Julius Chambers, the Bombs, and the Bus
Near Charlotte, North Carolina
In nineteen sixty-four, Darius Swann, a theology professor at Johnson C. Smith University, tried to enroll his six-year-old son James in the neighborhood elementary school closest to their home. It was a predominantly white school. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education sent James home with a note telling him he must first attend the all-Black school assigned to his address.
Swann was chosen by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund as a test plaintiff partly because his professional status made him less economically vulnerable to local retaliation. His family's case was combined with nine other families and filed as a class action. The young attorney who took it was Julius Chambers, a Black lawyer trained at the University of North Carolina and Columbia Law School.
The retaliation was not slow. Someone bombed Chambers' home. Someone bombed his car. Someone bombed his law office. Chambers kept working.
In nineteen sixty-nine, Federal District Judge James McMillan issued a desegregation plan for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system that went far beyond what the district was willing to accept. The district appealed. The case reached the Supreme Court of the United States, which heard arguments in October nineteen seventy.
On April twentieth, nineteen seventy-one, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously. Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote the opinion. The court held that busing, transporting students across school district boundaries to achieve racial balance, was a constitutionally permissible remedy for segregation. Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg was the last unanimous Supreme Court ruling on school desegregation.
The decision reshaped public education across the entire country. Charlotte itself became a national model for school integration through the nineteen seventies. Dozens of other cities implemented busing programs citing Swann. The case began because a six-year-old boy was sent home from a school that was four blocks from his house, and ended with the law of the land changing.
