aspects, to take any 
action whatever to implement any of its allegedly prefer­
red desegregative alternatives. Id. at 1493-95.

In sum, the district court found that the Board’s 
refusal to implement such proposals in the late 
1970’s occurred in [a] temporal and factual context 
which renders a finding of deliberate perpetuation of 
racial segregation appropriate: the increased racial 
imbalance among the district’s schools; the increas­
ingly visible racial opposition to correcting this con­
dition; the increased demands for desegregative 
action; an increasing realization that such action was 
an important ingredient in eliminating disparities in 
educational opportunities in the district; a commu­
nity increasingly afflicted by segregative governmen­
tal housing practices animated by community 
opposition to the presence of subsidized housing in 
areas outside of Southwest Yonkers; and the failure 
to address the problem of racial imbalance in the 
schools in any meaningful fashion in the years fol­
lowing the rejection of Phase II in a manner consis­
tent with the Board’s stated reasons for rejecting the 
plan. In our view, the record makes clear that the

6230



initial reluctance to implement desegregative school 
reorganization plans evolved into a persistent failure 
to adopt measures to correct recognized educational 
and racial imbalances in the district in part because 
of their desegregative consequences. From the fore­
going, we find the Board’s failure to meaningfully 
address the problem of racial imbalance subsequent 
to its consideration of Phase II is more readily 
explainable as a reflection of the community’s resis­
tance to desegregation rather than the race-neutral 
concerns of the community.

624 F. Supp. at 1497. The court concluded that the 
conduct of the Board violated the rights of minority 
school children under Titles IV and VI and the Equal 
Protection Clause.

2. The Liability o f  the City

The court found that the City’s segregative housing 
practices had been a contributing cause of the racial 
segregation of the schools. It found that the failure of the 
Board to take action to minimize the school segregation 
“in no way negates the fact that, as a factual matter, the 
City’s housing practices contributed to the perpetuation 
and aggravation of residential segregation and the result­
ing segregation of the schools.” Id. at 1501.

The court found that the segregative impact of the 
City’s segregative housing practices on the schools was 
not unavoidable, unknowing, or inadvertent. It noted 
that the link between the racial identifiability of a school 
and the residential segregation of the surrounding neigh­
borhood was recognized by City officials, id. at 1443, and 
found that “in light of the school district’s historic 
neighborhood school policy, the perpetuation and exacer-

6231



bation of racial imbalance in the school district was a 
natural, probable and actually foreseen consequence of 
the City’s discriminatory housing practices . . . Id. at 
1542. Indeed, in the racially motivated community oppo­
sition to the construction of low-income housing in non­
minority areas, there was frequent mention of the effect 
of such housing on schools, and express objection by 
white parents to having their children schooled with 
minorities.

Further, the court found that the pattern of appoint­
ments by Mayor Martinelli of Board members, screened 
for their opposition to “busing,” was an exercise of 
“power over school board appointments as a means of 
furthering the city’s segregative objectives.” Id. at 1534. 
Though the City was not initially responsible for the 
Board’s neighborhood-school policy, it opposed construc­
tion of housing for minorities outside of Southwest 
Yonkers, and it advocated keeping all children assigned to 
schools in the neighborhoods in which they lived. Mar­
tinelli consistently appointed Board members who shared 
this view and who steadfastly refused to take any action 
that would have had any desegregative effect on the 
schools. Thus, the court found that “the City not only 
was aware of the overall impact of its subsidized housing 
practices on Yonkers public schools but also intended to 
preserve the racially segregative impact of these practices 
on the schools.” Id. at 1501.

In all, the court found that the City’s segregative 
housing practices and the mayor’s appointments contrib­
uted significantly both to the confinement of minority 
students to schools in Southwest Yonkers and to the 
Board’s failure to undo the segregative effects of these 
and other practices on the schools. “And in a city where

6232



the segregated condition of ‘neighborhood schools’ is in 
part the product of official municipal design, the commit­
ment to the neighborhood school system by the head of 
that same municipality can hardly be considered race- 
neutral.” Id. at 1513.

The court concluded that the conduct of the City in 
intentionally perpetuating segregation in the schools vio­
lated the rights of minority schoolchildren under Title IV 
and the Equal Protection Clause.

G. The School Remedy

After receiving remedy proposals from the parties and 
conducting an evidentiary hearing, the court issued its 
school remedy order, reported at 635 F. Supp. 1538 
(1986). As an overall goal, the order provided that the 
Board “shall seek to achieve” desegregation throughout 
the Yonkers public school system by the 1987-88 school 
year. To this end, the court ordered the creation of a 
system of magnet schools that students could choose to 
attend voluntarily. It defined a “desegregated school” as
(a) a magnet school whose minority enrollment was 
within 15 percentage points of the system-wide propor­
tion of minority students for the first year of that school’s 
operation and within 10 percentage points thereafter, or
(b) a nonmagnet school whose minority population was 
within 20 percentage points of the system-wide propor­
tion.

The court prescribed the methods to be used in admin­
istering the magnet school system “ [i]n order to maximize 
the extent to which the integrative goals of this order will 
be reached through voluntary student assignments.” Id. 
at 1544. They included an intense publicity and recruit­
ment phase, id., and a system whereby parents must

6233



submit for each child a list of three school choices, at 
least one of which must “further the goals of desegrega­
tion.” Id. at 1545. The court also established the admis­
sions criteria to be used in the magnet schools, ordered 
the Board to “make every effort” to achieve a specified 
racial composition of teachers at each school, explained 
the guidelines to be followed in the special education 
program, and ordered that the Board provide transporta­
tion for specified students. Id. at 1545-50.

The court ordered the City to provide the necessary 
funding for implementation of the ordered desegregation 
program. It appointed a monitor to oversee compliance 
with its orders and retained jurisdiction of the action in 
order to enforce compliance. Id. at 1551-53.

The court overruled a belated objection by the City 
that the plan ordered by the court was too expensive. The 
court noted that the City had made no such objection at 
the hearing when the desegregation plan budget was 
presented, had not contended that any part of the pro­
posal was not required for desegregation, and was un­
able, despite being given an additional opportunity to do 
so, to show that any part of the desegregation plan 
budget either was not necessary or was duplicative of the 
regular budget.

A stay motion was denied, and the desegregation pro­
gram was commenced in the 1986-87 school year.

B. L IA B ILITY

In these appeals, the City mounts several challenges to 
the district court’s ruling that it is liable for segregation in 
housing. Principally it contends that the court erred (1) in 
ruling, in effect, that it had an obligation to build

6234



subsidized housing outside of Southwest Yonkers; (2) in 
finding that the City’s housing decisions were made with 
the intention and the effect of perpetuating housing 
segregation; and (3) in holding the City liable for making 
decisions that merely responded to the wishes of its 
citizens.

The City challenges the ruling that it is liable for 
segregation in the schools, contending principally (1) that 
the segregation was caused not by City actions but rather 
by Board policies for which the City may not be held 
liable; (2) that the record reflects at most the foreseeabil­
ity that City actions would perpetuate and enhance school 
segregation, but not any intent on the part of the City to 
achieve those effects; and (3) that the court could not 
properly take into account, in assessing City responsibil­
ity for school segregation, the mayor’s pattern of ap­
pointing to the Board individuals who espoused the 
maintenance of segregation in the schools.

The Board challenges the district court’s ruling that it is 
liable for school segregation on the principal grounds that 
(1) there was insufficient evidence of its intention to 
discriminate, and (2) the court could not properly take 
into account the intentionally segregative conduct of the 
City in determining whether the Board should be held 
liable. The Board also contends that “minority” should 
have been defined to include only blacks, not hispanics, 
and that witlf that redefinition, the schools could not be 
found to be in fact segregated.

As discussed in Part C. below, both the City and the 
Board contend that various aspects of the district court’s 
remedial orders go beyond the proper bounds of discre­
tion.

6235



We have considered all of the arguments made by the 
City and the Board on these appeals and find all of them 
to be without merit. Only those mentioned above warrant 
discussion.

I. General Principles

A. Substantive Law and the Requirement o f  Intent

It is by now well established that in order to prove a 
claim of discrimination in violation of the Equal Protec­
tion Clause a plaintiff must show not only that the state 
action complained of had a disproportionate or discrimi­
natory impact but also that the defendant acted with the 
intent to discriminate. This principle governs claims of 
discrimination in housing, see Village o f  Arlington 
Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp., 
429 U.S. 252, 265 (1977) (“Arlington Heights F ) ,  and 
claims of segregation in the schools, see Keyes v. School 
District No. 1, 413 U.S. 189, 198 (1973) {“Keyes”)- See 
generally Washington v. Davis, 426 U.S. 229, 239 (1976).

In order to prevail on an equal protection claim of 
racial discrimination, the plaintiff need not show that the 
decisionmaker was motivated solely, primarily, or even 
predominantly by concerns that were racial:

[ Washington v.] Davis does not require a plaintiff to 
prove that the challenged action rested solely on 
racially discriminatory purposes. Rarely can it be 
said that a legislature or administrative body operat­
ing under a broad mandate made a decision moti­
vated solely by a single concern, or even that a 
particular purpose was the “dominant” or “primary” 
one.

6236



Arlington Heights I, 429 U.S. at 265 (footnote omitted). 
Rather, the plaintiff need begin only by showing that race 
was “a motivating factor.” Id. at 266 (emphasis added). 
Once it is shown that a decision was motivated at least in 
part by a racially discriminatory purpose, the burden 
shifts to the defendant to show that the same result would 
have been reached even without consideration of race. Id. 
at 270 n.21; Mt. Healthy School District Board o f  Educa­
tion v. Doyle, 429 U.S. 274, 287 (1977). If the defendant 
comes forward with no such proof or if the trier of fact is 
unpersuaded that race did not contribute to the outcome 
of the decision, the equal protection claim is established.

As to a claim under the Fair Housing Act, in contrast, 
the consensus is that a plaintiff need prove only discrimi­
natory effect, and need not show that the decision com­
plained of was made with discriminatory intent. See, e.g., 
Robinson v. 12 Lofts Realty, Inc., 610F.2d 1032, 1036-38 
(2d Cir. 1979) (collecting cases):

“To establish a prima facie case of racial discrimina­
tion, the plaintiff need prove no more than that the 
conduct of the defendant actually or predictably 
results in racial discrimination; in other words, that 
it has a discriminatory effect. . . . The plaintiff 
need make no showing whatsoever that the action 
resulting in racial discrimination in housing was 
racially motivated. . . . Effect, and not motivation, 
is the touchstone, in part because clever men may 
easily conceal their motivations . . . .”

Id. at 1037 (quoting United States v. City o f  Black Jack, 
508 F.2d 1179, 1184-85 (8th Cir. 1974), cert, denied, 422 
U.S. 1042 (1975)). See Arlington Heights I, 429 U.S. 252, 
270-71 (ruling that equal protection claim should have

6237



been dismissed for lack of proof of discriminatory intent, 
but remanding for further consideration of Fair Housing 
Act claim); Metropolitan Housing Development Corp. v. 
Village o f  Arlington Heights, 558 F.2d 1283, 1287-90 (7th 
Cir. 1977) (“Arlington Heights IF )  (holding that Fair 
Housing Act claim could be established by proof of 
discriminatory effect, without proof of discriminatory 
intent), cert, denied, 434 U.S. 1025 (1978).

