Hobson Ex Rel. Hobson v. Hansen

SUMMARY

In Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497, 74 S.Ct. 693, 98 L.Ed. 884 (1954), the Supreme Court held that the District of Columbia’s racially segregated public school system violated the due-process clause of the Fifth Amendment. The present litigation, brought in behalf of Negro as well as poor children generally in the District’s public schools, tests-the current compliance of those schools-with the principles announced in Bolling, its companion case, Brown v. Board of *406 Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S.Ct. 686, 98 L.Ed. 873 (1954), and their progeny. The basic question presented is whether the defendants, the Superintendent of Schools and the members of the Board of Education, in the operation of the public school system here, unconstitutionally deprive the District’s Negro and poor public school children of their right to equal educational opportunity with the District’s white and more affluent public school children. This court concludes that they do.

In support of this conclusion the court makes the following principal findings of fact:

1. Racially and socially homogeneous schools damage the minds and spirit of all children who attend them — the Negro, the white, the poor and the affluent— and block the attainment of the broader goals of democratic education, whether the segregation occurs by law or by fact.

2. The scholastic achievement of the disadvantaged child, Negro and white, is strongly related to the racial and socioeconomic composition of the student body of his school. A racially and socially integrated school environment increases the scholastic achievement of the disadvantaged child of whatever race.

3. The Board of Education, which is the statutory head of the public schools in the District, is appointed pursuant to a quota system which, until 1962, for over half a century had limited the Negro membership of the nine-man Board to three. Since 1962 the Negro quota on the Board has been four, one less than a majority. The city of Washington, which is the District of Columbia, presently has a population over 60% Negro and a public school population over 90% Negro.

4. Adherence to the neighborhood school policy by the School Board effectively segregates the Negro and the poor children from the white and the more affluent children in most of the District’s public schools. This neighborhood school policy is relaxed by the Board through the use of optional zones for the purpose of allowing white children, usually affluent white children, “trapped” in a Negro school district, to “escape” to a “white” or more nearly white school, thus making the economic and racial segregation of the public school children more complete than it would otherwise be under a strict neighborhood school assignment plan.

5. The teachers and principals in the public schools are assigned so that generally the race of the faculty is the same as the race of the children. Thus most of the schools can be identified as “Negro” or “white,” not only by reference to the predominant race of the children attending, but by the predominant race of the faculty as well. The heaviest concentration of Negro faculty, usually 100%, is in the Negro ghetto schools.

6. The median annual per pupil expenditure ($292) in the predominantly (85-100%) Negro elementary schools in the District of Columbia has been a flat $100 below the median annual per pupil expenditure for its predominantly (85-100%) white schools ($392).

7. Generally the “white” schools are underpopulated while the “Negro” schools generally are overcrowded. Moreover, all of the white elementary schools have kindergartens. Some Negro schools are without kindergartens entirely while other Negro schools operate kindergartens in shifts or consecutive sessions. In addition to being overcrowded and short on kindergarten space, the school buildings in the Negro slums are ancient and run down. Only recently, through the use of impact aid and other federal funds, have the Negro slum schools had sufficient textbooks for the children’s use.

8. As they proceed through the Washington school system, the reading scores primarily of the Negro and poor children, but not the white and middle class, fall increasingly behind the national norm. By senior high school the discrepancy reaches several grades.

9. The track system as used in the District’s public schools is a form of ability grouping in which students are divided in separate, self-contained curricula or tracks ranging from “Basic” *407 for the slow student to “Honors” for the gifted.

10. The aptitude tests used to assign children to the various tracks are standardized primarily on white middle class children. Since these tests do not relate to the Negro and disadvantaged child, track assignment based on such tests relegates Negro and disadvantaged children to the lower tracks from which, because of the reduced curricula and the absence of adequate remedial and compensatory education, as well as continued inappropriate testing, the chance of escape is remote.

