Appellate Court Orders Speed-Up of Arkansas School Desegregation

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» New York, N.Y. 10019 
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Legal Defense and Educational Fund 
PRESS RELEASE 
President FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

Dr. Allan Knight Chalmers Saturday, " 
Director-Counsel October 30, 1965 

Jack Greenberg 

APPELLATE COURT ORDERS SPEED-UP 
OF ARKANSAS SCHOOL DESEGREGATION 

Experimental "Freedom of Choice" Plan Modified For Further Integration 

ST, LOUIS--A Federal Circuit Court of Appeals here this week struck 

a blow at “freedom of choice" as a means of desegregating public 

schools. 
¢ 

The three-judge court, acting on an appeal by the NAACP Legal 

Defense and Educational Fund, said a desegregation plan submitted 

by the El Dorado, Ark., school board did not go far enough om fast 

enough towards integrated education. r 

The Legal Defense Fund appealed a lower court decision © 

accepting a plan that would have given pupils the choice of which 

of the systems 10 white and eight Negro schools they wished to attend, 
4 

While agreeing with Fund attorneys that freedom of choice places 

the burden of desearegating education on Negro pupils and their 

parents rather than school officials, the court said such a plan was 

acceptable on an experimental basis. 

The court ruled that the school board must offer freedom of 

choice to the llth and 12th grades for the 1965-66 school year as 

well as to the first and second grades as outlined in the original 

plan. 
It further ordered desecregation of at least four additional 

grades for the following year, with all grades desegregated by the 

1967-68 school year. The original plan was not to be fully 

implemented until the 1968-69 school year. 
Students who do not exercise their free choice should "be 

assigned to the school nearest their homes or on the basis of 

nonracial attendance zones" in accordance with guidelines laid down 

by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the court said. 

The court also agreed with a Legal Defense Fund argument that 

the school board should offer the choice of schools to pupils in 

every grade each year once the plan is fully operational. 

Although “freedom of choice has been recognized...as one method 

of achieving integration...it is still only in the experimental 

stage and it has not yet been demonstrated that such a method will 

fully implement the 1954 Supreme Court ruling against segregated 

education or the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the court said. 

In ordering further desegregation than was outlined in the 

original plan, the court warned that further delays in desegregating 

education should not be tolerated. 
"The bell was tolled for segregated schools more than a decade 

ago," the court said. "At this late date all discriminatory 

systems should have been eliminated.” 
"After eleven years of deliberation, discussion and delay, the 

courts should turn a deaf ear to arguments that now is not the 

‘earliest practicable date.' 
‘Whatever administrative difficulties may have been present at 

the outset could have been resolved by this time if compliance had 

been commenced in good faith and without hesitation. 

"Constitutional rights should no longer be permitted to remain 

in abeyance," the court said. 
The appellate court returned jurisdiction in the case to the 

Federal District Court, which will oversee the modificatians in the 

desegregation plan, and supervise faculty integration, for which the. 

Legal Defense Fund is also pressing: 

Jesse DeVore, Jr., Director of Public Information—Night Number 212 Riverside 9-8487 Ss