The effect in the present case of the differing standards 
of proof for the constitutional claim and the Fair Hous­
ing Act claim is, as a practical matter, immaterial, for the 
district court found that even if proof of discriminatory 
intent were required for establishment of a claim under 
the statute, the requisite intent was proven. See 624 F. 
Supp. at 1293 n.12 (“In light of the strength of the 
evidence of intent in the case before us, it is unnecessary 
to reach the question whether entitlement to the broad 
remedial measures sought by plaintiffs here could be 
established under the relaxed ‘effects’ standard set forth 
in Arlington Heights I I ”). Since we find no basis for 
overturning the district court’s findings of intent (see 
Parts B .II.A .2., 5.11.B., and 5.III.B . below), and since 
the conduct upon which the housing discrimination claim 
is based spans a period that commenced many years 
before the 1968 effective date of the Fair Housing Act, we 
review the statutory claims, along with the constitutional 
claims, in light of the proof of the City’s segregative 
intent.

B. Standard o f  Review

The standard to be followed by the appellate court in 
reviewing findings of fact made by the district court is 
also clear. Fed. R. Civ. P. 52(a) states that those findings,

6238



“whether based on oral or documentary evidence, shall 
not be set aside unless clearly erroneous.” Assessments of 
the credibility of the witnesses are peculiarly within the 
province of the district court as trier of fact and are 
entitled to considerable deference. Id. Thus, “when a trial 
judge’s finding is based on his decision to credit the 
testimony of one of two or more witnesses, each of whom 
has told a coherent and facially plausible story that is not 
contradicted by extrinsic evidence, that finding, if not 
internally inconsistent, can virtually never be clear error.” 
Anderson v. City o f  Bessemer City, 470 U.S. 564, 575 
(1985). Even when the district court’s findings of fact do 
not rest on credibility determinations but instead are 
based on documentary evidence or on inferences from 
other facts, the appellate court must accept those findings 
if they adopt a permissible view of the evidence; the 
appellate court may not conduct a de novo review. In 
short, “ [w]here there are two permissible views of the 
evidence, the factfinder’s choice between them cannot be 
clearly erroneous.” Id. at 574; see United States v. Yellow 
Cab Co., 338 U.S. 338, 342 (1949).

This standard of review governs questions of fact, 
though not questions of law or mixed questions of fact 
and law. A finding of discriminatory intent is a finding of 
fact, Pullman-Standard v. Swint, 456 U.S. 273, 287-90 
(1982), as are findings of discrimination, Anderson v. 
City o f Bessemer City, 470 U.S. at 573, and causation, 
e.g., Wellner v. Minnesota State Junior College Board, 
487 F.2d 153, 156 (8th Cir. 1973).

In accordance with the above principles, if the district 
court’s findings as to the existence of segregation in fact, 
the existence of segregative intent, and the existence of a 
causal relationship between the two are permissible infer-

6239



ences from the evidence of record, we may not overturn 
them.

II. The City’s Liability For Segregation In 
Housing

A. The City’s Obligation With Respect to Subsidized 
Housing

The Fair Housing Act makes it unlawful

(a) To refuse to sell or rent after the making of a 
bona fide offer, or to refuse to negotiate for the sale 
or rental of, or otherwise make unavailable or deny, 
a dwelling to any person because of race, color, 
religion, sex, or national origin.

42 U.S.C. § 3604(a) (emphasis added). The statute de­
fines “dwelling” as “any building . . . intended for 
occupancy as[ ] a residence by one or more families, and 
any vacant land which is offered for sale or lease for the 
construction or location thereon of any such building 
. . . .” Id. § 3602(b). The City’s contention is that nei­
ther the Fair Housing Act nor the Equal Protection 
Clause imposes on it any obligation to construct housing, 
that it has constructed housing that it has made available 
to all persons regardless of race, and that the law requires 
no more of it. In the circumstances of the present case, 
we disagree.

Though we know of no statutory or constitutional 
provision that imposes on a municipality a general obliga­
tion to construct subsidized housing, see Acevedo v. 
Nassau County, 500 F.2d 1078, 1081-82 (2d Cir. 1974), 
more focused principles govern the present case. In 
Acevedo, the thrust of the complaint was that the defen-

6240



dant county had initially planned to build both senior 
citizen and family housing and that its abandonment of 
the plan to build family housing had a disproportionate 
impact on minorities. See id. at 1081. The district court, 
after a trial, found that the abandonment had neither 
discriminatory effect nor a discriminatory motive. See id. 
at 1079-80. Accordingly, we held that the abandonment 
violated neither the Constitution nor the Fair Housing 
Act. See id. at 1082. This does not mean that we would 
have reached the same conclusion in the face of findings 
that there had been discriminatory impact and discrimina­
tory intent, for the absence of a general obligation to 
construct does not give the municipality license to pro­
ceed discriminatorily once it has started down the road to 
construction. Thus, the Sixth Circuit, for example, has 
upheld a “pattern and practice” claim under the Fair 
Housing Act, see 42 U.S.C. § 3613(a), where the defen­
dant city had applied for federal funds that it in fact 
wanted and needed, but had abandoned its application 
for reasons found to be racially discriminatory. United 
States v. City o f  Parma, 661 F.2d 562, 575 (6th Cir. 1981), 
cert, denied, 456 U.S. 926 (1982).

Nor, once a municipality has decided to construct 
housing, may it lawfully proceed with segregative intent 
and effect to confine housing for minority occupancy to 
areas in which minority residence is already concentrated, 
thereby enhancing and perpetuating racial segregation in 
residential patterns. In Otero v. New York City Housing 
Authority, 484 F.2d 1122 (2d Cir. 1973), we noted obiter 
that “Congress’ desire in providing fair housing through­
out the United States was to stem the spread of urban 
ghettos and to promote open, integrated housing,” id. at 
1034, and that, accordingly, “ [a]n authority may not . . .

6241



select sites for projects which will be occupied by non­
whites only in areas already heavily concentrated with a 
high proportion of non-whites,” id. at 1033. The Third 
Circuit reached a similar conclusion in Shannon v. United 
States Department o f  Housing and Urban Development, 
436 F.2d 809 (3d Cir. 1970), which involved a challenge to 
HUD’s approval of a rent-subsidy contract for a new 
building in an urban renewal area of Philadelphia. The 
thrust of the complaint was that the location of a rent- 
subsidy project in that area would have the effect of 
increasing the already high concentration of low-income 
black residents there, and that HUD had not properly 
considered the effect of such a subsidy guarantee on the 
racial concentration in Philadelphia as a whole or in that 
neighborhood in particular. Id. at 811-12. The court of 
appeals agreed that HUD had not considered those ef­
fects, and it vacated the district court’s denial of relief, 
stating that “ [ijncrease or maintenance of racial concen­
tration is prima facie . . .  at variance with” the policy 
underlying the Fair Housing Act. Id. at 821. Consistent 
with these views, when we held in Acevedo that there was 
no constitutional violation in the defendant’s decision, 
made with no discriminatory intent, not to construct 
housing, we took care to distinguish cases in which 
municipalities had intentionally pursued their construc­
tion plans in a segregative manner, “effectively restrict­
ing] low income housing projects to segregated 
neighborhoods.” See 500 F.2d at 1081 n.3.

Accordingly, the district court properly rejected the 
City’s contention that its decisions not to construct mi­
nority housing in any virtually all-white area were im­
mune from scrutiny, and appropriately proceeded to 
determine whether housing in Yonkers was in fact segre-

6242



gated, whether that segregation was caused or enhanced 
in substantial part by the City’s conduct, and whether 
that conduct was intentionally segregative.

1. Segregative Effect o f  the City’s Actions

The district court found that by 1980 an “extreme 
condition of segregation . . . exist[ed] in Yonkers.” 624 
F. Supp. at 1364. The evidence amply supports this 
finding.

The 1980 Census figures showed that 81% of Yonkers’s 
minority residents lived in one quadrant of the City. 
Minorities constituted 19% of Yonkers’s total population; 
yet the minority population of Southwest Yonkers ex­
ceeded 40%. Of the 10 census tracts within Southwest 
Yonkers itself, five had minority populations exceeding 
50%. In contrast, outside of Southwest Yonkers, only 6% 
of the residents were minorities; and these minority resi­
dents were largely confined to two areas, one having a 
minority population of 29% and the other having a 
minority population of 80%. In light of these facts, we 
have no difficulty in upholding the district court’s finding 
that housing in Yonkers was segregated.

Nor do we see a basis for upsetting the finding that the 
City’s decisions to locate low-income housing only in or 
adjacent to areas already having high concentrations of 
minority residents was a contributing cause of the ex­
treme condition of residential segregation that existed by 
1980. From 1948 to 1980, some 144 sites were formally 
proposed to the City for subsidized housing, most of 
them in East or Northwest Yonkers or predominantly 
white neighborhoods of Southwest. More than 100 other 
sites, the vast majority of them in East or Northwest 
Yonkers, were also given official consideration. In all, 23

6243



family housing sites were approved; of these, 21 were in 
Southwest Yonkers; one was in Northwest, abutting a 
heavily minority neighborhood of Southwest; and one— 
the only family project approved for an area that was 
neither within nor abutting Southwest Yonkers—was in 
the predominantly black Runyon Heights. See Appendix
B. Of the 21 family housing sites approved for Southwest, 
18 were in or adjacent to neighborhoods already having 
high minority concentrations, one was a half-block away 
from such a concentration, and the other two were but 
five blocks away.

Only one subsidized housing project was approved for 
a nonminority area outside of Southwest Yonkers: it was 
not a family project but a senior citizen project which, as 
expected, was occupied predominantly by white persons. 
Thus, over a period of more than three decades, the City 
approved no housing for minorities in any area that was 
not in or close to an already heavily minority area.

The demographic effect of concentrating minority- 
intended housing in the already concentrated minority 
areas was predictable. From 1960 to 1970, while the 
minority population of East and Northwest Yonkers in­
creased by 1,879 persons, or 61%, the minority popula­
tion of Southwest Yonkers increased by 10,333, or 5.5 
times as many, persons. In percentage terms, the minority 
population of Southwest increased by 186%, from a 
starting base that was nearly twice as large as that in East 
and Northwest Yonkers combined. From 1970 to 1980, 
when the minority population of East and Northwest 
Yonkers increased by 43%, the minority population in 
Southwest Yonkers increased by 87%; in raw numbers, 
the net increase of minority residents in Southwest 
Yonkers outpaced the minority increase in other parts of

6244



Yonkers by 13,783 to 2,119. In all, during the period 1960 
to 1980, when virtually all of the low-income minority 
housing at issue here became available for occupancy, all 
of it confined to areas that already had high minority 
concentrations, the minority population of Southwest 
Yonkers increased by 24,116 persons, or 434%, while 
elsewhere in Yonkers the minority population grew by 
only 3,998 persons, or 130%.

