At Center of ’76 Segregation Ruling : High Court Action Puzzles Campus of ‘Melting Pot’

WASHINGTON —  The Fairfax Academy of Early Learning, its rooms brightly colored, its teachers plentiful and attentive, is the kind of school where affluent parents in the Washington suburbs scramble to enroll their children--children of all colors.

“We have a melting pot here, and it’s wonderful,” says school owner Norma Brill, standing in a playground surrounded by smiling faces of many races and nationalities.

Twelve years ago, the red-brick two-story school, built in the 1950s as a motel, looked much the same from the outside. But there was one obvious difference: All the faces were white.

That summer in 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that this school had violated a Civil War-era law by refusing to admit a black child. The landmark ruling completed the high court’s civil rights revolution, which it had begun in 1954 by outlawing racial segregation in the public schools.

But earlier this week, a newly constituted Supreme Court, taking the civil rights community by surprise, announced that it would reconsider that 1976 decision. Here at the Fairfax Academy of Early Learning, no one can figure out why.

‘Kind of Strange’

“That seems kind of strange for these times,” said William Brill, Norma Brill’s husband. “It sounds like it could open a big can of worms.”

The Brills’ befuddlement echoes that of many legal analysts and others over the new court’s action. In an outpouring of public statements, they also expressed amazement that the issue of segregated schools was still open.

In attracting students and building a good reputation, private schools now depend on offering a diversity of races. The era when separate schools would be desired, or could exist, seems long past.

“I think every child should have an equal opportunity,” Norma Brill said. Nearly a fourth of her pupils are black. Among the children, who range in age from 3 to 12, another substantial percentage are Asian and Latino. “I also don’t think it is any good for a white child to be in a lily-white situation,” she said.

As the 1976 ruling seemed to delineate the past from the future in private schools, it gave the Brills “opportunity” to get into the school business. The previous owner, whom they described as a “staunch Southerner,” decided to sell a few months after the high court said he could not exclude black children.

At the time, social and legal pressures were already pushing the segregated system into the past. After separation in public schools finally ended in northern Virginia in 1959, some white parents turned to private schools as refuge. But black working couples who needed day care for their children also wanted this private option.

In 1973, Curtis and Sandra McCrary, who worked at a Navy office near the Arlington school, asked to enroll their 3-year-old son. They were told that black children were not admitted.

Joined by another couple who had a similar experience at a nearby private school, they filed a suit in federal court in Alexandria, Va. Their lawyers relied on a civil rights law enacted by Congress in 1866 that gave the newly freed slaves equal legal rights as whites, including the right to “make and enforce contracts.” In 1968, the Supreme Court had revived this largely forgotten statute to rule that a white housing developer in St. Louis could not refuse to offer a contract to a black couple seeking a home. The McCrarys maintained it should also cover admission to a private school.

Response to Suit

In response to the McCrarys’ suit, the school owners, Katheryne and Russell Runyon, contended that as private entrepreneurs, they could close their doors to whomever they chose. They denied, however, that they excluded black children. “No colored had ever applied to the school,” Mrs. Runyon told reporters during the court battle.

U.S. Judge Albert Bryan Jr., who presided over the case, accepted the McCrarys’ argument and awarded them $3,500 in damages.

The Runyons appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, where they were joined by an association of more than 300 private schools. Then-U.S. Solicitor General Robert H. Bork filed a brief on behalf of the McCrarys, arguing that the 1866 law “prohibits all racial discrimination, private as well as public.”

Finally, on June 25, 1976, the Supreme Court settled the matter. On a 7-2 vote, the justices declared that white academies could not discriminate on race.

The ruling was not welcomed everywhere. Former California Gov. Ronald Reagan, campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination in Wyoming, denounced the decision: “How far do we go in this country in interfering with the rights of privacy?” Reagan said in response to the ruling.

He added that he was “personally opposed to segregation,” but believed the courts had no business regulating an entirely private business. “One of the great freedoms we have in America is the freedom to be wrong,” Reagan said.

But in the ensuing years, school integration became accepted and the conflicts in the past largely forgotten.

“Our son studied about the case at college,” Mrs. Brill said. Recently, the Brills found a drawer full of old newspaper clippings on the court battle and mused over them in spare moments.

They said they were stunned when what they considered a historical curiosity suddenly came back into the news, when the justices announced Monday that they would hold a hearing in the fall on whether the case of Runyon vs. McCrary “should be reconsidered.”

The five justices in the majority did not explain their intent, except to say it is “surely no affront to settled jurisprudence to request argument on whether a particular precedent should be modified or overruled.”

Ordered Review

They ordered the review in connection with a suit by a black woman from North Carolina who is seeking damages under the 1866 statute for racial harassment allegedly suffered in her job. Rather than decide whether the law covered this type of harassment, the court chose instead to consider whether the law actually bans any form of private racial discrimination. The five justices represent the court’s new conservative majority, which gained its decisive margin with the recent appointment of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

The Brills said that, regardless of what the court finally decides on the legality of private discrimination, they cannot fathom a return to the old days of all-white schools.

By coincidence, they recently bought a private school a mile away because they needed a second, larger facility to keep up with parents’ demand for the environment they offer. This school, once exclusively white, had fewer children from minority groups.

The Brills’ business philosophy will change that. “Our doors are open to everyone,” Mrs. Brill said. “I can’t imagine turning away a little child because he is black.”