11. Education in the lower tracks is geared to what Dr. Hansen, the creator of the track system, calls the “blue collar” student. Thus such children, so stigmatized by inappropriate aptitude testing procedures, are denied equal opportunity to obtain the white collar education available to the white and more affluent children.

Other incidental, but highly indicative, findings are as follows: a. The June 1964 — December 1965 study by the Office of the Surgeon General, Army, shows that 55.3% of the 18-year-olds from the District of Columbia failed the Armed Services mental test, a higher percentage than any of the 50 states, b. The average per pupil expenditure in the District’s public schools is only slightly below the national average. The 1964-65 Bureau of the Census Report on Governmental Finances shows, however, that the District of Columbia spends less per capita on education generally than all states except Arkansas and Tennessee, c. The same report shows that the District of Columbia spends more per capita on police protection than all states without exception. In fact, the District of Columbia spends more than double any state other than Nevada, New York, New Jersey and California. The inferences, including those bearing on the relationship of the quality of education to crime, which arise from these findings are obvious. Indeed, the National Crime Commission’s Task Force Report: Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime indicates that the very deficiencies in the District’s public school system noted by the record in this case — prejudging, through inappropriate testing, the learning abilities of the disadvantaged child as inferior to the white middle class child; placing the child in lower tracks for reduced educa-' tion based on such tests, thus implementing the self-fulfilling prophecy phenomenon inherent in such misjudgments; placing inferior teachers in slum schools; continuing racial and economic segregation of pupils; providing textbooks unrelated to the lives of disadvantaged children ; inadequate remedial programsjfpr offsetting initial psychological and social difficulties of the disadvantaged child— all have contributed to the increase in crime, particularly juvenile crime.

In sum, all of the evidence in this case tends to show that the Washington school system is a monument to the cynicism of the power structure which governs the voteless capital of the greatest country on earth.

Remedy

To correct the racial and economic discrimination found in the operation of the District of Columbia public school system, the court has issued a decree attached to its opinion ordering: 1. An injunction against racial and economic discrimination in the public school system here. 2. Abolition of the track system. 3. Abolition of the optional zones. 4. Transportation for volunteering children in overcrowded school districts east of Rock Creek Park to underpopulated schools west of the Park. 5. The defendants, by October 2, 1967, to file for approval by the court a plan for pupil assignment eliminating .the racial and economic discriminatioh found to exist in the operation of the Washington public school system. 6. Substantial integration of the faculty of each school beginning with the school year 1967-68. 7. The defendants, by October 2, 1967, to file for approval by the court a teacher assignment plan fully integrating the faculty of each school.

*408 The United States is invited to intervene in these proceedings to assist in implementing the decree, to suggest changes in the decree, and to take whatever other steps it deems appropriate in the interest of public education in the District of Columbia.

FINDINGS OF FACT

I. Student Segregation

A. De Jure Segregation and Bolling v. Sharpe.

Until 1954 the public schools in the District of Columbia were racially segregated by law. 1 The school system was divided up into Division I (white) and Division II (Negro), each with its own elementary and junior and senior high schools, each with teaching and administrative personnel of the one race only. The two Divisions were capped at the top by a single Superintendent. A few administrative committees also cut across Division lines.

The Negro schools, though entirely disjointed from Division I, were denied the consolation of equality which the separate-but-equal doctrine had promised. In 1949 the monumental Strayer Report 2 thoroughly documented the comparative inferiority of Division II: its classrooms were considerably more crowded, its buildings older and shabbier, its curricula narrower, its counseling services less adequate, its supplies more scarce. 3

The next year our Court of Appeals upheld the constitutionality of the District’s segregated school system, Judge Edgerton dissenting. Carr v. Corning, 86 U.S.App.D.C. 173, 182 F.2d 14 (1950). Only months later, however, the Supreme Court issued decisions which clearly threatened the viability of the separatébut-equal doctrine as it applied to public school education. Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629, 70 S.Ct. 848, 94 L.Ed. 1114 (1950); McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, 339 U.S. 637, 70 S.Ct. 851, 94 L.Ed. 1149 (1950). Heedful that this doctrine was in its twilight, in the early fifties the school administration began readying itself for desegregation should that be decreed. Participating in these explorations was Dr. Carl F. Hansen, then in charge of Division I elementary schools and of the curriculum for all *409 schools, and since 1958 the Superintendent of Schools.

