Poindexter v. Louisiana Financial Assistance Commission

• Citation: 275 F. Supp. 833
• Decision Date: 15 January 1968
• Docket Number: Civ. A. No. 14683.
• Parties: Bryan POINDEXTER, a minor, by Lorraine Poindexter, his mother and next friend et al., Plaintiffs, v. LOUISIANA FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE COMMISSION et al., Defendants.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Eastern District of Louisiana

275 F. Supp. 833

Bryan POINDEXTER, a minor, by Lorraine Poindexter, his mother and next friend et al., Plaintiffs, v. LOUISIANA FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE COMMISSION et al., Defendants.

Civ. A. No. 14683.

United States District Court E. D. Louisiana, New Orleans Division.

August 26, 1967.

Judgment Affirmed January 15, 1968.

A. P. Tureaud, A. M. Trudeau, Jr., New Orleans, La., Jack Greenberg, Henry M. Aronson, New York City, for plaintiffs.

Hugh W. Fleischer, Ray Terry, J. Harold Flannery, U. S. Dept. of Justice, for plaintiff-intervenor.

Victor A. Sachse, Baton Rouge, La., J. J. Davidson, Jr., Lafayette, Sidney W. Provensal, Jr., New Orleans, La., for La. Financial Assistance Comm., E. W. Gravolet, Jr., Jas. R. Leake, Jas. D. Fontain and Lantz Womack.

Frank L. Dobson, Baton Rouge, La., for Louisiana State Bd. of Education.

Walter E. Doane, New Orleans, La., for Ninth Ward Elementary School and Armond J. Duvio, and Carrollton Elementary School Association.

Sydney J. Parlongue, New Orleans, La., for Garden District Academy.

Cy Courtney, New Orleans, La., Richard Cadwallader, Baton Rouge, La., for Mrs. Thelma Deamer, Carroll Leach, Rosetta Jiles and Mrs. Fannie Magee defendant-intervenors.

Before WISDOM and AINSWORTH, Circuit Judges, and CHRISTENBERRY, District Judge.

Judgment Affirmed January 15, 1968. See 88 S.Ct. 693.

WISDOM, Circuit Judge:

This class action by Negro schoolchildren and their parents against the Louisiana Financial Assistance Commission and others¹ attacks the constitutionality of Act 147 of 1962.² Under that law the Commission administers a program of tuition grants to pupils attending private schools in Louisiana. The United States intervened as a party plaintiff;³ directors of four private schools for Negro retarded children intervened as parties defendant.⁴

In an earlier opinion in this case the court disposed of various motions, including the defendants' motion to dismiss for lack of the plaintiffs' standing to sue and a motion to dissolve the three-judge court. Poindexter v. Louisiana Financial Assistance Commission, E.D.La.1966, 258 F.Supp. 158. The matter is now before us on the merits.⁵

* * *

The free lunches and textbooks Louisiana provides for all its school children are the fruits of racially neutral benevolence. Tuition grants are not the products of such a policy. They are the fruits of the State's traditional racially biased policy of providing segregated schools for white pupils. Here that policy has pushed the State to the extreme of using public funds to aid private discrimination endangering the public school system and equal educational opportunities for Negroes in Louisiana.

As certainly as "12" is the next number of a series starting 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, Act 147 fitted into the long series of statutes the Louisiana legislature enacted for over a hundred years to maintain segregated schools for white children.⁶ After the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in the School Segregation Cases,⁷ the legislature rapidly expanded the series. As fast as the courts knocked out one school law, the legislature enacted another. Each of these laws, whether its objective was obvious⁸ or nonobvious, was designed to provide a state-supported sanctuary for white children in flight from desegregated public schools.

Act 147 of 1962 is unconstitutional. The purpose and natural or reasonable effect of this law are to continue segregated education in Louisiana by providing state funds for the establishment and support of segregated, privately operated schools for white children. The United States Constitution does not permit the State to perform acts indirectly through private persons which it is forbidden to do directly. The evidence before the Court shows that the tuition grants have supplied a heavy predominance of funds needed to establish and maintain post-1954 and especially post-1962 private segregated schools. The Commission's recent decision to reduce its aid to less than 50 per cent of the funds required for operating a school fails to take the curse off the Act. Any affirmative and purposeful state aid promoting private discrimination violates the equal protection clause. There is no such thing as the State's legitimately being just a little bit discriminatory.

