City of Pleasant Grove v. United States

• Decision Date: 03 August 1983
• Docket Number: Civ. A. No. 80-2589.
• Citation: 568 F. Supp. 1455
• Parties: CITY OF PLEASANT GROVE, Plaintiff, v. UNITED STATES of America, Defendant.
• Court: U.S. District Court — District of Columbia

568 F. Supp. 1455

CITY OF PLEASANT GROVE, Plaintiff, v. UNITED STATES of America, Defendant.

Civ. A. No. 80-2589.

United States District Court, District of Columbia.

August 3, 1983.

Donald J. Cronin, Thomas G. Corcoran, Jr., Corcoran, Youngman & Rowe, Washington, D.C., Thomas N. Crawford, Jr., Cooper, Mitch & Crawford, Birmingham, Ala., for plaintiff.

Gerald W. Jones, Paul F. Hancock, Jeremy I. Schwartz, John K. Tanner, U.S. Dept. of Justice, Washington, D.C., for defendant.

Before MacKINNON, Senior Circuit Judge, and ROBINSON and GREENE, District Judges.

MEMORANDUM ORDER

HAROLD H. GREENE, District Judge:

The City of Pleasant Grove, a residential community in Jefferson County, Alabama, brought this action under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, 42 U.S.C. § 1973c, seeking a declaratory judgment that the annexation by the city of certain land¹ did not have "the purpose or effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color." The Attorney General denied preclearance for the annexations because contiguous areas inhabited by blacks which had petitioned for annexation were not annexed by Pleasant Grove.

Presently before the Court is plaintiff's motion for summary judgment.² Plaintiff argues (1) that there is no evidence that the annexations were the product of a purpose to abridge the right of blacks to vote or had such an effect, and (2) that even if a purpose to discriminate could be established, it alone would not sustain the refusal of the Attorney General to clear the annexations.

I

Pleasant Grove has a population of 7,086 people, all of them white.³ Jefferson County as a whole has 671,197 residents, one-third of them black. Other municipalities in west central Jefferson County have substantial black populations,⁴ and there are several unincorporated black communities directly to the south and southeast of Pleasant Grove. Pleasant Grove may thus accurately be described as an all-white enclave in an otherwise racially mixed area of Alabama.

The basic issue here is whether the Voting Rights Act forbids the annexation by Pleasant Grove of areas inhabited or likely to be hereafter inhabited by whites at a time when Pleasant Grove is refusing to annex contiguous areas which are inhabited by blacks. Resolution of this issue demands examination of two subsidiary questions — first, can an intent to discriminate be attributed to Pleasant Grove on the present record, and second, assuming that such an intent exists, is Pleasant Grove prohibited from proceeding with its annexations in the absence of any allegation by the government that the voting power of blacks will be impaired or diluted?

II

The government's evidence, which, for purposes of the motions must be regarded as true,⁵ shows an astounding pattern of racial exclusion and discrimination in all phases of Pleasant Grove life.

As early as in the 1940s, the Pleasant Grove city council acted to prevent the construction of a "colored housing project" within the city and directed the city attorney to draft a zoning ordinance designed to "restrict colored property." The city has thereafter consistently maintained a dual housing market through advertising and marketing directed exclusively to white buyers. In 1978, the city council adopted an exclusionary zoning ordinance which was found by a federal court to have a racially restrictive effect.⁶

Pleasant Grove's annexation policy followed a similar pattern. For example, the city refused to annex the site on which the "black" Woodard School was located in an attempt to avoid school desegregation orders issued by a federal court. See p. 1457 infra. However, shortly after that refusal, the city annexed the Glasgow Addition which is located several miles outside the city limits past a black neighborhood which was not annexed. The city also declined at various times to annex two parcels of land⁷ because of their location adjacent to black areas and the possibility that these areas might, in turn, press for annexation. In 1979, Pleasant Grove began its effort to annex the Western Addition which, together with the Glasgow Addition, is now directly before the Court in this action.⁸ While the Western Addition annexation was taking its course, two black areas (Pleasant Grove Highlands and the Dolomite area) petitioned for annexation. Both were rejected.⁹

Pleasant Grove's discriminatory policies have not been confined to housing, annexations, and zoning.¹⁰