In 1950 seven Negro students, of whom Spottswood T. Bolling was alphabetically the first, filed suit in federal court seeking admission to Sousa Junior High, a Division I school. On May 19, 1954, in Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497, 73 S.Ct. 693, the companion case to Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S.Ct. 686, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in Washington’s schools was incompatible with the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment. For the argument on remedy Bolling and Brown were consolidated. A year and two weeks after Brown I, the Court in Brown II, 349 U.S. 294, 75 S.Ct. 753, 99 L.Ed. 1083 (1955), issued its famous decree of “all deliberate speed” and, noting that “[substantial progress has been made in the District,” supra at 299, 75 S.Ct. at 756, remanded Bolling to the District of Columbia federal district court. A month later, whether because by that time plaintiffs had all graduated from the District’s schools or for other reasons, the Bolling action was dismissed.

B. The Board’s Desegregation Plan.

1. As the Board of Education correctly understood, the Bolling decision affected the constitutional rights not of the complainants alone but of the entire Negro community in the District. Accordingly, within the week after Bolling and Brown I, the Board of Education released a plan for desegregation, one drawn up tentatively by the school administration the year before, widely known as the Corning Plan after the then Superintendent. By the opening of school in September 1955 it was in full effect.

As for placement of students, the plan embraced and asserted a policy, with modifications, of neighborhood schools. That is, geographical boundaries were traced around each school, the school somewhere near the center of the defined area; with the significant exceptions noted below in Sections I — D—3 and I — E of these findings, students attending public school and residing within each enclosure were required to go to the school inside that enclosure. (Tr. 135). Elementary school districts were kept compact enough so that most youngsters could easily walk to the schools from their homes, usually a distance of less than half a mile. (Tr. 3728, 3730.) Junior high school zones were of greater size — several elementary schools “feeding” into one junior high — and senior high zones were more inclusive still. 4

2. Neighborhood elementary schools have undeniable advantages. Neither school nor parents need bear any transportation expenses, since the school is within walking distance of home. For the same reason, the safety hazards and the expense of time involved in getting from home to school are held at a minimum ; also, students may conveniently return home for lunch, and, with no school bus to catch, may linger after school with school work or after-school activities. Locating schools within the neighborhoods facilitates a closer relationship between school and parents, and gives the student a chance to make friends during the school day with the children, of his own age who live near his home. (Tr. 3120-3121; 4047-4049; 5031-5035; 6091-6094, 6194-6196.)

For junior and senior high schools, however, the relevant “neighborhoods” so expand that the advantages said to accrue with neighborhood schools in great part attenuate. (See Tr. 198.) As shown above, those advantages primarily depend on a neighborhood school only a reasonable walk from home; and the maps of school zone lines in the city make it clear that most Washington secondary school students must rely on *410 some form of transportation in getting to and from school.

C. Washington Residential Patterns.

Adoption of a neighborhood policy for student assignment inevitably impresses the racial residential patterns within the city on the schools with dramatic consequences. This section of the findings, drawing on evidence scattered through the exhibits, will try to sketch those patterns in the large. Below, to begin, are figures graphing the gradual displacement of whites by Negroes in the city and in its schools.

Year Per Cent Negro City Per Cent Negro School

1900 32%

1930 27% 32%

1940 28% 39%

1950 35% 50.1%

1953 40% 56.8%

1960 55% 79.7%

1965 61+% 89.4%

1966 90.2%

(Ex. V-13; Ex. 7; Ex. 26; Ex. 146.)

