On April 20, 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education that busing students was a constitutionally permissible method to achieve racial integration in public schools. The decision upheld a North Carolina district court’s plan to use busing and redistricting as tools to dismantle de facto segregation. This landmark ruling reinforced the federal government’s role in enforcing desegregation, nearly 17 years after Brown v. Board of Education. Though controversial, it marked a turning point in civil rights law and set a precedent for similar actions across the country in the 1970s.
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