There was expert testimony that by concentrating subsi­
dized low-income housing in the minority areas of 
Yonkers, the City had “stigmatized” those neighborhoods 
and thereby made them both less likely to attract new 
white families and less likely to retain the white families 
already there. This is consistent with evidence of denigrat­
ing comments made by white residents of other parts of 
Yonkers about the Southwest Yonkers neighborhoods, 
and with the demographic statistics. As the minority 
population in Southwest Yonkers increased from 5,559 in 
1960 to 29,675 in 1980, the white population in Southwest 
declined steeply from 75,952 in 1960, to 66,523 in 1970, 
and to 41,124 in 1980, a net decrease of nearly 35,000 
white residents. Elsewhere in Yonkers, the number of 
white residents increased from 1960 to 1980 by some 
6,000 persons.

Other City acts also served to confine minority resi­
dents to predominantly minority areas. For example, in 
the period 1968 to 1974, when CD A sought out private 
developers, it focused efforts solely on sites in Southwest 
Yonkers. In 1975, when a private developer, who had 
planned a housing project on an East Yonkers site de­
scribed by City planners as “well suited for Housing for 
the Elderly,” revealed that he hoped to rent 20% of the 
space to minorities, the City prevented the project. In the

6245



late 1970’s, the Council obstructed the potential move­
ment of minority families to existing buildings in East 
Yonkers by curtailing the use of Section 8 Certificates by 
families and by steering minority families to buildings in 
Southwest.

From all the evidence, the court could reasonably infer 
that the City’s actions accelerated and enhanced the 
process of concentrating minority housing in Southwest 
Yonkers.

2. Segregative Intent

Intent to discriminate may be established in a number 
of ways. Often it may be “inferred from the totality of 
the relevant facts, including the fact, if it is true, that the 
law bears more heavily on one race than another.” Wash­
ington v. Davis, 426 U.S. at 242. Such impact may be an 
important starting point. Other probative sources may 
include the “historical background of the decision . . . , 
particularly if it reveals a series of official actions taken 
for invidious purposes” ; “ [t]he specific sequence of 
events leading up to the challenged decision,” such as 
zoning changes for a given site enacted upon the decision­
maker’s learning of plans for the construction there of 
integrated housing; “contemporary statements by mem­
bers of the decisionmaking body, minutes of its meetings, 
or reports” ; “ [departures from the normal procedural 
sequence” ; and “ [s]ubstantive departures . . . , particu­
larly if the factors usually considered important by the 
decisionmaker strongly favor a decision contrary to the 
one reached.” Arlington Heights /, 429 U.S. at 267-68. In 
the present case, a wealth of evidence in each of these 
categories supports the district court’s finding that the

6246



City intended its housing decisions to result in the con­
finement of minorities to existing minority areas.

The impact of the City’s decisions has been discussed in 
the preceding section. The historical background of these 
decisions included the City’s 1930’s decision to build a 
housing project especially for blacks, its rejection of a 
number of sites “on the ground that the level of minority 
concentration there was not sufficiently high,” and its 
eventual selection in 1940 of a site “in one of the most 
heavily minority areas of Southwest Yonkers.” 624 F. 
Supp. at 1312.

Many sequential clusters support the proposition that 
the City’s decisions in the ensuing decades were similarly 
purposely segregative. The most commonly recurring se­
quence consisted of a site proposal for a white area, 
followed by vehement community opposition (e.g., letters 
on behalf of 2,000 residents; 1,000 attending public meet­
ings), followed by City Council disapproval of the site. 
There was virtually never a site proposal for low-income 
family housing in a white area that was not met with 
opposition; there was virtually never white-community 
opposition that was not followed by withdrawal or rejec­
tion of the site.

There was ample evidence that much of the white-area 
residents’ opposition to low-income housing was race- 
related. Both the Council and the community equated 
low-income family housing with minorities and senior 
citizen housing with whites. Thus, a group of white 
Catholics urged that the housing project proposed for 
their area be changed from family to senior citizen, 
stating that they feared an influx of blacks. Virtually all 
councilmen from East Yonkers stated that they were

6247



concerned about community opposition to low-income 
housing in their areas; many acknowledged explicitly that 
that opposition was race related. Iannacone testified that 
his own facially race-neutral public opposition to a pro­
posed low-income housing project had been pretextual, 
masking his response to his constituents’ racial concerns; 
some of those constituents had stated, pretextually, that 
they feared of loss of a parking lot, but others “who 
knew him better” told him “they didn’t want the housing 
because they didn’t want any blacks there.” Speakers at 
meetings, officials at trial, and contemporary news arti­
cles reflected the view that many of Yonkers’s white 
residents were opposed to “having to absorb the overflow 
from Puerto Rico or Harlem,” and were “not ready” to 
accept racial integration. Officials describing public meet­
ings said racial motivations were “definitely a consider­
ation” and were “thick in the air.” Councilmen discussing 
Section 8 Certificates and forbidding MHA to obtain 
such certificates for family housing exhibited their “con­
cern! ] about the possibility that members of the minority 
community would, in fact, seek and probably find units 
on the east side of the city.”

The inference that the City intended to preserve racially 
segregated neighborhoods was also supported by evidence 
of its swift zoning obstructions of specific prospects for 
desegregative construction. For example, as to three sites 
submitted by CDA and tentatively approved by HUD in 
1980, the Council rezoned one site for use as a shopping 
center; it refused to rezone another to a category consis­
tent with a housing project; and as soon as the third was 
mentioned as a possibility for low-income housing, the 
Council rezoned it to remove it from the category appro­
priate for a housing project, in order “to give the commu-

6248



nity some peace of mind.” The Council indicated that it 
would rezone the site to the original category to permit 
luxury housing but not minority housing, stating, “we 
will change that zone when the concept fits the people, 
not before.”

The record also reflects numerous instances in which 
the City deviated from its normal procedural sequences or 
ignored the usual substantive standards in order to place 
low-income housing in Southwest Yonkers or to prevent 
its construction in East Yonkers. For example, in the 
1950’s the City constructed 415 units of low-income 
housing on a minority-area site though the Planning 
Board recommended a limit of 250 units; the City rejected 
every site recommendation from the Planning Board, 
even those the planning experts rated as superlatively 
suitable, if the site was in a virtually all-white neighbor­
hood. In the 1970’s, when Planning Board opposition to 
further low-income housing construction in Southwest 
Yonkers was known, the City simply began construction 
there without consulting that body. In the 1980’s, when 
the Council wished to have the School 4 site used for 
luxury housing rather than for low-income housing, it 
again bypassed the Planning Board and, in an unprece­
dented move, appointed a five-person advisory commit­
tee, four members of which had no planning or zoning 
experience; their major qualification appears to have been 
that they were white residents of the School 4 area.

Finally, the City’s intent to preserve the existing racial 
imbalance between Southwest and other areas of Yonkers 
was made clear by the words and actions of Mayor 
Martinelli. In 1971, HUD had warned the City that in 
order to retain federal funding, the City would have to 
build minority housing in nonminority neighborhoods.

6249



Thereafter, Martinelli won election on a campaign plat­
form that included the promise of no more subsidized 
family housing in Yonkers. He was true to his word, and 
no more such housing was built. He further sought to 
ensure the preservation of the predominantly white neigh­
borhoods by appointing school board members who 
would not approve busing, stating that “a Board of 
Education fully committed to neighborhood schools . . . 
is of critical importance to neighborhood stability . . . .”

Neither this summary nor our more detailed summary 
in Part A .l.A . recounts all of the evidence that supports 
the district court’s finding that the City’s housing deci­
sions were intentionally segregative. Given even that frac­
tion of the proof recited here as to the impact of the 
City’s decisions, the sequences of events, the procedural 
deviations, the convenient disregard of substantive stan­
dards, and the explicit and veiled statements of racial 
concerns, we regard as frivolous the City’s contention 
that the evidence is insufficient to support the district 
court’s finding that the City made its subsidized housing 
decisions with a segregative purpose.

B. The City’s Responsiveness to the Racial Animus o f  
its Citizens

Finally, the City argues that it is entitled to judgment in 
its favor on the housing discrimination claim because its 
housing decisions only responded to the concerns of its 
citizens, and race was not found to be the citizens’ 
“dominant” concern. We reject this argument on factual, 
procedural, and doctrinal grounds.

First, we note that the City’s factual premise—that City 
officials themselves displayed no race-related concerns 
but merely sought to follow the wishes of their

6250



constituents—is contradicted by the district court’s find­
ings and by the record. Although the City argues that the 
district court found

that “officials . . . were entirely well-meaning public 
servants acting in accordance with their perception of 
what was feasible in the political and socio-economic 
circumstances of Yonkers and in the best interests o f  
that community,”

and argues that “ [t]hus, the Court below expressly found 
that the public officials themselves lacked any racial 
animus in any of the housing decisions reviewed by the 
Court,” (City brief on appeal at 34, quoting 624 F. Supp. 
at 1289 (emphasis and ellipsis in City’s brief)), the City’s 
view of the facts and the findings is untenable, for it is 
plainly contradicted by the district court’s well docu­
mented opinion. To begin with, the quoted passage, 
which appears in a brief introductory portion of the 
court’s opinion, is preceded by the word “ [m]any” ; the 
district court stated that “ [m]any officials” were entirely 
well meaning, not that all officials were well meaning. 
Further, the rest of the opinion makes clear that by “well- 
meaning” and “in the best interests of the community,” 
the district court was giving recognition to the view of 
certain officials that “racially influenced opposition to 
subsidized housing in East Yonkers [w]as a ‘fact of life,’ ” 
624 F. Supp. at 1316, and their position that they had 
made “conscious decisions” to concentrate on “ ‘politi­
cally feasible’ ” sites, id. at 1313, /.e. , sites that could be 
approved without incurring race-based opposition. Most 
importantly, although the court found that the City’s 
actions consistently responded to the racial concerns of 
white community members, it did not find that City 
leaders had no racial concerns of their own. To the

6251



contrary, it found that “numerous City officials not only 
responded to, but . . . ‘led the fight against subsidized 
housing in East Yonkers.’ ” 624 F. Supp. at 1373.

The record amply supports the finding that many City 
officials were leaders, not mere puppets, of their constitu­
encies. Thus, on several occasions, the mayor or council- 
men exhorted their constituents to action. For example, a 
councilman whose ward was near the School 4 area sent 
letters to all of his constituents, urging them to support 
the sale of the property for luxury housing and defeat 
“the wishes of the NAACP” for low-income housing. 
Similarly, with regard to another site proposed to HUD in 
1980, then-mayor Gerald Loehr sent a mass mailing to 
residents of the area, taking the position that the low- 
income housing would place an “unacceptable burden” 
on the neighborhood and urging the residents to respond. 
Nor did the City confine its segregative actions to the 
simple disapproval of housing sites whose proposal pro­
voked white residents’ opposition. The actions of Mar- 
tinelli in packing the Board with opponents of busing in 
order, in his words, to preserve “neighborhood stability,” 
the refusal of the Council to approve use of Section 8 
Certificates by families, and the Council’s eventual order 
to MHA not even to apply for Section 8 Certificates lest 
“members of the minority community . . . seek and 
probably find units on the east side of the city,” provided 
further confirmation for the finding that in the fight to 
preserve segregation in housing, the Council was not just 
a reactive body.

