Strong Opinions Expressed at Rally Outside Supreme Court

Teddy B. Gordon, a lawyer representing Louisville mother Crystal Meredith, speaks outside the U.S. Supreme Court on Dec. 4 after presenting his argument that assigning students to schools based on race is unconstitutional.

—Christopher Powers/Education Week

By Christina A. Samuels

Washington

The steps of the U.S. Supreme Court building were a magnet for hundreds of college and high school students who turned out on a cold and windy Monday to show their support for affirmative action and Brown v. Board of Education , which they believe will be damaged if the court strikes down two voluntary plans used to promote racial diversity in the Jefferson County, Ky., and Seattle schools.

The rally began hours before the court was to hear the cases, in which parents challenged school policies that assigned students to schools using, in part, a formula to maintain racial balance.

The T-shirts worn by Anita Wadhwa and Shannon Garth-Rhodes, both students at Harvard University’s graduate school of education, expressed the message that most demonstrators at the court today promoted. Listed on the back of the T-shirts was a timeline of key Supreme Court cases concerning race, including Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, which upheld the creation of “separate but equal” public accommodations for blacks and whites; Brown , which struck down that doctrine in 1954 in overturning segregated systems of public education; Grutter v. Bollinger , the 2003 case in which the Supreme Court upheld the use of race as a factor in the admissions policy of the University of Michigan law school; and the two current cases, which are just as...