The Legal Basis for Segregated Schools in Maryland

Abstract

A survey of the problem of the legal basis for the segregation of the different races in Maryland public schools and other state institutions of learning requires an investigation of many sources. These include the decisions of the Court of Appealsof Maryland, which is the State's highest court; and those of all three levels of the United States or Federal courts, which are the District or trial courts, the intermediate Circuit Courts of Appeal,* and the highest one, the Supreme Court of the United States. Both State and Federal constitutions must be consulted; and inquiry is necessary into legislation, including not only state-wide legislation found in the Annotated Code of Public General Laws, but also local legislation for the respective counties, city ordinances, regulations of school -boards, bond issue legislation, and the biennial state budgets enacted by the legislature. The readers of this are familiar with the fairly recent Maryland Court of Appeals case of University of Maryland v. Murray, decided about a decade ago. In this case the University was forced by mandamus proceedings to admit to its Law School persons of all races, lacking any provision for separate or segregated treatment of persons of different races. Under this ruling at the present time some twenty persons are now studying law who could otherwise have been excluded. Because of this familiar ruling, first attention will be given herein to this and other cases which, more or les recently, in the Maryland and Federal courts have indicated that the courts are zealous to guarantee freedom of opportunity to all by carefully scrutinizing state action in denying equal use of the same facilities to members of all races. The essential theme of these cases is that unless the State provides equal and separate accommodations for different races, it must admit all to the sole facilities it may have provided. A subsidiary-theme concerns the actual equality of separate facilities if allegedly provided. These cases, of course, assume that a state has the constitutional power to provide separate facilities if they are truly equal in scope. Beyond that, the main theme of this paper will be to scrutinize the extant legal materials of Maryland to see what is the true legal basis therein of the segregation of the races in the public schools, to. the extent to which it is actually practiced; to inquire whether that segregation is compulsory or optional under present law; and to note the amendment or repeal of what laws would make the segregation policy more certainly optional or perhaps even terminate it. If the latter were so then the equal use of all facilities by the same races would be mandatory. After discussion of the case law of the subject will come, in that order, a treatment of the constitutional provisions, of the local legislation for the