Supreme Court Asked to Halt Southern School Integration Evasion
Press Release
October 19, 1967
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Press Releases, Volume 5. Supreme Court Asked to Halt Southern School Integration Evasion, 1967. 0e3c382d-b892-ee11-be37-00224827e97b. LDF Archives, Thurgood Marshall Institute. https://ldfrecollection.org/archives/archives-search/archives-item/c73ad2ec-b870-452c-b2b3-aa462c1aece1/supreme-court-asked-to-halt-southern-school-integration-evasion. Accessed November 23, 2025.
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NAACP LEGAL DEFENSE AND EDUCATIONAL FUND, INC
egal efense fand 10 Columbus Circle, New York, N.Y. 10019 * JUdson 6.8397
FOR RELEASE
JRSDAY
SUPREME
T SOUTII
EGRATION
nS
HA
INT
LDF Suit In Jackson, Tenn, Has Wide Scope
WASHINGTON---The U.S. Supreme Court was asked today to halt evasion by
southern school boards of integration, the resistance pattern that has
emerged since the cays of "absolute defiance,"
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) attorneys
told the high court in t brief against the Board of Commissioners
of Jackson, Tenn., taat school segregation is still rampant across the
South:
"During the 1966-67 school year, a full 12 years after Brown
(1954 Supreme Court school integration ruling), more than 90 per cent
of the almost three million Negro pupils in the 11 southern states
still attended schcols which were over 95 per cent Negro," the LDF
asserted.
The LDF utilized services of a panel of national educational ex-
perts in evaluating schocl segregation in Jackson, a medium-sized city
in mid-western Tennessee.
Jackson's policies follow "a course which perpetuates segregation
for the overwhelming majority of Negro students while paying lip ser-
vice to the obligation to desegreoate," the LDF maintained,
The case provides "an especially appropriate vehicle to consider
the general problem of evasion of the obligation to desegregate," the
Supreme Court was told,
LDF attorneys cited the following points to document a "systematic
evasion of the constitutional obligation to desegregate" on the part
of the Jackson school officials: es
* maintained a completely compulsory segregated school system
after the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling until sued in 1963,
* built three new junior high schools, after 1954, "in centers of
racially segrecated residential concentrations,"
* established school zones in 1965 "in such a way as to follow
the patterns of racial residential segregation to the maximum
extent possible,"
* encouraged students to transfer to school zones in which they
would be a racial majority,
* undertook to build an additional portion on the overcrawded
Negro junior high "while there was still cubstantial excess
capacity at the two all-white junior highs."
LDF attorneys in the case include Director-Counsel Jack Greenberg, Associate Counsel James M, Nabrit ITI, and Assistant Counsel Michael Henry of the LDF's New York office; also, cooperating attorneys Avon Williams and Z, Alexander Looby of Nashville and J. Emmett Ballard of
Jackson.
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NOTE: The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc, (LDF) is a
separate and distinct organization from the NAACP, serving as the legal
arm of the entire civil rights mover t and representing members of all
groups as well as unaffiliated individuals,