Second, even if we were to accept the City’s legal 
premise—that the City could not be held liable for the 
racially segregative impact of its decisions made in re­
sponse to the concerns of the citizenry unless race were

6252



found to be the citizens’ “dominant” concern—we would 
not order the entry of judgment in favor of the City. The 
district court did not find that race was not the protesting 
citizens’ dominant concern in their opposition to low- 
income housing. It found that race was a “significant” 
factor. Neither this finding nor the finding that race was 
not the sole factor is inconsistent with a hypothesis that 
race was their dominant concern; and since a finding that 
race was the dominant factor would not have been clearly 
erroneous, the best the City could gain on this appeal, 
assuming our acceptance of its factual and legal premises, 
would be a remand for the district court to make addi­
tional findings.

Finally, we reject the City’s doctrinal contention that 
elected officials may lawfully act with the purpose of 
achieving or preserving racial segregation in response to 
the urgings of their constituents so long as race is “only” 
a significant, but not a dominant, factor in the constitu­
ents’ motivation. Even assuming, contrary to the findings 
and record in the present case, that the actions of the 
municipal officials are only responsive rather than leading 
the fight against desegregation, we conclude that the 
Equal Protection Clause does not permit such actions 
where racial animus is a significant factor in the commu­
nity position to which the city is responding. See, e.g., 
Palmore v. Sidoti, 466 U.S. 429, 433 (1984); Smith v. 
Town o f  Clarkton, 682 F.2d 1055, 1063-66 (4th Cir. 1982); 
Dailey v. City o f  Lawton, 425 F.2d 1037, 1039 (10th Cir. 
1970); United States v. City o f  Birmingham, 538 F. Supp. 
819 (E.D. Mich. 1982) (“City o f  Birmingham”), a f f ’d  as 
modified, 727 F.2d 560 (6th Cir. 1984); cf. City o f  
Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Center, 473 U.S. 432, 448

6253



(1985) (“Cleburne Living Center”); Lucas v. Colorado 
General Assembly, 377 U.S. 713, 736-37 (1964).

The Supreme Court has long held, in a variety of 
circumstances, that a governmental body may not escape 
liability under the Equal Protection Clause merely be­
cause its discriminatory action was undertaken in re­
sponse to the desires of a majority of its citizens. In 
Palmore v. Sidoti, the Court overturned a state court 
judgment that divested a natural mother of the custody of 
her infant child because of her remarriage to a person of 
a different race. The Court noted that community biases 
might subject the child to undesirable stresses that could 
be avoided if the child lived with parents of her own race, 
but it ruled that the state, although having a substantial 
interest in the welfare of the child, could not lawfully 
remove the child from the custody of her natural mother 
in order to cater to the racial biases of its constituents. 
Noting that this was by no means the first occasion on 
which it had struck down a law that responded to popular 
racial prejudice, and pointing to its invalidation of laws in 
areas such as housing in Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 
60, 81 (1917), the Court stated as follows: “Private biases 
may be outside the reach of the law, but the law cannot, 
directly or indirectly, give them effect. ‘Public officials 
sworn to uphold the Constitution may not avoid a consti­
tutional duty by bowing to the hypothetical effects of 
private racial prejudice that they assume to be both 
widely and deeply held.’ ” 466 U.S. at 433 (quoting 
Palmer v. Thompson, 403 U.S. 217, 260-61 (1971) 
(White, J., dissenting)).

In Lucas v. Colorado General Assembly, the Court 
invalidated a discriminatory legislative apportionment 
plan that had been expressly approved by the electorate,

6254



stating that “ [a] citizen’s constitutional rights can hardly 
be infringed simply because a majority of the people 
choose that [they] be.” 377 U.S. at 736-37 (footnote 
omitted). In Cleburne Living Center, the Court held that 
a city requirement that a permit be obtained for use of a 
dwelling as a home for mentally retarded persons, where 
no permit requirement was imposed with respect to simi­
lar types of uses for such dwellings, violated the Equal 
Protection Clause in light of the city’s inability to articu­
late a legitimate governmental purpose to which the 
permit requirement was rationally related. The Court 
rejected the notion that the city was entitled to adopt such 
a requirement in response to the prejudices of residents of 
the neighborhood in which the home was to be located:

It is plain that the electorate as a whole, whether by 
referendum or otherwise, could not order city action 
violative of the Equal Protection Clause, . . . and 
the city may not avoid the strictures of that Clause 
by deferring to the wishes or objections of some 
fraction of the body politic. “Private biases may be 
outside the reach of the law, but the law cannot, 
directly or indirectly, give them effect.”

473 U.S. at 448 (citation omitted) (quoting Palmore v. 
Sidoti, 466 U.S. at 433).

The circuit courts have applied these principles in the 
context of challenges to segregation in both schools and 
housing, ruling that discriminatory action is not lawful 
simply because it was taken in response to the racially 
motivated opposition of a segment of the community. In 
City o f  Birmingham, for example, the district court ruled 
that a city was liable for its obstruction of a racially 
integrated housing project even though six of the seven

6255



members of the decision-making body in fact favored the 
project, and that body’s impedance of the project was 
simply responsive to the racial animus of a majority of its 
virtually all-white community:

The government need not prove that the [decision­
making body] itself intended to discriminate on the 
basis of race in order to establish that the City acted 
with a racially discriminatory intent. In order to 
demonstrate a city’s racially discriminatory intent, it 
is sufficient to show that the decision-making body 
acted for the sole purpose of effectuating the desires 
of private citizens, that racial considerations were a 
motivating factor behind those desires, and that 
members of the decision-making body were aware of 
the motivations of the private citizen [s]. United 
States v. City o f  Blackjack, Missouri, 508 F.2d [at 
1185 n.3]. Any other rule of law would permit a 
legislative body to place its official stamp of ap­
proval on private racial discrimination.

538 F. Supp. at 828. The Sixth Circuit affirmed the 
district court’s judgment that the actions of the decision­
maker had been racially motivated, quoting the lower 
court’s findings that unlawful racial motivation was prop­
erly inferred from, among other things, “ ‘the views 
expressed by a significant number of opponents of [the 
low-income housing project] (uttered both on the public 
record and within the hearing of those who testified at 
trial),’ ” and a decision-making body “ ‘that knowingly 
pursued policies that appeased those who expressed these 
bigoted views.’ ” 727 F.2d at 564 (quoting 538 F. Supp. at 
826).

In Smith v. Town o f  Clarkton, a town was found liable 
under the Equal Protection Clause and the Fair Housing

6256



Act for withdrawing from a joint plan to construct low- 
income housing, where its withdrawal was a response to 
town residents’ opposition that was “motivated in signifi­
cant part by racial considerations.” 682 F.2d at 1063 
(citing district court’s findings of fact). Though there was 
no evidence that the town officials themselves had a 
history of racially discriminatory acts or that in their 
individual capacities they were racially motivated, the 
circuit court upheld the imposition of liability, stating that 
“ [i]t is not necessary, in proving a violation of the equal 
protection clause, to show that the challenged actions 
rested solely on a racially-discriminatory intent in order 
to demonstrate that the involved officials acted with an 
intent to illegally discriminate,” id. at 1066 (emphasis in 
original), and concluding that there could be “no doubt 
that the defendants knew that a significant portion of the 
public opposition was racially inspired, and their public 
acts were a direct response to that opposition,” id.

Other circuits have reached the same conclusion. See 
Dailey v. City o f  Lawton, 425 F.2d at 1039 (holding city 
liable for refusing zoning change to permit minority 
housing project in white area “because of the opposition 
to the project by the residents o f” the white area); 
Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority, 436 F.2d 306, 
307-08, 313 (7th Cir. 1970) (holding city council’s delay in 
submission to HUD of low-income housing sites pro­
posed for predominantly white neighborhoods not justifi­
able by the fact that it was responsive to “political 
considerations and community hostility”), cert, denied, 
402 U.S. 922 (1971); Resident Advisory Board v. Rizzo, 
564 F.2d 126, 144 (3d Cir. 1977) (inferring improper racial 
motivation from city’s “sudden shift in . . . position 
from passive acceptance [of low-income housing project]

6257



to active opposition, in the face of protests by demonstra­
tors manifesting racial bias”) (footnote omitted), cert, 
denied, 435 U.S. 908 (1978); Hoots v. Pennsylvania, 672 
F.2d 1107, 1115 (3d Cir.) (holding that “ ‘[s]chool author­
ities may not, consistent with the Fourteenth Amend­
ment, maintain segregated schools or permit educational 
choices contributing to the development and growth of 
segregated schools because o f  community sentiment or 
the wishes o f  a majority o f  voters’ ” (quoting district 
court opinion in Hoots reported at 359 F. Supp. 807, 822 
(W.D. Pa. 1973) (emphasis in Third Circuit opinion)), 
cert, denied, 459 U.S. 824 (1982).

We do not read these cases to imply, as the City would 
have us do, that if invidious discrimination is a significant 
factor in the community position but is not the dominant 
factor, the municipality is permitted to cater to that 
prejudice with impunity. Just as many concerns inform a 
given legislative decision, making it difficult to pinpoint a 
single or dominant factor that motivates a legislative 
body, it may be equally difficult to isolate as “dominant” 
a motive shared by a given segment of the populace at 
large. It is sufficient to sustain a racial discrimination 
claim if it has been found, and there is evidence to 
support the finding, that racial animus was a significant 
factor in the position taken by the persons to whose 
position the official decision-maker is knowingly respon­
sive. Given the district court’s finding, which is unim­
peachable on the basis of the present record, that racial 
animus was a significant factor motivating those white 
residents who opposed the location of low-income hous­
ing in their predominantly white neighborhoods, the City 
may properly be held liable for the segregative effects of a 
decision to cater to this “will of the people.”

6258



III. The Liability of the Board and the City For 
Segregation in the Schools

Each of the defendants contends that the district court 
erred in holding it responsible for the segregated state of 
the Yonkers public schools. In essence, each seeks to place 
the responsibility on the other, the Board contending that 
it simply adhered to a neighborhood-school policy and 
cannot be held liable because any segregation in the 
schools is the result of segregated residential patterns for 
which it is not responsible, and the City contending that 
all responsibility for school configurations rests on the 
Board and that the court could not properly take into 
account the mayor’s filling the Board with persons de­
voted to preserving the racial imbalance in the schools. 
Each defendant challenges the district court’s findings 
that it took, or failed to take, certain actions with 
segregative intent. We conclude that the evidence supports 
each of the district court’s findings, as well as its conclu­
sion that both the Board and the City are liable for school 
segregation.

A. The Definition o f  Minorities

Preliminarily, the Board contends that the district court 
erred in defining “minorities” to include hispanics as well 
as blacks, and argues that if only blacks had been consid­
ered, the court would not have found that the Yonkers 
public schools were in fact segregated. This contention 
need not detain us long.

