What did the federal courts decide in related cases?
In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court declared de jure school segregation unconstitutional, but the Court’s order to desegregate applied only to the school districts that were part of the four suits encompassed by Brown. The decision established a precedent, however, to which states needed to conform through voluntary desegregation or be subject to suits asking the federal courts to enforce desegregation. Although some school districts desegregated after the Brown decision without a specific court order requiring them to do so, most southern school desegregation took place as a result of a federal court ordering a school district to comply with the Brown decision. During the five years after the Brown decision, a few federal courts, mostly in the upper South and in Texas, issued orders requiring desegregation, but many of these orders were not immediately enforced. Similarly, although Judge Wright found the New Orleans schools unconstitutionally segregated in February 1956,