Washington’s white families, then, are increasingly few in number; further their residences are heavily concentrated in one area of the city, the area west of Rock Creek Park 5 — the western fourth, approximately, of the truncated District diamond. The Park is a verdant curtain which draws through the city. It has long been true that virtually every residence west of the Park is white. 6 It is now true that east of the Park the city is very heavily Negro. 7 Twenty-seven years ago whites constituted at least a one-third minority in every neighborhood in the city. (Ex. A-16, pp. 310-314). But the rapid white out-migration from Washington into the Virginia and Maryland suburbs ever since 1948, the year of peak white population, has evidently depleted the supply of whites in many areas.

By the time of Bolling v. Sharpe, segregated residential patterns blighted the city. Since then the conditions have worsened. White families have deserted the Northeast, and the white population has greatly thinned in the high Northwest and in the quadrant of the city south and east of the Anacostia River. It is a painful irony that in the very decade in which society has intensified its efforts in facing up to the race question, residential segregation in Washington has become yet more complete.

Many whites still do live east of the Park, especially in the corridor between the Park and Parkway and 16th Street, including the fashionable DuPont Circle area, and in the socially variegated Capitol Hill area. But they enroll few children in the public school system, some because they are unattached and the others because, though married, they either are without children of public school age or place their children in private schools. 8

D. Segregation 1954-1967.

Adoption of a neighborhood school policy by Washington school officials in 1954 marked a thorough and commenda *411 bly rapid abandonment of the formally segregated school structure of the preceding century. Nevertheless, it cannot be gainsaid that these officials were doubtless aware that its adoption would lead to a school system still considerably segregated in fact. 9 There is no direct evidence that they intended this result; on the question of intent, see Section F-5 below. But the tendency toward segregation they accentuated by establishing various special student-assignment exceptions to the neighborhood principle — “optional” zones, an “optional feature,” and a psychological upset provision (these will be individually discussed below)- — ■ all calculated to release many white students from any obligation to attend their neighborhood school if that school should be predominantly Negro. The degree of actual integration which the neighborhood school policy, so qualified, in fact achieved in the years immediately following Bolling the record does not clearly show; all we know is that in 1954-55 27% of all Washington’s schools were 100% of one race or another; a year later this figure was 17%. (Ex. 7, p. 49.) Dr. Hansen’s track system, instituted in the high schools in 1956 and extended downward to the junior high and elementary schools in 1959, had the tendency of resegregating the races within the individual school. 10

In 1958-59, an elementary school racial count uncovered the following information:

1958-59

Per Cent Negro Number of Elementary Schools

90-100% 68

80-90% 10

70-80% 7

60-70% 6

50-60% 3

40-50% 1

30-40% 1

20-30% 2

10-20% 1

0-10% 18

(Ex. 8, p. 9.)

Beginning with the school year 1962-63 the record is profuse with detail. Here is the racial breakdown of all the schools, first for that year and then for the 1966-67 school year just drawing to a close. 11

Elementary Schools

Per Cent Negro Number of Schools

Pupils 1962-63 1966-67

85-100% 94 109

67-85% 11 9

33-67% 12 4 4

15-33% 3 4

0-15% 17 9

*412 Junior High Schools

Per Cent Negro Number of Schools

Pupils 1962-63 1966-67

85-100% 17 22

67-85% 2 3

33-67% 1 1

15-33% 2 0

0-15% 1 1

Senior High Schools

85-100% 6 8

67-85% 0 1

33-67% 3 1

15-33% 1 0

0-15% 1 1

In 1962-63, of the 13 elementary schools west of the Park, 12 were predominantly (85-100%) white. (The last, Jackson, was 83% white.) The five other predominantly white schools were on the other side of the Anacostia River. This year (1966-67) every one of 11 predominantly white schools at the three levels (9 + 1 + 1) is west of the Park, and so are all four 67-85% white schools. The only schools west of the Park which are not predominantly white are Western High and Gordon Junior High, both in the 33-67% class.

E. Efforts to Correct De Facto Segregation.

At this juncture it becomes relevant to inquire into the efforts the school administration has undertaken, if any, to lessen the massive actual segregation which these figures reveal.