The census data for the earliest periods covered by this 
suit defined minorities to include blacks and dark-skinned 
hispanics, and for the latter decades defined minorities to 
include blacks and all hispanics. School records kept by 
the Board set forth statistics in terms of “Black,” “His-

6259



panic,” and “Other.” The opposition of white citizens to 
the placement of low-income housing in their neighbor­
hoods and to the busing of Southwest Yonkers school 
children into East Yonkers was directed toward both 
groups. Many protests specified opposition to blacks and 
hispanics in these precise terms, or in pairs of derogatory 
epithets, or in dual geographic terms. In all the circum­
stances, it would have been error for the district court to 
omit hispanics from the minority category in its analysis 
of whether the Yonkers public school system was segre­
gated. See Keyes v. School District No. 1, 413 U.S. at 
197-98; Hart v. Community School Board o f  Education, 
512 F.2d 37, 45 n.10 (2d Cir. 1975).

B. Sufficiency o f  the Evidence o f  the Board’s Intent to 
Preserve School Segregation

As discussed in Part B .II.A .2. above, official intent to 
discriminate may be inferred from evidence of such facts 
as the segregative impact of the decision, historical back­
ground, specific sequences of events, departures from the 
normal procedural or substantive standards, contempo­
rary statements by members of the decision-making body, 
and the totality of the circumstances. See Arlington 
Heights I, 429 U.S. at 266-68. The foreseeability of a 
segregative effect, or “ [a]dherence to a particular policy 
or practice, ‘with full knowledge of the predictable effects 
of such adherence upon racial imbalance,’ ” is a factor 
that may be taken into account in determining whether 
acts were undertaken with segregative intent. Columbus 
Board o f  Education v. Penick, 443 U.S. 449, 465 (1979) 
(quoting district court opinion therein, 429 F. Supp. 229, 
255 (S.D. Ohio 1977)).

6260



Applying these principles in the context of equal pro­
tection challenges to school segregation, the courts have 
found, for example, that a city’s decision, from among 
several options, to create a school attendance zone that 
results in a school whose student population is very 
heavily minority is evidence from which an intent to 
segregate may be inferred. See, e.g., Arthur v. Nyquist, 
573 F.2d 134, 144 (2d Cir.), cert, denied, 439 U.S. 860 
(1978). Further, “ [independent of student assignment, 
where it is possible to identify a ‘white school’ or a 
‘Negro school’ simply by reference to the racial composi­
tion of teachers and staff, the quality of school buildings 
and equipment, or the organization of sports activities, a 
prima facie case of violation of substantive constitutional 
rights under the Equal Protection Clause is shown.” 
Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board o f  Education, 
402 U.S. 1, 18 (1971); see also Green v. County School 
Board, 391 U.S. 430, 435 (1968). Other factors from 
which an intent to create or perpetuate segregated schools 
may be inferred include adherence to discriminatory ad­
mission policies in the city’s vocational schools, see, e.g., 
Arthur v. Nyquist, 573 F.2d at 144, the use of attendance 
zone policies that rigidly require attendance of minority 
students at minority schools while giving nonminority 
students options to attend schools that are predominantly 
white, e.g., Oliver v. Michigan State Board o f  Education, 
508 F.2d 178, 183-84 (6th Cir. 1974), cert, denied, 421 
U.S. 963 (1975), and the implementation of attendance 
zone changes having a foreeseeably segregative effect, 
together with an intentional failure to take any corrective 
action, see Hart v. Community School Board o f  Educa­
tion, 512 F.2d at 46-48.

6261



In the present case, the district court’s finding of 
segregative intent on the part of the Board is supported 
by the evidence of (1) the segregative impact of its 
decisions and the foreseeability of that impact, (2) the 
discriminatory nature of certain of its affirmative acts, 
which included segregation-enhancing school zone re­
alignments, race-based staff assignments, race-based 
placement of minorities in special classes and prejudice­
enhancing treatment of those classes, race-based decisions 
on school openings and closings, and systematic exclusion 
of minorities from vocational programs, and (3) the 
Board’s failure, in deliberate responsiveness to the race- 
based opposition of some segments of the community, to 
implement any step that would have been desegregative.

Little need be said to show the segregated condition of 
the Yonkers public schools. Among Yonkers’s 25 elemen­
tary schools in 1980, in which 61% of all students were 
white, more than three-quarters of the schools were either 
more than 80% minority or more than 80% white; 92% 
of the minority students attended just 10 of the schools. 
Seventy percent of Yonkers’s white elementary students 
attended 14 schools outside of Southwest Yonkers, whose 
student populations ranged from 90% to 99% white. The 
distribution of students by race at the middle and high 
school levels was not dissimilar. Ninety-five percent of the 
middle school minority students were concentrated in 
four of the six middle schools. In the City’s academic 
high schools, 92% of the minority students were concen­
trated in two of the four schools.

At each level, all but one of the schools having very 
high percentages of minority students were located in 
Southwest Yonkers, which housed 81% of Yonkers’s mi­
nority residents; the lone exception at each level was

6262



located in Northwest Yonkers, a small segment of which 
had a 29% minority population. In East Yonkers, which 
housed less than 6% of Yonkers’s minority residents, no 
school at any level, other than one elementary school 
attended by students from Runyon Heights, had more 
than a 9% minority student enrollment; in the other 
elementary schools, the minority population ranged from 
1% to 7%. The Board attributes the segregated school 
patterns to the City’s segregated residential patterns, and, 
arguing that it merely adhered to a neighborhood-school 
policy, it contends that it was not responsible for school 
segregation that reflected housing patterns. This position 
is superficial and untenable, both because the Board’s 
adherence to a neighborhood-school policy has helped to 
increase the concentrations of minority residents in cer­
tain neighborhoods and because adherence to that policy 
is hardly the only premise of the Board’s liability.

It is, of course, plain that housing patterns have an 
impact upon school populations and that when a school 
board adopts a policy of requiring children to attend 
schools in their own neighborhoods, the racial makeup of 
a school’s population will normally be reflective of the 
makeup of its neighborhood. The neighborhood-school 
policy itself, however, has an effect on residential pat­
terns, for parents of school-age children are often influ­
enced by the quality of the nearby public schools in 
deciding where to reside. Thus, the neighborhood-school 
policy may result in identifiably minority schools in 
neighborhoods having high concentrations of minority 
residents; such identifiability, especially if it is perceived 
that the quality of the education available in those schools 
is inferior, often dissuades nonminority persons from 
moving into the neighborhood or from remaining there;

6263



and the election of nonminorities to live elsewhere in­
creases both the minority proportion of the neighbor­
hood’s population and the identifiability of its schools as 
minority schools. As the Supreme Court has put it, 
“ [pjeople gravitate toward school facilities, just as 
schools are located in response to the needs of people. 
The location of schools may thus influence the patterns 
of residential development of a metropolitan area and 
have important impact on composition of inner-city 
neighborhoods. . . . [Cjhoices in this respect have been 
used as a potent weapon for creating or maintaining a 
state-segregated school system.” Swann v. Charlotte- 
Mecklenburg Board o f  Education, 402 U.S. at 20-21 
(discussing selection of sites for school construction). 
Thus a neighborhood-school “policy does more than 
simply influence the short-run composition of the student 
body of a new school. It may well promote segregated 
residential patterns which, when combined with ‘neigh­
borhood zoning,’ further lock the school system into the 
mold of separation of the races.” Id. at 21.

We think it clear that the district court correctly found 
that it was foreseeable to the Board that adherence to its 
neighborhood-school policy would further lock the 
Yonkers school system into its segregated patterns. 
Plainly the Board was aware over the years of the increas­
ing percentages of minorities attending many of the 
schools in Southwest Yonkers; it was also aware of the 
declining attendance at those schools by white students. 
The changes in racial balance of the student populations 
contributed to the increasing identifiability of certain 
schools as minority schools, each thereby promoting and 
speeding the identifiability of its neighborhood as one 
that was predominantly or wholly minority. Thus, the

6264



district court was justified in finding that the very adher­
ence by the Board to a neighborhood-school policy where 
the housing patterns were segregated had a spiral effect, 
serving to promote and enhance school segregation be­
yond the segregated levels existing when the policy was 
first adopted. Certainly where the City advocated adher­
ence to a neighborhood-school policy in order to preserve 
the existing segregated residential patterns—as was explic­
itly stated by Martinelli in extolling the Board he had 
filled with carefully screened appointees who would ad­
here to that policy—the Board may not validly argue that 
that adherence exonerates it from liability for the segrega­
tion in the schools resulting from the segregation in 
housing that it has helped to preserve.

In the present case, of course, the intent of the Board 
to preserve segregated schools was inferrable not just 
from the foreseeably increasingly segregative effect of its 
neighborhood-school policy but also from the facts that 
(1) its adherence to that policy was selective, the consis­
tent element being that deviations or manipulations 
tended to increase the racial imbalance in the schools, (2) 
it made other decisions and followed other practices that 
further increased the racial identifiability of certain 
schools or promoted racial discrimination, and (3) it 
consistently rejected, often stating reasons that were pre- 
textual, any significantly desegregative alternative pro­
posed to it.

Specific deviations or manipulations included the 
Board’s redrawing of school attendance lines. For exam­
ple, the attendance lines for School 1, theretofore one- 
half to two-thirds white, were altered at both the north 
and the south ends of the zone to exclude virtually all of 
the white students and reassign them to virtually all-white

6265



than 5% of Yonkers’s total population, created a school 
whose student population was 99% black. The changes 
were not dictated by any race-neutral considerations: 
School 1 became woefully underutilized; two of the 
nearby white schools, including one to which white stu­
dents were reassigned, were already overcrowded; and the 
distance to be traveled by some of the reassigned students 
was increased. Though the School 1 manipulations had 
no discernible lingering effect on school patterns by 1980, 
the school having been closed in 1954, the “careful[ ]” 
and “deliberate, racially motivated gerrymandering,” 624 
F. Supp. at 1411, contributed to a historical background 
showing segregative intent on the part of the Board.

The Board also several times altered the attendance 
zone lines between School 16 and School 25, which did 
have a lasting segregative effect. On each occasion white 
students were reassigned to School 16, and usually only 
white students were reassigned. At all times, School 16, to 
which the white students were reassigned, had either no, 
or a minuscule percentage of, minority students. By the 
time of this suit, School 25, from which the white stu­
dents were transferred, was 88% minority; School 16, less 
than a mile away, remained 90% white.

The Board’s major system-wide deviations from the 
neighborhood-school policy applied to special education 
classes and vocational schools. The special education 
classes for emotionally disturbed children were viewed as 
a dumping ground for minority children; they were three- 
quarters filled with minorities, a proportion that was 
unexplainable on a race-neutral basis; these classes were 
generally staffed with minority teachers assigned because 
of their race; the classes were bused long distances to 
predominantly white schools where they were carefully

6266



separated from the regular school population for all 
phases of the school day activities. Pointed to by school 
officials as examples of bad behavior, these special educa­
tion students were despised by the impressionable young 
white students and their parents. An expert formerly 
employed by the Board testified that white students of the 
regular school programs would likely generalize their 
contempt for black special education education students 
to all blacks. He testified that the Yonkers program was 
the most inhumane program for handicapped children he 
had seen anywhere. During his tenure, some of the worst 
facets of the program were discontinued; upon his depar­
ture some were resumed.