Prior to 1969, Pleasant Grove maintained a rigidly segregated school system: black children living in close proximity to Pleasant Grove were bused elsewhere. When a federal court mandated an end to this system on August 4, 1969,¹¹ the city council voted to secede from the county school system on the very evening of the day the court order was issued.¹² Moreover, although the County is one-third black, Pleasant Grove itself has never had a black employee.¹³

From all of these facts, a court could appropriately draw the inference that the City of Pleasant Grove had and has the purpose to discriminate against blacks with respect to voting as with respect to other subjects. To be sure, the incidents of discrimination do not directly involve voting, nor could they, since there were and are no blacks eligible to vote in Pleasant Grove: all blacks have simply been kept out. Nevertheless, as the Supreme Court has said, the "historical background of a decision is one evidentiary source, particularly if it reveals a series of official actions taken for invidious purposes." Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp., 429 U.S. 252, 267, 97 S.Ct. 555, 564, 50 L.Ed.2d 450 (1977). For that reason, proof of discrimination in a variety of fields may be used as proof in an action charging discrimination in voting. See note 10 supra.

The present record, if unrebutted, would warrant a finding that the City of Pleasant Grove had the purpose, in its annexation decisions, of "denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race...." 42 U.S.C. § 1973c. The next question to be determined is whether such a finding would entitle the United States to judgment in its favor after a trial and, thus, would defeat plaintiff's motions for summary judgment.

III

Pleasant Grove contends most vigorously that, especially in an annexation case, proof of a discriminatory purpose is insufficient; that there must be proof of a discriminatory effect. It further reasons that, since there are no black voters (or persons even arguably eligible to vote) in the city, there could be no proof of a discriminatory effect, and the government's claims must therefore be rejected.

The basis for these arguments is as follows. While according to City of Richmond v. United States, 422 U.S. 358, 95 S.Ct. 2296, 45 L.Ed.2d 245 (1975), annexation constitutes a change in a voting practice or procedure, under that decision an annexation violates the Voting Rights Act if it reduces the proportion of voters of a particular race in the affected locality (or if the minority race has been denied the opportunity to obtain representation reasonably equivalent to its political strength in the enlarged community). It follows, according to plaintiff, that since there are no blacks eligible to vote in Pleasant Grove, the government cannot meet the City of Richmond standard. This conclusion is said to be buttressed by Beer v. United States, 425 U.S. 130, 96 S.Ct. 1357, 47 L.Ed.2d 629 (1976) which held that the Voting Rights Act does not require preclearance for a failure to change a voting practice or procedure (as distinguished from an active alteration of such a practice or procedure). Again, since, with regard to the black areas at issue here, Pleasant Grove has simply failed to annex them, the Beer decision, so the reasoning goes, constitutes a complete defense.

This argument is not persuasive. The City of Richmond case and other, similar annexation decisions discuss the applicable standard in terms of the effect of the annexation on black voters in the annexing community because in those cases there happened to be black voters in that community and hence the annexations did have the effect of reducing their voting power. These cases do not discuss, and hence they do not reject, the application of a purpose test, particularly not in the context of an annexation where, as here, there are no black voters in the annexing municipality.

However, a number of recent decisions make it clear that a discriminatory effect (on blacks already living in a community) is not the only yardstick by which discrimination in violation of the Voting Rights Act may be measured, and that annexation decisions made with a discriminatory purpose — regardless of effect — also constitute violations of the Fifteenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act.

In City of Port Arthur, Texas v. United States, ___ U.S. ___, 103 S.Ct. 530, 535, 74 L.Ed.2d 334 (1982), the Court held that

... even if a particular electoral scheme might otherwise be said to reflect the political strength of the minority community, the plan would nevertheless be invalid if adopted for racially-discriminatory purposes... (emphasis added).¹⁴

The recent case of Lockhart v. United States, ___ U.S. ___, 103 S.Ct. 998, 74 L.Ed.2d 863, further supports this conclusion. The Court there referred with approval to the district court's recognition "that the City must prove both the absence of discriminatory effect and discriminatory purpose ...," id. 103 S.Ct. at 1001, and that "in view of its decision on discriminatory effect, it was unnecessary for the District Court to reach the issue of discriminatory purpose."¹⁵Id. 103 S.Ct. at n. 4.

Indeed, the Supreme Court has described as discriminatory the very fact situation presented by this case. In Perkins v. Matthews, 400 U.S. 379, 388, 91 S.Ct. 431, 437, 27 L.Ed.2d 476 (1971), the Court said,

Clearly, revision of boundary lines has an effect on voting in two ways: (1) by

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