St. Augustine High School v. Louisiana HS Ath. Ass'n

Decision Date06 July 1967
Docket NumberCiv. A. No. 16341.
Citation270 F. Supp. 767
PartiesST. AUGUSTINE HIGH SCHOOL et al. v. LOUISIANA HIGH SCHOOL ATHLETIC ASSOCIATION et al.
CourtU.S. District Court — Eastern District of Louisiana

John P. Nelson, Jr., Edward H. Booker, Nelson & Nelson, New Orleans, La., for plaintiffs.

Thomas W. McFerrin, McFerrin & Dobson, Baton Rouge, La., for Louisiana High School Athletic Assn.

Jack P. F. Gremillion, Atty. Gen., State of Louisiana, Kenneth C. DeJean, Baton Rouge, La., for Louisiana State Bd. of Education.

HEEBE, District Judge:

I. The Louisiana High School Athletic Association, or LHSAA, was founded in Baton Rouge in October 1920 at a meeting of various high school principals of the state. Its members consisted, until 1962, of Louisiana high schools with all-white student bodies and faculties. The present membership consists of schools formerly all "white"1 although now "integrated" by court orders. The schools are represented by their respective principals, but the LHSAA is, in essence and in reality, an association of schools. Although the LHSAA constitution formerly contained a "white only" clause, that clause was deleted at an executive committee meeting of the Association in 1962. Prior to the summer of 1964, no "Negro" high school had ever applied for membership in the LHSAA.

St. Augustine High School is a senior high school, consisting of grades 8 through 12; it has been approved and accredited by the State of Louisiana since 1957. For the past four or five years St. Augustine has maintained a student body of some 750 students, all of whom have been of the Negro race. There has never been, nor is there now, any white student at St. Augustine. The 30-odd members of the faculty are both white and Negro. St. Augustine is a private school, maintained by the Archdiocese of New Orleans and the Society of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart, a Roman Catholic religious order.

St. Augustine's reputation scholastically in recent years has been quite good — in fact, outstanding. Reverend Robert Grant, the principal of the school for the past seven years, testified that 75 to 80 per cent of the school's graduates go on to college careers, many to such top-prestige schools as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton and Amherst. Grant testified that St. Augustine has had three National Merit Scholars in the last four or five years, and that one of those three was chosen for the award of "Presidential Scholar," the first student so chosen in Louisiana at the beginning of the Presidential Scholar program. Recipients of the latter award are chosen from among the state's 30-odd National Merit Scholars each year; only two or three students in the entire state are cited for this ultimate honor.

The athletic achievement record of St. Augustine is one of the finest in the State of Louisiana. The school offers a complete athletic program to its students and fields teams in the four major sports: football, baseball, basketball and track. Although there has been little competition with all-or nearly all-white schools, no one could dispute that, given the opportunity, St. Augustine would put any high school team in the state to a stern test in a competition in basketball and football. In basketball and track, the only sports in which Negro and white high school varsity teams in Louisiana have had the chance to compete on any basis, St. Augustine has shown that it is the equal of the best "white" schools. Last year, in its second appearance in the annual CYO Tournament in New Orleans, St. Augustine carried off top honors, defeating the teams which went on to finish the season at the very top of the list of high school teams in the LHSAA.

On August 14, 1964, St. Augustine submitted its application for membership to the LHSAA, along with a check for $100.00 representing the dues required for the first year of membership. The application was scheduled to come up for consideration before the executive committee of LHSAA at the annual meeting of the Association in January 1965. However, St. Augustine's application was not considered at that time, for at the 1965 meeting the LHSAA Constitution was amended, drastically changing the procedure for admitting new member schools to the Association. Whereas admission of new members was formerly based wholly on the determination of the 10-man executive committee of LHSAA, the Constitution was changed to require a vote in favor of admission by two-thirds of the total number of member schools present at the annual meeting. In addition — or rather, as a prerequisite to consideration by the total membership at the annual meeting — it was required that a school's application for membership be approved by two-thirds of the schools in the particular district of the LHSAA in which it is to compete.