In the area of vocational training, the Board’s discrimi­
natory practices went from one extreme to the other. 
Prior to the 1960’s, Saunders too had a reputation as a 
dumping ground for minority students. Minority students 
were often encouraged to enroll in Saunders even when 
they preferred an academic program. In the early 1960’s 
the community perception of the school changed due to 
the Board’s introduction of entrance requirements; Saun­
ders received a surfeit of applications and, applying some 
academic criteria that students from the inferior South­
west schools perhaps could not meet and some subjective 
criteria that they did not meet, Saunders officials began 
to admit a disproportionately small number of minority 
students. Board officials acknowledged that the new se­
lection process “ ‘appeared to systematically exclude mi­
nority youngsters.’ ”

In the academic schools, the Board’s racially discrimi­
natory staff assignment practices enhanced the racial 
identifiability of most schools. When the Board began to 
hire minority teachers in the late 1940’s, it assigned most

6267



of them to the more than 91% minority school in Runyon 
Heights and the rest to other schools with substantial 
minority enrollments. In the decades that followed, the 
Board continued to assign most of its minority teachers 
and minority principals to schools that had high percent­
ages of minority students. These discriminatory assign­
ments, combined with the repeated exercise by 
nonminority teachers of their seniority rights to transfer 
from the predominantly minority schools in favor of the 
predominantly white schools, caused the predominantly 
minority schools to be staffed by less experienced teach­
ers. This fact, plus others such as the lack of a system- 
wide standardization of teaching materials and the vastly 
more skimpy and crowded physical facilities of the pre­
dominantly minority schools (as the superintendent said, 
“probably the worst facilities that one could imagine”), 
contributed both to the fact that those schools were 
educationally inferior to East Yonkers’s predominantly 
white schools and to the community recognition that this 
was so.

One concededly inferior and identifiably minority mid­
dle school was Longfellow, which community members 
repeatedly urged the Board to close or rezone. The school 
had long been disproportionately minority, enrolling 41% 
of all of Yonkers’s middle school minority students as 
early as 1950. As early as 1967, the PTA urged that it be 
closed. Through the years, the Board kept it open, declin­
ing, even while closing other schools in response to the 
City’s fiscal crisis, to close Longfellow (which would have 
saved some $500,000) and to send its predominantly 
minority students to an underutilized school that was 
virtually all white. When Burroughs was closed in 1978, 
Longfellow could have been made substantially less segre-

6268



gated by retransferring to Longfellow a predominantly 
white area taken from Longfellow’s zone in 1969. In­
stead, the Board gave students from those areas the 
option of attending Emerson or Whitman, both predomi­
nantly white. In 1980, Longfellow remained open, an 
inferior and underutilized school whose minority popula­
tion was 94%.

In opening Commerce Middle in 1973, though explic­
itly recognizing that reassigning students from Emerson, 
in addition to those from Gorton, to Commerce Middle 
was the only hope for the latter to avoid becoming an all 
minority school, the Board assigned Commerce Middle 
only Gorton students. Thereafter, it expanded the Com­
merce Middle attendance zone to incorporate additional 
predominantly minority areas. By the time Commerce 
Middle was closed in 1976, its minority population was 
77%.

The district court permissibly inferred discriminatory 
intent on the part of the Board from the plainly and 
foreseeably segregative effects of these acts and practices 
and from the fact that many of its proffered rationales 
were pretextual. For example, though the Board claimed 
that the eastward flow of the experienced white teachers 
resulted from a collective bargaining agreement provision 
that gave them a transfer right, that agreement also gave 
the Board latitude to retransfer some teachers in the best 
interests of the school system; the Board never sought to 
invoke its right. Though the Board rationalized the re­
drawing of the attendance line between Schools 16 and 25 
on the ground that it was intended to make the trip to 
school easier for the reassigned children, two of the four 
zone changes in fact made the trip more difficult. Simi­
larly, though the Board rationalized its refusal to reassign

6269



Longfellow students to Twain partly on the ground that 
the trip for the reassigned students would be nearly three 
miles, some Twain students already had nearly that dis­
tance to travel, and the Board simultaneously allowed 
predominantly white Burroughs students to attend a pre­
dominantly white school that caused them an even longer 
trip. The Board also rationalized the refusal to send 
Longfellow students to Twain on the basis that transpor­
tation would be too costly; yet the state would have been 
required by law to subsidize 90% of that cost; even 
unsubsidized, the cost would have been a tiny fraction of 
the $500,000 per year that would have been saved by the 
closing of Longfellow. The Board’s proffered rationale 
for rejecting the Phase II proposal for busing students to 
achieve desegregation was twice-belied. Though the 
Board stated that it disapproved of busing because it 
preferred such alternatives as the creation of magnet 
schools, (a) it never implemented any such alternatives, 
and (b) in fact it had earlier rejected a proposal for the 
limited use of magnet schools for vocational programs. 
Such a stream of pretextual rationales made a substantial 
contribution to the fund of evidence from which the 
Board’s intention to preserve segregated schools was 
reasonably inferrable.

Finally, it is rather plain that in failing to adopt any 
desegregative measures the Board was, at least in part, 
bowing to the will of the City and of white community 
members who opposed desegregation. Cooperation with 
the views of the City was often evident. The Council, of 
course, had fiscal control of the Board’s operations, with 
the power to approve or disapprove the school budget line 
by line. Both the mayor and the councilmen often pub­
licly expressed their views of proposals under consider-

6270



ation by the Board; school officials generally refrained 
from pursuing courses that they thought would spark 
race-based opposition; and in submitting budgets to the 
Council even before the advent of Martinelli, the Board 
eschewed desegregative proposals that it thought would 
be politically infeasible in light of community and Coun­
cil opposition. After Martinelli saturated the Board with 
members who would not vote for “busing,” the Board 
unanimously rejected each desegregative aspect of the 
Phase II proposals and implemented no desegregative 
alternatives, not even those they stated they preferred.

The Board argues here that the court was wrong to find 
an intent to preserve segregation, because the Board 
merely followed the wishes of the populace, and popular 
opposition to desegregative proposals was merely an op­
position to busing, not to desegregation. Any suggestion 
that public opposition was not race-based or that the 
racial nature of the opposition was unknown to the Board 
is, on the record before us, entirely frivolous. Hostile 
white audiences from at least the early 1970’s through 
Phase II told state and local school officials in haec verba 
that they did not want their children going to school with 
minority children. Thus, as early as 1971, the Board’s 
superintendent abandoned even the gathering of informa­
tion on the schools’ racial imbalance on the ground that 
“any kind of totally city-wide racially balanced program 
would be politically infeasible.” The NYU pairing-and- 
sharing proposal for Saunders’s vocational programs, 
which would have had a desegregative effect, was rejected 
by the superintendent and the Board because of opposi­
tion by councilmen who had openly declared themselves 
against the proposal and community opposition that 
school officials recognized as “fear of racial encro[a]ch-

6271



merits.” When the Task Force was formed in 1975, the 
Board’s announcement carefully refrained from mention­
ing the racial issues to be explored, in hopes of averting 
immediate community opposition. The opposition none­
theless was quickly forthcoming, raucous and strident, 
much of it in the form of letters and flyers expressing 
opposition explicitly on racial grounds.

To the extent that community opposition was not stated 
in explicitly racial terms but rather invoked race-neutral 
explanations, the evidence easily permitted the court’s 
inference that these explanations often were pretextual. 
The stated opposition to the NYU-proposed exchanges of 
students between East Yonkers and Southwest Yonkers on 
the ground of a desire to preserve the superior achieve­
ment levels of the East Yonkers students had little appli­
cability in the context of vocational programs, for there 
was no indicated disparity in achievement in those fields. 
And though East Yonkers parents stated that they op­
posed busing on the ground that it would usurp too much 
of their children’s before-and-after-school time, that time 
cost could not explain their at least equally vehement 
opposition to the busing of Southwest Yonkers children 
into East Yonkers. The finding that the emphasis on 
busing was partially pretextual was further supported by 
the evidence that white-area residents opposing the place­
ment of low-income housing nearby complained that 
having minority housing in their neighborhoods would 
result (obviously without any busing) in more minority 
students attending their schools.

As a doctrinal matter, even if a majority of the Board 
members had favored desegregative measures, which 
plainly some did prior to their replacement by appointees 
of Martinelli, the Board may not escape liability for

6272



perpetuating its segregated school system on the ground 
that its rejection of desegregative courses of action merely 
responded to the will of that segment of the populace that 
desired segregation. E.g., City o f  Birmingham , 538 F. 
Supp. at 826, 828 (obstruction of low-income housing 
project for white area because of race-based opposition 
of community violated Equal Protection Clause though 
six of seven members of the decision-making body fa­
vored the project). As we have discussed in Part i?.II.B. 
above, public officials may not, directly or indirectly, give 
effect to the racial prejudices of their constituents.

In sum, there was ample evidence to support the 
district court’s findings that the Yonkers school system 
was segregated, that affirmative segregative acts and 
system-wide racially discriminatory practices of the Board 
substantially contributed to that segregation, that the 
Board adhered to the neighborhood-school policy with 
the intent of preserving school segregation, and that the 
desire to perpetuate school segregation was a motivating 
factor in the Board’s refusals to take any step that would 
have had a desegregative effect. Thus, the court correctly 
concluded that, even though a school board that had had 
no part in creating or enhancing school segregation might 
not be constitutionally required to take affirmative steps 
to desegregate that system, this Board through its dis­
criminatory and segregative actions had brought upon 
itself an obligation under the Equal Protection Clause to 
take action to decrease the segregation in the Yonkers 
public schools.

Though we agree with the Board that it would have 
been permitted to fulfill its constitutional obligations 
without resort to busing, we reject its notions that no 
action whatever was required and that it must be exoner-

6273



ated because it preferred methods other than busing. The 
Board’s effort to minimize the segregative-intent implica­
tion of its rejection of busing proposals by referring to 
the district court’s observation that “ [virtually every 
Board member also expressed preferences for other, vol­
untary methods of desegregation, most notably, the use of 
magnet schools and open enrollment plans,” 624 F. Supp. 
at 1492, and by arguing that “ [a] solution that tries to 
enlist the better nature of a community in a constructive 
manner is not a surrender to community prejudice” 
(Board brief on appeal at 79 (quoting Hart v. Community 
School Board o f  Education, 512 F.2d at 53)), lands far 
from the mark. There is no dispute that the Board 
members “expressed” such preferences; the flaw in the 
Board’s argument is that the district court permissibly 
found the expressions to be pretextual. The quote from 
Hart is entirely inapposite, for the Board had not in fact 
“trie[d]” any solution. It was not the Board’s failure to 
adopt busing that violated the minority students’ rights; 
rather the evil lay in the combination of the Board’s 
promotion and enhancement, through deliberately dis­
criminatory acts and practices, of a segregated school 
system and its purposely discriminatory refusal to take 
any significant desegregative action whatever.