I. The Statute

Act 147 of 1962 (LSA-R.S. 17:2951-17:2953) authorizes state tuition grants for children attending "private non-sectarian elementary or secondary schools" in Louisiana. The statute creates the Louisiana Financial Assistance Commission to administer the program. The Commission is composed of three members appointed by the governor.⁹ Payments are "by check to the parent or guardian of, or the person standing in loco parentis to, the applicant." The statute is tied in with the public school system in the sense that to receive a grant, the applicants must be "eligible * * * for admission to elementary or secondary schools within the public school system of the state." Applicants must furnish "satisfactory evidence of admissibility to a private non-sectarian * * * school * * * legally constituted and operated under constitution and laws of the state." As thus far administered, each grant amounts to two dollars a day based on an assumed school term of 180 days, or $360, but limited to an amount not to exceed the tuition obligation actually incurred by the applicant.

In 1961 the Legislature transferred 2.5 million dollars from the Public Welfare Fund to the Education Expense Grant Fund to maintain tuition grants.¹⁰ Act 147 authorized the monthly transfer of $200,000 from the Education Expense Grant Fund, supported by sales tax deductions, to a fund to be administered by the Commission. In 1963 the Legislature increased this amount to $300,000 a month.¹¹

October 29, 1966, the Commission adopted a resolution stating, in part:

"The Commission has concluded that, except with respect to applicants on behalf of children attending private schools for retarded children, it will not pay tuition grants to applicants whose children attend any private school predominantly maintained through such tuition grants. In order to avoid unnecessary disruption of the present classes with consequent injury to the students, this policy shall be effective for school sessions commencing after June 1967."

The resolution was adopted to meet the holding in Griffin v. State Board of Education, E.D.Va.1965, 239 F.Supp. 560 (unappealed) and the definition of "public school" in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.¹² Griffin held that state tuition grants are an unconstitutional application of a grant-in-aid law and discriminatory state action only when they "predominantly maintain" a segregated school. For purposes of Title IV (Public Education), the Civil Rights Act of 1964, § 401(c), defines "public school" as an institution "operated wholly or predominantly from or through the use of government funds or property."¹³ The Commission construes the resolution as authorizing payments to applicants attending a school supported by tuition grants which amount to any sum less than fifty per cent of the school's annual operating costs.

II. Purpose and Motive

We are not unmindful of the distinction courts draw between "purpose" and "motive". We accept the first Justice Harlan's statement, quoted by the defendants: "In a legal sense the object or purpose of legislation is to be determined by its natural and reasonable effect, whatever may have been the motive of the legislature".¹⁴

Recognition of the distinction between purpose and motive does not prohibits courts from looking beyond the face of the statute. As we said in Hall v. St. Helena, E.D.La.1961, 197 F.Supp. 649, aff'd 368 U.S. 515, 82 S.Ct. 529, 7 L.Ed.2d 521, in holding unconstitutional an earlier version of Louisiana's grant-in-aid system:

Irrespective of the terms of a statute, particularly in the area of racial discrimination, courts must determine its purpose as well as its substance and effect. * * * "Acts generally lawful may become unlawful when done to accomplish an unlawful end." Western Union Tel. Co. v. Foster, 247 U.S. 105, 115, 38 S.Ct. 438, 62 L.Ed. 1006.

See also the discussion in United States v. State of Louisiana, E.D.La., 225 F. Supp. 353, 361-363. In that case we considered the constitutionality of the Louisiana "understanding" or "interpretation" test as a requirement for registration to vote. We said, "Purpose carries the meaning of Coke's `true reason' for the law in the light of the situation at which it is aimed."¹⁵ We quoted from a well known lecture by Mr. Justice Frankfurter:

Laws are not abstract propositions. They are expressions of policy arising out of specific situations and addressed to the attainment of particular ends. * * * And the bottom problem is: What is below the surface of the words and yet fairly a part of them?¹⁶

In the Louisiana Constitutional Convention of 1921 the bottom problem in devising registration provisions was, how to draft registration requirements that would appear to be neutral but would have the necessary effect of keeping any large number of Negroes from voting; the "grandfather" clause had been declared unconstitutional.¹⁷ The Convention's solution was to bring out of limbo the "understanding" or "interpretation" test¹⁸ which the Constitutional Convention of 1898 had considered but rejected in favor of the "grandfather" clause.

There is no doubt that here the bottom problem, the situation at which Act 147 is aimed, is the desegregation of the public schools. The same problem had confronted other sessions of the legislature. Since 1958 the Louisiana legislative solution has been to offer the alternative of so-called "private" schools supported by state tuition grants. Public expressions by the legislators on the subject may or may not reveal the motives that actuated their vote. The Court is not interested in their motives. The Court is interested in their public expressions indicative of the legislative purpose, as the...