1. One witness, a school system engineer, testified that since 1962 the school system has ventured on a limited policy of integration, although one generally confined within the neighborhood principle. (Tr. 3609-3615, 3660-3668, 3725-3726, 3758-3760.) This policy, as he defined it, takes effect when more than a trivial number of whites happen to live in neighborhoods in which, for reasons unrelated to race, schools are due to be built. The substance of the alleged policy is that in these circumstances the new schools will be carefully placed within the neighborhoods so that their white enrollment when they open will be as high as possible. The hope is that the attractiveness of the new school will fasten the white families to the neighborhood, and perhaps lure other white families in; the witness’ claim was that this integration factor is sometimes as important a factor as cost in settling on the location of a new school.

The witness conceded that the policy had never been clearly articulated, or embodied in a written memorandum, or even approved by the School Board, originating instead with Dr. Hansen. And other evidence verifies that this testimony that integration is considered in locating school sites is simply untrue. In September 1964, two years after he supposedly announced this policy, Dr. Hansen notified the Board that integration was ignored in the placement of new schools, that to do otherwise would be futile (given the rapid racial transitions in mixed neighborhoods) and “bad educational planning.” (Ex. 36(c), p. 23.)

2. An instance of the school system’s concern for student integration is the *413 WISE program, discussed in these findings at III-H-6 below. Now still in the planning stage, WISE is designed to upgrade the secondary schools in the southern half of the region west of the Park, in the hope that these school improvements will stabilize this presently integrated neighborhood. Financially the program will depend exclusively on federal grants under impact aid or other national statutes.

3. Two exceptions which the school administration has carved from its neighborhood policy may in operation be achieving slight integration; if this results, however, it is fortuitous, for the school administration disavows here any intention to integrate.

a. The first of these exceptions is that youngsters with mental or emotional disabilities, most of them Negro, through the years have been bused at public expense from their homes into special instructional classes meeting in approximately 35 elementary schools throughout the city. (Tr. 139, 2256-2257.) This past year slightly more than 100 such students, half of them Negro, were so deposited in the schools west of the Park. (Ex. 146.) At the receiving schools, of course, these disabled students are segregated into special classrooms set aside for their use and generally separated from the regular student body of the school.

b. A child attending a school overcrowded to a point well above stated capacity may be allowed to transfer to certain underutilized schools designated “open.” (See Tr. 125, 136, 183, 2257, 2879; Ex. A-35(c), pp. 18-19, 36; Ex. N-9.) Since none of the 11 “open” schools in 1965-66 was predominantly (85-100%) Negro, the open school policy evokes the possibility of integration, although this is no part of the purpose of the school administration, which apparently looks forward to ending the transfers as soon as adequate facilities can be erected in the now overcrowded areas. Further, there are inhibitions on the right to transfer. The students are, first, responsible for furnishing their own transportation. At least this has been true until a year ago, and the recent departure establishing busing is apparently limited to situations where the regular school is overcrowded to the extreme point of requiring shifts or consecutive half-day sessions. {See Defendants’ Proposed Findings, p. B-10.) Of course, the failure to provide transportation in effect biases the open-school policy in favor of families fortunate enough economically to shoulder transportation expenses. It is unclear, moreover, whether, once the conditions of under- and overcrowding are satisfied, the student’s right to transfer is absolute, or whether clearance on academic or other grounds must be secured from or renewed by some school official. For whatever reason, many and in some cases most of the students transferring into the predominantly white schools west of the Park are white students who would otherwise have attended schools with higher Negro concentrations. 13

4. The attitude toward curing segregation on the part of the school administration is adequately exposed by the circumstances surrounding Dr. Hansen’s report to the Board in 1964. In June of that year the Washington Urban League presented a report on school segregation to the Board of Education in open meeting. This Urban League submission (Ex. A-36(b)) urged the Board, first, to declare officially that actual integration is one of its policy objectives, and, next, to create a permanent advisory committee on integration; finally, it spelled out concrete if limited steps which *414 the Board could take in the direction of integration. These included busing Negroes into underutilized predominantly (85-100%) white schools, making rather slight amendments in certain secondary school zones (in one instance merely rotating the Cardozo zone, now a north-south rectangle, 90 degrees), abolishing several optional zones (defined below), and establishing three fourth- through sixth-grade educational centers in lower Georgetown, Mount Pleasant and the upper Northwest, each one serving an area now parcelled out among three elementary schools.