C. The Sufficiency o f  the Causal Connection Between 
City Actions and Segregation in the Schools

The City’s argument that its housing decisions had no 
effect on the racial balance of the Yonkers schools is 
based principally on the opinion testimony of its expert 
witness to the effect that if no subsidized low-income 
housing projects had been built and the sites had re­
mained vacant, the racial imbalance in the Yonkers

6274



schools would have been substantially as it in fact was in 
1980. This proposition, which is tantamount to an argu­
ment that plaintiffs failed to prove that the City’s actions 
had any segregative effect on the schools, in untenable. 
The district court chose to reject the views of the City’s 
expert and to credit instead the testimony of plaintiffs’ 
expert, who described the way in which concentrating 
minority housing in an area helps to create schools that 
are identifiable as minority schools, and who gave his 
opinion that the City’s decisions to build low-income 
housing in Southwest Yonkers and not in East Yonkers 
had contributed to the segregated state of the schools. We 
are hardly entitled to upset the district court’s decision to 
find the testimony of one expert more credible than that 
of another, and certainly we may not do so where, as 
here, extrinsic evidence supported the view found more 
credible by the district court.

In 1967, the schools were already to a degree segre­
gated, but significantly less so than they were by 1980. In 
1967, only three of the City’s 29 elementary schools, all in 
Southwest, had student populations that were predomi­
nantly minority; by 1980 there were eight predominantly 
minority schools, seven of them in Southwest. In 1967, 
44% of the system’s minority elementary school students 
attended the three predominantly minority schools; in 
1980, 76% of the minority students attended predomi­
nantly minoiity schools. In 1967, there was no school 
whose minority enrollment was as high as 80%; by 1980, 
five schools—four of them in Southwest—had minority 
enrollments of more than 80%. At the middle school 
level, there was no predominantly minority school in 
1967, but three out of six were predominantly minority in 
1980, all of them in Southwest.

6275



The increasing concentration of minority students in 
Southwest schools that theretofore had had a more bal­
anced racial mix occurred during a period in which the 
City was building minority housing in Southwest Yonkers 
and not elsewhere, causing Southwest Yonkers to experi­
ence so-called “white flight.” For example, as discussed in 
Part ZMI.A.l., in the period 1960 to 1970, the number of 
white residents declined by 12% (from 75,952 to 66,523) 
in Southwest Yonkers and increased by 13% (from 
106,630 to 120,494) in East and Northwest Yonkers. From 
1970 to 1980, the number of white residents in both 
segments of Yonkers declined, but in Southwest Yonkers 
the decline was far more precipitous, from 66,523 to 
41,124, or 38%, as compared to the decline in East and 
Northwest Yonkers from 120,494 to 112,785, or 6%.

Given the confluence from 1960 to 1980 of the City’s 
confinement of low-income housing to Southwest 
Yonkers, the prevailing perception that low-income hous­
ing would be occupied by minorities, the net decrease by 
some 35,000 of white residents in Southwest while there 
was a net increase of some 6,000 white residents in other 
parts of Yonkers, the faster decline of white student 
enrollment in Southwest Yonkers than in other parts of 
Yonkers, and the nearly quadruple increase in the number 
of identifiably minority schools in Southwest Yonkers, the 
court was plainly entitled to find that the City’s segrega­
tive housing decisions were a contributing cause of the 
increasing segregation in the schools.

D. Sufficiency o f  the Evidence o f  City’s Intent to 
Segregate Schools

There is no basis in the record for overturning the 
finding that the City intended to preserve or enhance

6276



segregation in the schools. Several types of evidence 
support this finding.

First, the City was well aware of the relationship 
between segregated neighborhoods and segregated 
schools. White residents opposing the construction of 
minority housing in their predominantly white neighbor­
hoods mentioned the schools as one of their concerns. 
Nearly all of the councilmen from East Yonkers stated 
explicitly that their constituents opposed minority hous­
ing in their neighborhoods in part because they sought to 
keep minority children out of their schools.

In addition, there was evidence that on several occa­
sions, City officials sought to have white areas moved 
into school attendance zones that had a greater predomi­
nance of white students. The effect, had the Board not 
rejected these requests, would have been to increase the 
degree of school segregation. The City has offered no 
other explanation for the requests, and the district court 
was free to infer from these attempts that the City desired 
that white students attend schools that were as predomi­
nantly white as it could arrange.

Further, illustrating the fact that segregated housing 
and segregated schools feed on and enhance one another 
in symbiotic fashion, Martinelli stated in his 1979 valedic­
tory speech that his “ [djiscussion of neighborhood stabil­
ity would not be complete without attention to our public 
school system,” and emphasized that keeping children in 
schools within their own neighborhoods was “of critical 
importance” to preserving the stability of the neighbor­
hoods. The mayor’s forthright packing of the Board with 
persons he believed would adhere to the neighborhood- 
school policy provided clear support for the finding that

6277



the City deliberately sought to preserve segregation in the 
schools, both for the sake of the schools and for the sake 
of the neighborhoods.

E. The Interrelationship Between the Board and the 
City

Finally, we reject the contentions of both the Board and 
the City that the district court erred in taking into account 
the actions and inactions of both defendants in assessing 
the responsibility of each. When two actors have cooper­
ated in a given venture, each contributing to the outcome 
that each desires, it requires no stretch of legal doctrine to 
conclude that each actor is liable if the result deliberately 
attained is unlawful. Indeed, “it would be an inadequate 
analysis if a trial court contented itself with a superficial 
examination of isolated acts, without any consideration 
of possible underlying relationships that are probative of 
intent.” Parent Ass'n o f  Andrew Jackson High School v. 
Ambach, 598 F.2d 705, 713 (2d Cir. 1979) (dictum).

Insofar as the Board’s liability is concerned, the fore- 
seeably spiraling effect of housing segregation and school 
segregation where a neighborhood-school policy is fol­
lowed has been discussed in Parts 5.III.B . and 5.111.C. 
above. The district court did not err in finding that the 
Board’s adherence to its neighborhood-school policy in 
light of the symbiosis bespoke a segregative intent on the 
part of the Board. Nor did the district court impose 
liability on the Board for segregation in housing or find 
the Board liable for school segregation solely because the 
City was liable for intentionally preserving segregation in 
housing. Rather the court found many indicia of segrega­
tive intent on the part of the Board independent of any 
goal or view attributable to the City, and found the City’s

6278



intent relevant, in major part, to an assessment of the 
Board’s motivation in repeatedly refusing to take any 
desegregative steps. Finally, the Board cannot escape 
liability simply because prior to the Martinelli regime its 
failure to take desegregative steps was perhaps due to the 
racial animus of persons other than Board members. To 
the extent that the Board was being responsive to the 
wishes of segments of the community and the Council, 
the imposition of liability on the Board was proper since 
the opposition to desegregative steps was racially moti­
vated. See authorities cited in Part 6.II.B . above.

As to the City, we have discussed in Parts 6.II.A .1 and 
.6.111.C. above the segregative effect of its housing deci­
sions and the other evidence from which the district court 
permissibly inferred its intent to preserve and enhance 
segregation in the schools. As the Seventh Circuit has 
stated,

[undoubtedly there are many contributing causes 
for racial segregation. But however complex the 
problem, it is clear that if residential segregation 
results from current or past segregative housing prac­
tices, there is a causal relation between those prac­
tices and the segregated schools. Therefore, if [a city] 
has participated in or contributed to these segregative 
housing practices either directly {e.g., selective loca­
tion of public housing) or indirectly . . . , it can be 
said that the [city] has caused, at least in part, the 
segregation in schools.

United States v. Board o f  School Commissioners, 573
F.2d 400, 408-09 (7th Cir. 1978) (footnote omitted); 
accord Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717, 755 (1974) 
(Stewart, / . ,  concurring). Certainly in the circumstances

6279



of this case, in which the City sought unabashedly to have 
the Board do its bidding by preserving neighborhood 
schools in part in order to preserve the segregated residen­
tial patterns, the City is properly held liable for segrega­
tion in the schools.

Finally, we reject the City’s contention that it was 
improper for the district court to take into account the 
mayor’s appointments to the Board of only persons who 
could be counted on to maintain segregation in the 
schools. While the discretionary nature of the mayor’s 
power of appointment might defeat a suit requesting an 
injunction for or against particular appointments, see, 
e.g., Mayor o f  Philadelphia v. Educational Equality 
League, 415 U.S. 605, 615 (1974), nothing forbids judi­
cial recognition of the pattern in which municipal discre­
tion is exercised in order to fathom the municipality’s 
underlying intent. The ineluctable conclusion that Mar- 
tinelli’s appointments were made with segregative intent 
supports the district court’s conclusion that the segre­
gated state of the Yonkers public schools—resulting from 
the City’s confinement of minority housing to already- 
minority neighborhoods and from the Board’s adherence 
to a neighborhood-school policy, its discriminatory fac­
ulty assignment and special program policies, and its 
failure to take any steps to achieve school desegre­
gation—was not simply coincidental.

In sum, we agree with the district court that “the 
combination of the City’s housing policies, the mayoral 
appointment of Board members and the subsequent inac­
tion of the Board amounted to an interrelated govern­
mental effort to preserve the integrity of ‘neighborhood 
schools’ whose racial segregation was governmentally 
sanctioned and steadfastly maintained.” 624 F. Supp. at

6280



1534. Where, between the municipality that has acted to 
preserve segregated residential patterns and the school 
board that has acted to preserve segregation in the 
schools, there is cooperation on a further course of action 
or inaction designed to maintain and enhance that school 
segregation, both the municipality and the school board 
may be held liable for school segregation. Given the facts 
discussed in the preceding sections, we conclude that 
there was ample evidence here to support the district 
court’s findings of both cooperation and design.

C. REMEDIES

Each of the defendants challenges various aspects of 
the district court’s remedial orders. In assessing these 
challenges we are guided by several general principles.

The power of the federal courts to remedy constitu­
tional violations is flexible but not unlimited. In general 
the power to restructure the operation of state and local 
entities should be exercised only where there has been a 
constitutional violation. Where such a violation has been 
found, the court should tailor the remedy to fit the nature 
and extent of the violation. See Dayton Board o f  Educa­
tion v. Brinkman, 433 U.S. at 419-20; Milliken v. Brad­
ley, 418 U.S. at 738; Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg 
Board o f  Education, 402 U.S. at 16.

Nonetheless, the Supreme Court has not required that 
the “least restrictive means of implementation” be 
adopted but has

“ . . . recognized that the choice of remedies to 
redress racial discrimination is ‘a balancing process

6281



left, within appropriate constitutional or statutory 
limits, to the sound discretion of the trial court.’ ”

United States v. Paradise, 107 S. Ct. 1053, 1073 (1987) 
(quoting Fullilove v. Klutznick, 448 U.S. 448, 508 (1980) 
(Powell, J. concurring) (quoting Franks v. Bowman 
Transportation Co., 424 U.S. 747, 794 (1976) (Powell, J., 
concurring in part and dissenting in part))). The district 
court, which has “first-hand experience with the parties 
and is best qualified to deal with the ‘flinty, intractable 
realities of day-to-day implementation of constitutional 
commands,’ ” must be given a great deal of flexibility and 
discretion in choosing the remedy best suited to curing the 
violation, United States v. Paradise, 107 S. Ct. at 1074 
(quoting Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board o f  Edu­
cation, 402 U.S. at 6).

In determining whether [an] order was “narrowly 
tailored,” we must acknowledge the respect owed a 
District Judge’s judgment that specified relief is 
essential to cure a violation of the Fourteenth 
Amendment. A district court has “not merely the 
power but the duty to render a decree which will so 
far as possible eliminate the discriminatory effects of 
the past as well as bar like discrimination in the 
future.” Louisiana v. United States, 380 U.S. 145, 
154 (1965).

