In Uplifting, Get Underneath

Disaster by Decree: The Supreme Court Decisions on Race and the Schools By Lino A. Graglia Cornell University Press, 351 pp., $11.50 Lino A. Graglia, Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Texas Law School, has written what to my mind should become the standard work on one of the most untoward and disastrous developments in American history: the transformation, over a period of fifteen years, of Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas—a decision which had seemed on its face to ban the use of racial criteria in assigning students to the public schools—into a federal requirement that racial criteria be used in assigning students to those schools. The issue arising from that requirement is known as “busing,” for one of the courts’ out-landishly bold provisions has been that large numbers of children be transported, for purposes of racial balance, away from the neighborhood schools that they would otherwise most conveniently have attended.

This development is understandably incomprehensible to the majority of the American people and their elected representatives, but it derives from a peculiar characteristic of our constitutional system. One can understand a situation—we have experienced it—in which what the people and their representatives believe to be right is denied them by the courts in accordance with a higher law. Thus the courts—at a time when most Americans would have been delighted to ban atheists and Communists from teaching positions in the schools—imposed certain restraints derived from a principle that most Americans accept almost without discussion: “freedom of speech.”

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Nathan Glazer

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Disaster by Decree: The Supreme Court Decisions on Race and the Schools By Lino A. Graglia Cornell University Press, 351 pp., $11.50 Lino A. Graglia, Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Texas Law School, has written what to my mind should become the standard work on one of the most untoward and disastrous developments in American history: the transformation, over a period of fifteen years, of Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas—a decision which had seemed on its face to ban the use of racial criteria in assigning students to the public schools—into a federal requirement that racial criteria be used in assigning students to those schools. The issue arising from that requirement is known as “busing,” for one of the courts’ out-landishly bold provisions has been that large numbers of children be transported, for purposes of racial balance, away from the neighborhood schools that they would otherwise most conveniently have attended.

This development is understandably incomprehensible to the majority of the American people and their elected representatives, but it derives from a peculiar characteristic of our constitutional system. One can understand a situation—we have experienced it—in which what the people and their representatives believe to be right is denied them by the courts in accordance with a higher law. Thus the courts—at a time when most Americans would have been delighted to ban atheists and Communists from teaching positions in the schools—imposed certain restraints derived from a principle that most Americans accept almost without discussion: “freedom of speech.”