The Board profusely thanked the Urban League for its civic interest and requested Dr. Hansen to analyze its several proposals. Dr. Hansen’s evaluation (Ex. A-36(c)), turned in to the Board on September 1, 1964, denied that “segregation,” even “de facto segregation,” was the right word for Washington’s schools, 14 insisted that the Board’s 1954 policy statement on ending de jure segregation sufficed in its content as a statement of racial policy (Ex. A-35(a), p. 45), argued that the League’s suggestions were “evil in principle” and probably unconstitutional insofar as they inclined toward color consciousness rather than color blindness on the part of the school system, and condemned them for entailing or auguring “abandonment” of the neighborhood school policy, his administration’s commitment to which he vigorously reaffirmed. The Board of Education, after receiving a reply brief by the Urban League (Ex. A-36(d)) pointing out that Dr. Hansen had not come to grips with many of its specific recommendations, 15 took no action. (Tr. 1437-1439.)

5. From all the evidence, including the Urban League episode and the collapse upon analysis of the professed integration policies respecting school placement, the court is forced to the conclusion that the school administration’s response to the fact and dilemma of segregation has been primarily characterized — at its best- — by indifference and inaction. School officials have refused to install actual integration as an objective for administration policy, or even to recognize that in the District segregation is a major problem. Over the years they have expressed little interest in and done nothing about locating schools on the borders of white and Negro communities, or busing students from east of the Park into the underutilized schools west of that divide to achieve integration, or building schools in the Park accessible from east and west alike, or Princeton planning contiguous schools, 16 or establishing large educational complexes drawing students from throughout the city; its present $300,000,000 six-year plan for expansion and construction envisages none of these alternatives. (Tr. 3713-3715, 3724.) Many of these ideas, indeed, have apparently never been considered. (See Tr. 2974, 2977, 3749.) Dr. Hansen, for example, although he has himself examined the literature on educational parks, has not ordered any studies undertaken re their local usefulness, nor has he broached the subject with the Board, or even with his own staff, at least until this suit got under way. 17 (Tr. 179-182, 975, 3669-3670.) *415 The truth may be that school officials have given up on integration primarily because they have noted the low number of whites in the schools in recent years. But so long as so many of the remaining white pupils continue to be sent to 85-100% white schools, the possibilities for integration have hardly been exhausted.

F. School Administration Policies Encouraging Segregation.

The next step is to focus attention on those additional school administration departures from the neighborhood school system which come wrapped in racial implications and bear directly on the question of the school administration’s racial intent. These fall under four headings.

1. Beginning after Bolling, individual whites who were seriously upset by the prospect of integration were suffered on an individual basis to transfer to white schools, in the teeth of the 1954 Board order ruling expressly to the contrary. (Ex. 7, p. 44; see p. 46.) And apparently professions of psychological upset were accepted at face value without investigation of their authenticity. (See Tr. 3068-3069, 3119.) The record is unclear as to whether this practice has been discontinued; the court notes one report that it was still functioning circa I960. 18

2. Under the so-called “optional feature” of the school system’s desegregation plan, students registered in one school at the time of Bolling were allowed, if that school stayed underenrolled, to remain there until graduation instead of attending their neighborhood school; indeed unless the student requested transfer to his neighborhood school he apparently continued in the school he had been attending. (Ex. 7, p. 46.) While this feature had some affirmative válue in minimizing the disruption in students’ lives occasioned by desegregation, another of its obvious functions was to let white students living in heavily Negro neighborhoods stay in their still predominantly white, though beyond the neighborhood, schools. The feature expired no later than 1960, since by then all students had graduated from their 1953 schools. 19