Pursuant to this change in the procedure, St. Augustine applied to the schools in its district and received there the required two-thirds vote of approval.2 It then submitted its application again to the general membership at the annual meeting in January 1966. At that meeting, 196 member schools cast votes on the issue of St. Augustine's application for membership; the vote was 11 votes in favor of membership and 185 votes against.

Prior to the 1965 meeting, no school except Delgado Trades School, a nonacademic training school in New Orleans, had ever applied for admission to the LHSAA and been refused. At the 1965 meeting no applications for membership were considered in view of the amendment to the LHSAA Constitution, requiring the two-thirds vote of both the district schools and the general membership. During the latter part of 1965, various schools applied to their respective districts and several were turned down or withdrew their applications. However, St. Augustine's application was approved at the district level. Of all those applications approved by the respective districts, none were refused at the LHSAA general assembly meeting in January 1966, other than that of St. Augustine High School.

II. The LHSAA is, for all intents and purposes, an agency of the State of Louisiana and consequently any discrimination by the Association is forbidden by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Although the Fourteenth Amendment recites that "No state shall deny to any person the equal protection of the laws," it is well settled that discrimination by private individuals may amount to "state action" and thus bring such individuals, or private associations, within the limits of the Fourteenth Amendment. This principle of "state action" is well grounded on the obvious fact that the state can act only through individuals; were it not for the fact that acts and omissions of private persons and organizations can be interpreted as "state action," the equal protection clause would have no meaning whatsoever.

There is "state action" where an individual or group is actually an official arm of the state, acting under the laws and regulations of the state, or under orders from higher state officials, with all of the actual authority of the state behind it. Johnson v. State of Virginia, 373 U.S. 61, 83 S.Ct. 1053, 10 L.Ed.2d 195 (1963); Monroe et al. v. Pape et al., 365 U.S. 167, 81 S.Ct. 473, 5 L.Ed.2d 492 (1961). There is "state action" where individual action is forced or commanded by the state. Nixon v. Herndon, 273 U.S. 536, 47 S.Ct. 446, 71 L.Ed. 759 (1926); Peterson v. City of Greenville, 373 U.S. 244, 83 S.Ct. 1119, 10 L.Ed.2d 323 (1963); Lombard v. State of Louisiana, 373 U.S. 267, 83 S.Ct. 1122, 10 L. Ed.2d 338 (1963); Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1, 68 S.Ct. 836, 92 L.Ed. 1161 (1948). There may even be "state action" where private discrimination is encouraged by state policy. Reitman v. Mulkey, 387 U.S. 369, 87 S.Ct. 1627, 18 L.Ed.2d 830 (1967). Certainly these extensions of the "state action" concept are of the most practical necessity, for without them it would be an easy matter for the state to effectively bypass the whole thrust of the Fourteenth Amendment merely by acting indirectly and "unofficially." And certainly the more an individual seeks the shelter of the state's power, the more an individual (or private group) uses state processes and takes advantage of state facilities, the more he associates himself with state officials and agencies acting in their official capacities, the more he uses and relies on state power to achieve his ends, then the more surely he forfeits the immunity from federal censure afforded him by the wording of the Constitution.3

The determination of whether or not an act of discrimination is a state act, an act of the state, "state action," usually involves drawing lines in areas of haze marked only by the uniqueness and force of the particular facts involved in each case.4 But it must be admitted that the more courts find "state action" in cases of distinctly individual action, the more they are flirting with the simple wording of the equal protection clause. Truly a balance must be struck; the total picture must be seen — and not with a view to the "fairness" or the "equities' involved or the wrongs done, but with a view to the strict letter of the Constitutional phrase, and the narrow approach of the Constitution as part of our federal system of government. Certainly where an individual seeks no shelter from the state, and refuses to associate himself with state officials and agencies in the practice of discrimination, there can be no "state action" and no relief under the Fourteenth Amendment.

The LHSAA is composed, according to its Commissioner, Thad H. Waters, of approximately 400 schools, 85 per cent of which are Louisiana public schools, 15 per cent of which are privately owned and operated. Now even if this — the membership situation — were the only factor for our consideration, we would feel compelled to find any action on the part of LHSAA to be "state action." An association such as this is basically the sum of its...

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