Davis v. Board of School Commissioners of Mobile County, case in which the U.S. Supreme Court on April 20, 1971, ruled (9–0) that the desegregation plan for Mobile county, Alabama, did not make use of all possible remedies and that lower courts needed to develop a more realistic plan. Davis was one of numerous cases in which the Supreme Court showed its impatience with inadequate desegregation efforts.
Nearly 10 years after Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) struck down desegregation, the Mobile county school system had failed to implement an effective desegregation plan. In 1963 a lawsuit was filed on behalf of a number of African American students, including Birdie Mae Davis. The case subsequently was involved in protracted legal proceedings as various plans were considered and rejected.
In the late 1960s the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals declared that a plan based on unified geographic zones inadequately eliminated desegregation to achieve a unitary school system. It remanded, and a federal district court then fashioned another plan, which left 18,623, or 60 percent, of the district’s African American students in 19 schools that were all Black or almost all Black.
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