3. Two years ago the school administration revised the tentative borders drawn around the new Rabaut Junior High (which finally opened last fall) admittedly in order to accommodate an organization called Neighbors, Inc. (Tr. 2790-2818.) Neighbors, Inc. represents a community that is centered around Takoma Elementary School, which until very recently was thoroughly integrated. The organization protested the original line because it would have sliced the Takoma district in two, dividing the white Takoma studentry up between Paul and Rabaut Junior Highs, in each of which they would be engulfed by a large Negro majority, rather than concentrating the whites in Paul alone.

4. Optional zones. Sometimes, the administration has replaced hard and fast geographical school boundaries with, what it calls “optional zones.”

a. Crestwood and Kalorama Triangle zones. As an illustration, presently every student living in the integrated. Crestwood area between 16th Street and the Park north of Piney Branch Parkway may choose to attend either predominantly (85-100%) Negro MacFárland Junior High, the neighborhood school only a few blocks to the east, or integrated (33-67%) Gordon, far away on the other side of the Park. Similarly, the older brother may enroll at either Roosevelt (predominantly Negro), his nearby neighborhood high school (adjoining MacFarland), or Western (integrated) or Wilson (predominantly white), each close to two miles to the west. The young student living in that area has an option between Powell Ele *416 mentary School (predominantly Negro), in his neighborhood a short walk away, and Hearst (predominantly white), at a distance of 10 minutes by car just off Wisconsin Avenue. (Tr. 3053-3054; Ex. N — 1, p. 27.)

Directly south of Crestwood, in the Kalorama Triangle area, optional zones afford the student a choice between Cardozo High and Western, and between Banneker Junior High and Gordon. His natural “neighborhood” schools are plainly Cardozo and Banneker, both predominantly Negro.

All these zones 20 were marked out when the school lines were drawn anew in the wake of Bolling. (Tr. 2957.) At that time all the schools in question were operating at less than capacity. (Tr. 2845-2846.) Despite this evidence, an assistant school superintendent maintained at first on the stand that the purpose behind creation of these zones was to relieve overcrowding at the schools within the territory of which the zones naturally fell. (Tr. 2859, 2862.) The next day the witness retracted this explanation, confessing that the primary original purpose for the zones was to afford whites the opportunity to avert attendance at the Negro schools to which they were otherwise destined. (Tr. 2956-2958, 2978.) 21 The court accepts this explanation. And while claiming that presently the zones also function to lessen overcrowding at the schools just east of 16th Street, the witness did not assert that the racial purpose for these zones has vanished (Tr. 2977-2985), and the court has no reason so to find.

b. Dunbar zone. Elsewhere in Washington optional zones also appear. Sometime after 1960, Washington’s Southwest was given its selection between Dunbar High School, which is overwhelmingly Negro, and Ballou, then mostly white but on the other side of the Anacostia River. When Ballou became overcrowded and began reporting substantial Negro majorities, it was replaced as the optional zone alternative by Western, a less crowded and racially mixed school, although a great distance away. This school year, the 35 white students living in that zone without exception elected to attend Western, as did 19 of the 86 Negroes with residences there. (Tr. 6713.)

The school administration professes 22 to the court that its purpose here is only to allow every student in the zone, white and Negro alike, to attend a genuinely integrated school. (Tr. 2852, 2982.) Its solicitude for the Negro student’s opportunity for exposure to an integrated education the court discredits. Since 1954 the administration has carved optional zones for race-oriented reasons only where significant islands of whites are found, never in neighborhoods which lack white enclaves, never, for example, in the almost exclusively Negro neighborhoods directly to the east of 14th Street feeding Shaw and Garnet-Patterson, which in fact are closer to Western High School than the Dunbar optional zone is. Further, the court can judicially note that the new Southwest, as school officials well know, is largely composed of urban-renewal affluent whites easily able to absorb the expense of transportation, and impoverished Negro families making do in public housing. Any equality here would be on a par with the majestic even-handedness of the ordinance which Anatole France cherished. 23