“Once a right and a violation have been shown, the 
scope of a district court’s equitable powers to remedy 
past wrongs is broad, for breadth and flexibility are 
inherent in equitable remedies.” Swann v. Charlotte- 
Mecklenburg Bd. o f  Education, 402 U.S. 1, 15 
(1971).

United States v. Paradise, 107 S. Ct. at 1073.

6282



With these principles in mind, we conclude that the 
orders fashioned by the district court to remedy the 
housing and school segregation in Yonkers were well 
within the proper bounds of discretion.

I. Housing Remedies

Insofar as the court ordered the City to construct 200 
units of family housing outside of Southwest Yonkers on 
sites selected by the City or, in default of an actual 
selection, on sites designated by the court, the City argues 
that the court abused its discretion in ordering any con­
struction, in requiring that the housing be for low-income 
families, and in controlling the sites for construction. The 
City also challenges the order that it develop a plan to 
create additional subsidized and private low-income hous­
ing and that it allocate 25% of its Development Grant 
funds for subsidized housing. In addition, the Board 
challenges one aspect of the housing order. One of the 
sites the court has deemed the City to have selected is the 
closed Walt Whitman School, and the Board contends 
that it should not be required to yield this property since 
it has not been found liable for segregation in housing. In 
light of the substantial latitude given a district court to 
fashion remedies for constitutional violations, we reject 
each of the parties’ challenges.

As discussed in Part B .II.A. above, once a municipality 
has undertaken to construct low-income housing, it may 
not, consistent with the Equal Protection Clause, deliber­
ately and with segregative intent concentrate that housing 
in predominantly minority neighborhoods. The remedy 
fashioned by the district court is closely tailored to the 
City’s constitutional violations and intrudes no more than 
necessary on the City’s prerogatives, consistent with en-

6283



suring that some remedial action will in fact occur. Thus, 
the court built upon a consent decree, already agreed to 
by the City with HUD, for the construction of 200 units 
of family housing using federal funds; it was plainly 
reasonable for the district court to believe that the order 
requiring the City to comply with this undertaking was 
necessary in light of the City’s prior disregard of govern­
mental urging that it select housing sites outside of 
Southwest and its historical willingness to forgo federal 
funding in order to preserve segregated housing patterns. 
The number of units, 200, was hardly excessive in light of 
the City’s agreement with HUD and the existing concen­
tration of 6,566 units of housing, or 96.6% of all of its 
subsidized housing, in Southwest. The requirement that 
the housing be built outside of Southwest Yonkers obvi­
ously was necessary in order to achieve some degree of 
correction of the imbalance caused by the City’s unlawful 
concentration of all prior low-income family housing 
inside Southwest Yonkers. In addition, it was appropriate 
and prudent for the court to give the City a deadline for 
designating the construction sites outside of Southwest 
and to deem the City to have chosen sites selected by the 
court if the City failed to meet that deadline. The City’s 
past history of foot-dragging (e.g., nine years taken to 
approve sites for 750 units) and its refusals to approve 
any site for low-income housing outside of Southwest or 
Runyon Heights plainly warranted the imposition of a 
deadline and the inclusion of default provisions.

We are also unpersuaded that the court abused its 
discretion in ordering the Board to return to the City the 
site of the closed Walt Whitman School. The Board made 
no showing that it had any plans to reopen Whitman, and 
after the site was identified as one that could be used for

6284



low-income housing, took the position that it might use 
that building to train teachers or store books. The court 
order provided that, in turning over the Whitman site to 
the City, the Board was entitled to reserve space for these 
training and storage purposes. The Board has made no 
other objections that we find persuasive. The circum­
stances of this suit made it appropriate for the court to 
look to closed school properties as possible housing sites, 
for while the Board was not held liable for housing 
segregation, the court found that there was “an interre­
lated governmental effort” by the City and the Board to 
preserve segregated neighborhood schools and that the 
City advocated such schools partly in order to maintain 
segregated neighborhoods; the City’s housing segregation 
was thus exacerbated by the Board’s knowing adherence 
to a neighborhood-school policy. Since the Board’s 
actions helped to enhance the segregated housing pat­
terns, and since all of the pertinent persons are parties to 
the present suit, it was permissible for the court to order 
the Board to return the closed school to the City.

We have considered all of the defendants’ other argu­
ments against the district court’s housing order and have 
found them to be without merit.

II. School Remedies

Each defendant makes one major challenge to the 
court’s remedy for school segregation. The Board con­
tends principally that the court should not have ordered it 
to implement a system-wide redistribution of students in 
light of the nature of the constitutional violations found 
by the court. The City argues that it should not have been 
ordered to fund a plan that is more expensive than a 
simple mandatory busing plan would be. We see no abuse

6285



of discretion in the district court’s ordering the desegrega­
tion of all of Yonkers’s public schools or requiring the 
City to fund the ordered plan.

Although the Board argues against a system-wide rem­
edy on the premise that certain of its segregative actions, 
such as the zone realignments between Schools 16 and 25, 
affected only discrete geographic areas and that its 
system-wide discriminatory practice of assigning minority 
staff members disproportionately to predominantly mi­
nority schools did not have a direct effect on the distribu­
tion of students, it is quite plain that many of the Board’s 
actions or practices did have comprehensive segregative 
effects that the court could properly seek to eliminate. 
For example, the Board’s disproportionate assignment of 
minority teachers to schools having a disproportionately 
high number of minority students and its refusal to 
invoke its contractual right to stem the flow of more 
experienced white teachers to the more attractive schools 
outside of Southwest not only skewed the distribution of 
teachers but also contributed to the identification of some 
schools as minority schools and others as white schools 
and contributed to the inferior quality of education avail­
able at the Southwest Yonkers schools. Similarly, the 
discriminatory placement of minorities in special educa­
tion classes and the “inhumane” treatment of special 
education classes were shown to have far-reaching effect. 
The Board’s pattern of placing the heavily minority 
special classes in virtually all-white schools served to 
stigmatize all minorities, giving many regular students at 
predominantly white schools the idea that minorities in 
general were “less worthy,” and making it more difficult 
for regular minority students to gain peer acceptance at 
predominantly white schools.

6286



Further, even Board actions whose immediate segrega­
tive effect may have been visited upon just one school 
often had secondary effects elsewhere. For example, with 
respect to the Board’s refusal to close Longfellow, the 
district court was not required to focus narrowly on the 
segregated status of that school alone. The disproportion­
ately high number of minority students at that school was 
exacerbated when Longfellow was rezoned to send some 
of its white students to the newly opened Burroughs; 
when Burroughs was closed, students from Burroughs 
were not reassigned to the nearby Longfellow with 
desegregative effect, but were allowed to attend schools in 
far corners of the City, with further segregative effect.

Finally, the Board’s general cooperation with the City’s 
effort to maintain segregated neighborhoods, the effect 
of which was to enhance segregation in the schools, in 
itself provided added justification for the court to order a 
system-wide remedy. Cf. Mil liken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. at 
755 (Stewart, J., concurring) (“Were it to be shown, for 
example, that state officials had contributed to the sepa­
ration of the races . . .  by purposeful, racially discrimi­
natory use of state housing or zoning laws, then a decree 
calling for transfer of pupils across district lines . . . 
might well be appropriate.”).

In sum, the district court found that there had been 
system-wide constitutional violations and its detailed 
findings support its conclusion that a system-wide remedy 
was needed.

We also reject the Board’s contention that it will be 
impossible to attain the remedial order’s goal of desegre­
gation of all schools, i.e. , bringing each to within 10-15% 
(for magnet schools) or 20% (for nonmagnet schools) of

6287



the system-wide proportion of minority students. We see 
nothing inherently impossible in the goal, and we note, in 
any event, that it is a goal rather than an immutable 
directive. The order states that the Board “shall seek to 
achieve” this desegregation of the system.

Nor do we find merit in the City’s complaint that it is 
improperly being required to pay for a desegregation plan 
that is more expensive than a simple mandatory busing 
plan would be. Although there is no question that the 
court-ordered plan is more expensive, that simple fact 
provides no basis for altering the relief ordered. The cost 
of a mandatory busing plan does not provide a bench­
mark that is relevant here, since that is not a remedy the 
City at all prefers. As late as the eve of implementation of 
the plan ordered by the court, the court asked the City’s 
attorney whether the Council had in fact made any 
determination that it preferred a more mandatory but less 
expensive plan. The answer was short and plain: “No, it 
has not.” In view of community opposition to busing 
proposals over the years, it is hardly surprising that the 
City does not support a mandatory busing program, even 
to save money. Throughout the period covered by this 
lawsuit, the City repeatedly eschewed desegregative 
courses of action, both in housing and education, in favor 
of segregative alternatives that were far more expensive. 
In all the circumstances, we see no abuse of discretion in 
the district court’s rejection of the City’s attempt to 
provide less funding than is needed to implement the 
adopted plan, simply because of the lower projected cost 
of a plan the City is not willing to endorse.

In selecting the desegregation plan ordered here, the 
district court plainly made appropriate efforts to elimi­
nate any expense that was not necessary to remedy the

6288



violations found and to minimize the degree to which the 
remedy would interfere with the autonomy of the City 
and the Board. The voluntary magnet-school plan was 
adopted only after all of the parties had been given an 
opportunity to submit proposals; the approach chosen 
was essentially that proposed by the Board. The court 
required the Board to submit a separate itemized budget 
for the desegregation expenses; it made appropriate find­
ings that the proposed budget represented the reasonable 
and necessary estimated cost of implementing the plan; 
and it has taken appropriate care to ensure that the 
Board’s projected expenditures for the ordered plan, 
insofar as they exceed the normal budgetary appropria­
tions, are in furtherance of the desegregation remedy 
rather than of the general enrichment of the school 
program. It appointed a monitor to oversee compliance 
and it has retained jurisdiction to ensure that the parties 
carry out their respective responsibilities. The City, 
though given an extra opportunity to do so, did not show 
that any part of the adopted plan was duplicative or 
unnecessary to the plan’s success.

Finally, because of the voluntary aspect of the school 
plan ordered by the district court, that remedy, while 
more costly than another plan might be in terms of 
dollars, is both less intrusive and more likely to achieve 
long-term success in desegregating the public schools. 
Since the City is responsible for funding the public 
schools and is responsible in part for the segregated 
condition of the schools, it was not an abuse of the 
court’s discretion to require the City to fund the more 
expensive, but practically more effective, remedy.

6289



CONCLUSION

The judgment of the district court is in all respects 
affirmed.

6290



APPENDIX A

CITY OF YONKERS 
CENSUS TRACTS WITH LARGE 
MINORITY POPULATIONS (1980)

%7/\ More Than 50%

□  20% - 50% 

g  7% • 20%

□  Below 7%

U r* !
ZA *////,

W/0^ j N  2Id  - S >M

=13:

_________ JS
The Heavily Outlined Section is the Southwest.

6291



APPENDIX B

CITY OF YONKERS 
SUBSIDIZED HOUSING SITES

6292
725-12-31-87 • USCA—80004

RECORD PRESS, INC., 157 Chambers St., N.Y. 10007 (212) 619-4949