"With all deliberate speed" was the famous phrase used in the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, commanding integration of the nation's public schools. The response in much of the South has been all deliberate resistance: 1,534 local districts in the Old Confederacy and Border States are still classified as segregated. Now the Supreme Court has run out of patience. Last week in Holmes v. Alexander—the first major judgment since Chief Justice Warren Burger joined the bench—the court unanimously ruled that the deliberate-speed formula "is no longer constitutionally permissible." The brusque, unsigned order declared: "The obligation of...
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