Green v. County School Board of New Kent County
| Green v. County School Board of New Kent Co. | |
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| Argued April 3, 1968 Decided May 27, 1968 |
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| Full case name | Charles C. Green et al. v. County School Board of New Kent County, Virginia et al. |
| Citations | 391 U.S. 430 (more)
88 S.Ct. 1689, 20 L.Ed.2d 716
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| Prior history | 382 F.2d 338 (4th Cir. 1967), cert. granted, 389 U.S. 1003. |
| Holding | |
| New Kent County's freedom of choice desegregation plan did not comply with the dictates of Brown v. Board of Education and was therefore unconstitutional. | |
| Court membership | |
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| Case opinions | |
| Majority | Brennan, joined by unanimous |
| Laws applied | |
| U.S. Const., amend. XIV | |
Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, 391 U.S. 430 (1968) was an important United States Supreme Court case dealing with the freedom of choice plans created to avoid compliance with the Court's mandate in Brown II. The Court held that New Kent County's freedom of choice plan did not constitute adequate compliance with the school board's responsibility to determine a system of admission to public schools on a non-racial basis. The Supreme Court mandated that the school board must formulate new plans and steps towards realistically converting to a desegregated system.
In Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Warren Court ruled that state-sanctioned segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. One year later, in Brown II, enforcement of this principle was given to district courts, ordering that they take the necessary steps to make admittance to public schools nondiscriminatory "with all deliberate speed." The term "all deliberate speed" did little to speed up the school board's plan for integration. Judge John J. Parker of the United States Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit led many in the South in interpreting Brown as a charge to not-segregate, but not an order to integrate. The Supreme Court heard several more cases surrounding the speed and efficacy of desegregation between its initial ruling in Brown and the Green v. School Board case in 1968.
New Kent is a rural county in eastern Virginia. At the time of the 1960 census, approximately half of the county's 4,500 residents were black. The school system had only two schools, the New Kent School for white students and the George W. Watkins School for black students. School buses traveled overlapping routes throughout the county. The state had long mandated racial segregation in public education under the Virginia Constitution of 1902. The school board continued to operate a segregated system in the wake of the Brown rulings, on the authority of several "massive resistance" state laws enacted to resist them.
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