For Immediate Release
April 2, 2004

Contact:
Greg Langlois or Elissa Free, (202) 662-9500

 

WASHINGTON, D.C. – In a year full of celebrations commemorating the 50 th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, Georgetown University Law Center will host an event that focuses specifically on the Supreme Court companion case to Brown – Bolling v. Sharpe – that brought an end to racial segregation in the public schools of Washington, D.C.

The two-day conference, which is supported in part by a grant from The Washington Post, will feature presentations by members of the D.C. community, including D.C. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, who was a student in Washington at the time. There will also be lectures on other current race and education issues by leading legal scholars. The conference will run Thursday, April 15 and Friday, April 16 and is chaired and organized by Associate Dean for Research T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Professor Susan Low Bloch.

Brief History of the Case:

In the late 1940s, Gardner Bishop and the Consolidated Parents' Group in Anacostia began a campaign to challenge the separate but equal doctrine, and petitioned the D.C. school board to use Sousa Junior High School – a brand-new, all-white school – on an integrated basis as an alternative to the overcrowded and rundown all-black junior high schools in Anacostia. At the beginning of the school term in 1950, Bishop, along with 12-year-old Spottswood Bolling and 11 other African-American school children, presented themselves at the Sousa School , where they were refused admission.

James Nabrit Jr., a professor of law at Howard University (where he would later become president), brought suit on behalf of Bolling and four other plaintiffs against C. Melvin Sharpe, president of the D.C. Board of Education, charging that segregation per se was unconstitutional discrimination. The federal district court dismissed the case on the basis of a prior ruling of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in Carr v. Corning that segregated schools were constitutional in the District. Nabrit filed an appeal and was awaiting a hearing when the Supreme Court agreed to consolidate the Bolling case with Brown v. Board of Education and the other segregation cases then pending. The Court handed down its decision in Bolling the same day it decided Brown: May 17, 1954.

Bolling v. Sharpe at 50:
Desegregation in the District of Columbia : Past, Present and future

Thursday, April 15

Panel I: 3:30 P.M. - 5:00 P.M. (McDonough, 520)
Educational Policy Today: In the Shadow of the Desegregation Cases
Chair : T. Alexander Aleinikoff (Georgetown)
James Forman Jr. (Georgetown), “The Progressive History of School Choice”
Charles Lawrence (Georgetown), “Forbidden Conversations: On Race, Privacy and Community”
William Taylor (Chair, Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights), “School Reform as a Legacy of Brown”

Dinner for Invited Guests: 6:00 P.M. – 7:20 P.M. (Library, 5th Floor)
Chair: Susan Low Bloch (Georgetown)
Keynote Speaker: Sr. Judge Louis H. Pollak, Eastern District of Pennsylvania

Panel II: 7:30 P.M. - 9:30 P.M. (McDonough, 520)
Bolling Remembered
Convener: Susan Low Bloch (Georgetown)
Chair : Roger Wilkins (George Mason University; Vice Chairman, NAACP Legal Defense Fund Board)
James Nabrit III, (Counsel to and Board member of the NAACP Inc. Fund and son of plaintiffs' attorney in Bolling)
Eleanor Holmes Norton, (Georgetown; D.C. Delegate to Congress; D. C. student in 1954)

Friday, April 16

Panel III: 9:00 A.M. - 10:30 A.M. (Gewirz, 12th Floor)
Bolling in Historical Context
Chair : Daniel Ernst (Georgetown)
Jack Balkin (Yale), “The Truman Show: Bolling and Nonjudicial Precedents"
Michael Klarman (U. Va.), “Why Bolling was Hard but Desegregation in D.C. was (Relatively) Easy”
Elizabeth Patterson (Georgetown), “A Gradual ‘[U]nfolding of Christian Social Justice': The Desegregation of Catholic Schools in Washington, D.C.”
Wendell Pritchett (U. Penn.), “A National Issue: Segregation in D.C. and the Civil Rights  Movement at Mid-Century”

Panel IV: 10:45 A.M. - 12:15 P.M. (Gewirz, 12th Floor)
Bolling and Substantive Due Process  
Chair and Commentator : Mark Tushnet (Georgetown)
David Bernstein (George Mason University), “The Equal Protection Component of Due Process During the Lochner Era”
Richard Primus (U. Mich.), “ Bolling Alone”
Peter Rubin (Georgetown), “Substantive Due Process, Korematsu and Bolling”