American Decades
School Desegregation
Desegregation in the 1970s.
By 1972 black children and white children in the South were going to school together. Much of the resistance to desegregation evident in the late 1950s and 1960s had been resolved in the South. The Department of Justice's efforts at enforcement, alongside the threat of cutting off federal funds under the 1964 Education Act, had effectively desegregated many southern schools. When desegregation moved north, however, circumstances changed. In 1970 the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare pursued fifteen desegregation cases; in 1973 it pursued one.
Moving Schoolchildren.
In 1971 the Supreme Court decided Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg. It held that the Constitution required school districts to dismantle systems that had long been segregated. The Court specific-ally held that this might mean changing attendance zones and putting children on school buses for the...
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1970's Law and Justice
- Overview
-
Topics in the News
- Abortion: Roe v. Wade
- The Attica Riot and the Rights of Prisoners
- The Changing Legal Profession
- Crime and Public Opinion
- The Death Penalty
- The Due-Process Revolution
- Employment Opportunity: Job Requirements and Discrimination
- Environmental Law
- The Equal Rights Amendment
- Equality Before the Law: Men and Women
- Legal Services
- The Other Side of Law and Order: Nixon and the Constraints of Law
- The Supreme Court and Public Policy: The Supreme Court of the 1970s
- Paddling in Schools
- The Rights of the Accused
- School Desegregation
- Headline Makers
- People in the News
- Deaths
- Publications
- Important Events in Law and Justice, 1970–1979
