Desegregation of Duval County Schools in Jacksonville, Florida

The Duval County school case lasted 41 years, from the December 6, 1960, complaint to the Eleventh Circuit ruling of November 19, 2001.

The U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, in its history of the Jacksonville Division, says the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling initially changed nothing in Jacksonville. In 1962 Judge Bryan Simpson told the Duval County School Board to stop running a segregated system and to submit a plan for system-wide integration, but by 1967 the board had made only small steps. The court supervised the schools' desegregation until May 27, 1999, when a judge ruled that the district had attained unitary status.

The Eleventh Circuit opinion that ended the case describes its length from the bench: forty-one years of litigation, five district court judges, and four earlier reviews by two different circuit courts of appeals before this fifth appeal. Unitary status is the finding that a once segregated system has eliminated the vestiges of segregation by law to the extent practicable, which ends court supervision in Jacksonville and elsewhere.

Braxton was the 1960 federal lawsuit that sought an order to desegregate the Duval County public schools, and it began the court's supervision of the district in 1963.

The Eleventh Circuit records that the original complaint, Braxton v. Board of Public Instruction of Duval County, was filed on December 6, 1960, and sought an injunctive order desegregating the Duval County public schools. In 1963, after finding that the county was operating a de jure dual school system, in which Black and white children were required to attend separate schools, the district court began supervising desegregation.

Jacksonville's civil rights leaders of the period are recognized by the state. The Florida Civil Rights Hall of Fame, run by the Florida Commission on Human Relations, says Jacksonville lawyer Earl M. Johnson was the first African American member of the Jacksonville Bar Association and that his cases helped desegregate schools, parks, water fountains and hospitals in Florida; the Earl M. Johnson Memorial Park in Jacksonville is named for him. Its biography of Rutledge Henry Pearson, a history teacher, says he was elected president of the Jacksonville Branch of the NAACP in 1961 and later of the Florida State Conference, and that Rutledge H. Pearson Elementary School in Jacksonville is named in his honor.

A Florida historical marker erected in 2001 at Monroe and Hogan streets in Hemming Park, describing the 1960 civil rights demonstration downtown, adds that within that decade Duval County public schools began to desegregate.

Busing began in 1971 because the U.S. Supreme Court had just approved mandatory busing as a desegregation remedy, and the Jacksonville federal court then ordered it in the Mims case.

The Eleventh Circuit says that after Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg in 1971 held that mandatory busing was a permissible, and sometimes necessary, remedy, the district court ordered the Duval County School Board to carry out mandatory reassignment of students in Mims v. Duval County School Board. Elementary and junior high schools were clustered into groups and converted to grade centers to produce student bodies with 21 to 34 percent Black students, and students were bused within each cluster. The judgment was affirmed by the Fifth Circuit in 1971 and, amended mainly to fit new schools, governed the parties through the 1970s and well into the 1980s.

The district court history says Eddie Mae Steward sued in the Jacksonville court on June 23, 1971, on behalf of her daughter, asking it to end all segregation in the school system. The court ordered immediate desegregation, with a plan requiring the board to close certain schools, acquire 100 to 250 additional school buses and provide free transportation to any student choosing to transfer. The appeals court notes why busing was hard here: Duval County covers 851 square miles and is divided by a large river and several smaller ones.

The district court declared the Jacksonville system unitary once before, in 1986, but the appeals court sent part of that ruling back in 1989.

According to the 2001 opinion, the district court dissolved the Mims injunction in 1986 after finding that the Duval County system had achieved unitary status. On appeal in 1989, the Eleventh Circuit upheld the finding for extracurricular activities and transportation but held that further efforts were needed in administrative staff, teacher and student assignments.

The busing years had changed the Jacksonville map. During the 19 years of the Mims injunction, every school that had been all Black or all white enrolled substantial numbers of students of the other race for at least a year, and by 1989 only 18 of the 142 schools operating in Duval County were identifiably Black, meaning by the parties' agreement a student body over 75 percent Black.

In 1990 the NAACP and the Duval County School Board agreed to end mass busing and to measure progress by a court-approved agreement built on magnet programs and transfers.

The Eleventh Circuit says both sides had concluded by 1990 that mandatory busing was particularly onerous to Duval County students. Their Stipulation and Agreement was filed on June 18, 1990, and, as corrected, approved by the district court on July 14, 1990; it took effect in the 1991 and 1992 school year. Its Attachment C listed 28 elementary schools expected to become identifiably Black once busing ended, 13 of them formerly all white and 15 formerly all Black, and set a goal of at least 20 percent Black and 45 percent white students at each.

The board had to run magnet programs to draw white students to those Jacksonville schools, recruit students to attend opposite race schools with transportation at no cost, permit majority to minority transfers, and commit $60,000,000 to the renovation, substantial rehabilitation or replacement of core city schools. The court later found that the board spent over $60,000,000 improving existing schools, most of them in inner-city areas. In 1996 the board mailed transfer letters to more than 36,000 parents and received only 332 transfer requests.

A federal judge in Jacksonville declared Duval County unitary on May 27, 1999, and the Eleventh Circuit affirmed on November 19, 2001.

The opinion says that after a three-week evidentiary hearing in 1997, the case was argued on August 24, 1998, and the district court issued a 140-page opinion finding that the board had acted in exceptional good faith, had substantially achieved the agreement's goals and had eliminated the vestiges of de jure segregation to the extent practicable. It declared the Jacksonville district unitary in all respects, vacated all prior injunctions and dismissed the case; the district court history dates that ruling May 27, 1999.

The Jacksonville NAACP appealed, arguing the agreement's goals had not been met. The panel affirmed, with Judge Rosemary Barkett concurring in part and dissenting in part. The opinion's own enrollment table shows the district at 121,667 students, 28 percent Black, in 1969 and 1970, and at 122,743 students, 41 percent Black, in 1998 and 1999.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, against the Eleventh Circuit's November 19, 2001 opinion on the court's website, the Middle District of Florida's Jacksonville Division history, two Florida Civil Rights Hall of Fame biographies and the Florida historical marker record.