1995

One-hundred per cent of the students in the public school systems of East St. Louis, Illinois and Compton California are minorities. Ninety-six percent of public school students in Washington, D.C. and Camden, New Jersey are minorities, along with 94% in Hartford, Connecticut and New Orleans, 93% in Los Angeles, Oakland, Atlanta, and Paterson, New Jersey, and 83% in the New York City public school system.
The median income of black households is $22,393; the median income of Latino households is $22,860; and the median income of white households is $35,766. Whereas 26.4% of black families and 27% of Latino families fall below the poverty line, only 8.5% of white families do.

June
In Missouri v. Jenkins, 515 U.S. 70 (1995) (Jenkins II), the Supreme Court overturns an ambitious plan for magnet schools in Kansas City designed to attract suburban white students back into the inner city. This Court argues that this goal is unjustified and unnecessary to remedy past segregation. The Court states that the primary goal of desegregation cases should be to return schools to local control. It also rejects the argument that increased spending on education could be justified in order to remedy reduced achievement by students in inner city schools. Justice Thomas concurs, arguing that the mere fact that a school has no white students does not mean that a constitutional violation has occurred. Only deliberate segregation by law violates the Constitution. He criticizes the assumption that black students suffer any psychological harm from being segregated from whites, contending that it rests upon questionable social science research and an assumption of black inferiority.
In Adarand Constructors v. Peña, 515 U.S. 200 (1995), the Supreme Court overturns Metro Broadcasting. It holds that strict scrutiny must be applied to all racial classifications by the federal government � both “benign” and “invidious.”
In Miller v. Johnson, 515 U.S. 900 (1995), the Supreme Court extends Shaw v. Reno, holding that if race is the predominant factor in legislative redistricting, strict scrutiny applies.

September
The Denver plan that gave rise to Keyes, the first non-Southern desegregation case, is dissolved.

Year: 
1995
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