The court also discredits two administration spokesmen’s claim that Western *417 replaced Ballou as one of the optional zone schools only because Ballou became overcrowded. (Tr. 548-549, 2661, 2982-2983.) As Ballou’s enrollment increased, so did its percentage of Negroes in attendance (now 85%); since the conceded function of this optional zone is to provide access to an integrated secondary school, race as well as (if not rather than) overcrowding must have induced the substitution.

c. Junior high zones. Two junior high school optional zones — between Paul and Backus and between Francis and Gordon — were created after formal desegregation, again so that the white student could choose to attend a distant school with a considerable white percentage rather than the overwhelmingly Negro school in his neighborhood. (Tr. 2865-2867, 2985.) Both zones were recently abolished, although in neither instance because the school administration had at last rejected this line of social reasoning. Rather, it was the opening of Rabaut Junior High this fall which spelled the end of the old Paul-Backus zone, while the Francis-Gordon zone was finally integrated into Gordon to decrease overcrowding at Francis.

d. Deal-Gordon zone. One other optional zone eased the withdrawal of students from an integrated junior high (Gordon) into the city’s one predominantly white junior high school, Deal. (See Tr. 152-171, 2858.) Beginning back in the 1940’s when both were Division I white high schools, an optional zone lay between Wilson and Western Senior Highs. At that time Deal fed into Wilson, Gordon into Western; these are today’s arrangements also. The Wilson-Western optional zone until 1963 fell entirely within Gordon’s province. Parents in the zone who preferred Wilson High School complained to Superintendent Hansen about the junior high assignment to Gordon. Ostensibly their reasoning was that their children suffered the awkwardness of having to acquire wholly new classmates when they graduated from Gordon into Wilson, and that families were inconvenienced by having children simultaneously attending Gordon and Wilson, at opposite directions from the zone itself. In 1963 the Superintendent, in response to these complaints, converted the zone from compulsory Gordon to Gordon-Deal optional territory. Two years later, admittedly because a civil rights group publicly argued that the zone parents were principally seeking a white school, the Superintendent changed directions, not only returning the junior high optional zone to the Gordon district, but merging the senior high zone into the exclusively Western district.

Although, the Superintendent testified, the 1963 change was an “unwise decision because of the racial overtones,” “The racial overtones,” he said, “are interjected into this by others.” (Tr. 165, 166.) The zone parents’ pre-1963 professed non-racial grievances do, however, seem disingenuous, since the inconvenience they cited they had invited upon themselves by choosing Wilson rather than Western High School for their older children. Further, that the Superintendent granted such relief upon the civil rights group’s protest evidently reflected his concession that one apparent intent of the zone parents was segregatory. Accordingly, the court finds that the underlying motive of at least some of the zone parents, not unappreciated by the Superintendent, lay in their preference for the greater white enrollment at Deal and Wilson.

5. Conclusion. Once nearly complete student segregation is shown in a school system in which de jure segregation had formerly been the rule, when challenged the burden falls on the school board to show that the observed segregation stems from the application of racially neutral policies. In this litigation defendants have exposed and explained their neighborhood policy and shown *418 that this is the agent responsible for the segregation.

Spotlighting the racial purpose hidden behind the optional zones, plaintiffs invite the court to find that the seeming racial neutrality of the neighborhood school policy itself is only a front that school officials adopted and adhered to because they intended the racial segregation they knew it would produce.

The court, however, is convinced, first, that, whatever the trends in recent educational thought, in 1954 the Board of Education sincerely believed in the neighborhood school policy and the legitimate values they saw it as furthering. Accordingly, the court cannot conclude that its segregatory potential was the reason the Board inaugurated the neighborhood policy 13 years ago. Actually, the whole question of the Board’s motives in