Opinion: 404 U.S. 1221 (1971)

HOLDING:  The Supreme Court denied the defendant’s petition to stay enforcement of the District Court’s order requiring a school district to use a court-imposed pupil assignment order entered to overcome racial segregation because of a delay in making the petition, a lack of specific allegations of hardship, and an inadequate record for determining whether the District Court correctly applied a prior case’s holdings.  

A group of black students and parents alleged that the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County School Board operated under a geographical zoning system that plaintiffs alleged created a racially imbalanced dual school system and sought the complete desegregation and proportional racial balancing of the county’s schools.  The plaintiffs submitted a plan (“the Larsen plan”) designed to achieve a proportional racial balance in every school by using satellite zoning and extensive cross-busing.  After the Supreme Court decided Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 (1971), the District Court required the parties to submit new pupil assignment plans to cure past segregation.  The School Board submitted a plan under protest, and the District Court accepted the School Board’s plan, not the plaintiffs’ Larsen plan.  

The School Board, looking to delay implementing the orders, petitioned for a stay pending appeal.  Chief Justice Burger, in his capacity as a circuit justice for the Fourth Circuit and pending disposition of a certiorari petition, denied the petition to stay enforcement of the order because there was a nearly month-long delay by the Board in making the application and there were no specific allegations that this new plan would create any hardships for the school system.  Chief Justice Burger also noted that the lower courts, in attempting to make plans that would result in a mathematically representative ratio of races within schools, may have had some confusion about the holding in Swann, restating that “[t]he constitutional command to desegregate schools does not mean that every school in every community must always reflect the racial composition of the school system as a whole.”