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The U.S. Supreme Court evidently agrees. In Missouri v. Jenkins, the court held last June that Judge Clark had no authority to order the state and district to pay for a plan aimed at attracting suburban students. Chief Justice William Rehnquist pointedly reminded the district court that its ultimate goal was not to achieve racial balance but "to restore state and local authorities to the control" of the school system. Once the lingering effects of legally enforced segregation were eliminated, it would be perfectly legal for the district to run schools that happened to be all black or all white. As Justice Clarence Thomas explained, "The Constitution does not prevent individuals from choosing to live together, to work together, or to send their children to school together, so long as the State does not interfere with their choices on the basis of race."
For the KCMSD, Missouri v. Jenkins portends a big reduction in the state's extraordinary desegregation payments. For court-ordered desegregation generally, the decision's implications could be dire. Says associate director of the naacp Legal Defense Fund Ted Shaw, who argued the Kansas City case before the high court: "If the courts say unitary status means school districts just have to get to the point where a desegregated snapshot can be taken, and then they can go back to the segregating school assignments they had before--if that's all Brown has done, it's been a big charade."
If resegregation is indeed the wave of the future, then the future can be glimpsed in Norfolk, Virginia. Norfolk won federal court approval of a return to neighborhood schools back in 1986, for the stated purpose of increasing parental involvement and arresting white flight. Black parents had sued to block the new plan because it would immediately render 10 elementary schools, many of them serving housing projects, 100% black. Sociologist David Armor, retained as an expert witness by the school board, predicted that if Norfolk's crosstown busing continued, the whole school system would soon become 75% black, making racial balance impossible. "Civil rights groups have always discounted the importance of whites," he says today, "which has always been a mystery to me. It's as though their goal were some abstract equity thing, as opposed to actual integration." The court accepted Armor's argument.
"It was turning back the clock. It was like being told you have to go to the back of the bus," recalls Lucy Wilson, then an associate dean at Old Dominion University and one of two black school-board members who initially voted against the plan. When the federal court's ruling rendered the return to neighborhood schools inevitable, Wilson and the other dissenter changed their votes in exchange for a commitment that the all-black schools would be targeted for extra resources, though Wilson doubts the promise will be kept forever. (As Harvard School of Education sociologist Gary Orfield has observed, "A less powerful group isn't going to get disproportionate resources for a very long time from a more powerful group. It requires that water flow uphill.") For the 1993-94 school year, the district's average expenditure per pupil in the black "target" elementary schools was $736 higher than at Norfolk's other elementaries, while class size averaged 20 pupils, two or three fewer than at the other schools.