FIGHTING THE SYSTEM

When the legal quest for school desegregation hit the skids.

- BY LOUIS MENAND

Busing mandates proved explosively unpopular among white voters.

On February 14th, a letter went out from the Department of Education to educational institutions that receive money from the federal government, which most do. The letter gave schools fourteen days to eliminate “the overt and covert racial discrimination that has become widespread in this Nation’s educational institutions.” Such discrimination, it warned, violates the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The letter (addressed “Dear Colleague,” often a sign that what follows won't be especially collegial) came from the desk of the acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, a man named Craig Trainor. It stressed that the new anti-discrimination policy encompasses much more than the race-conscious admissions programs recently declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court (forty-five years after the Court declared them constitutional).

“Educational institutions may neither separate or segregate students based on race,” the letter said. For example, programs that suggest “certain racial groups bear unique moral burdens that others do not” violated the equal-protection clause, since they “stigmatize students who belong to particular racial groups based on crude racial stereotypes. Consequently, they deny students the ability to participate fully in the life of a school.” (Whether a majority group can discriminate against itself—who is stereotyping whom?—is an interesting question not explored in the letter.)