Supreme Court as a tool of the President

Is school integration ending? Is the U.S. Supreme Court against integration in our public schools? Their latest ruling shows that they are.

A school district in Kentucky, along with all others throughout the nation, has been told that the school district’s racially diverse programs have to end.

In June of this year, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down racially diverse programs that were started voluntarily in Louisville and Seattle, using race as a factor to determine public school placements. The court's decision has left schools across the country scrambling to find a way to protect diversity in their classrooms.

More than 50 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court decision, known as Brown v. Board of Education, declared that separate schools are inherently unequal and therefore must become racially diverse. Thus began a painful and sometimes violent process for school districts to become compliant with that ruling.

I believe this process helped unify our nation and bring us more in line with the notion of ‘America, Land of the Free’. I believe this decision helped make our country stronger.

50 years of busing students out of their school districts to other schools based on race has resulted in more racially diverse schools. We needed it. Without the Supreme Court decision to force integration it would not have happened.

Now, the U.S. Supreme Court has made a decision that will undo everything we have struggled to achieve and will set race relations back 50 years.

School districts have now been told, by this conservative U.S. Supreme Court, that race cannot be a factor in promoting desegregation. Schools have been trying to comply with that 50 year old decision based on race and now the court has said that basis is wrong. What does this government want?

Do we have George W. Bush to thank for this? He appointed the two most recent, most conservative justices he could find to serve on this Court. Both of those justices, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, played major roles in undermining the tenets of Brown v. Board of Education.

This turn of events is in itself an education for students. What they take away from this is that no decision of our highest court in the land is final. No final decision remains, as it is not written in stone. We can no longer believe in what the courts tells us, because another court will strike the decision down.

This is why the once noble practice of law has become so overrun with unscrupulous lawyers. Because they can manipulate the justice system to get the decision they want based on the fact that our court system is not unified and that no court decision is final. We live in a world of wishy-washy ‘decision makers’ that change their minds based on which way the political wind is blowing. If there had been different justices on the court 50 years ago there is a strong possibility that integration never would have happened.

We, the people of the United States, need to have a firm foundation to define us, to unify us. The U.S. Constitution is that foundation. But, the U.S. Supreme Court, through the appointments of the President, keeps changing that foundation. The U.S. Constitution says that were are created equal and as such should all be treated as equals. Before Brown v. Board of Education, and other court decisions, the U.S. government was not treating all of us equally because of the way the school system was set up and because racial discrimination had become so institutionalized. The government was forced to correct these injustices by forcing integration and now the U.S. Supreme Court tell us that they were wrong to do it in this manner.

When a decision as strong and righteous as Brown v. Board of Education has been made and it has been proven to be as successful as it has it then becomes too important to be over turned by a future court just because the current president loads the court with people of his choice.