The decision in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education has come to be recognized as a most important moment in this country's history. Chief Justice Earl Warren realized the importance of the decision and made a successful effort to secure the unanimity of all the other justices in its wording. Thus began a policy of seeking unanimity in succeeding high court "desegregation" opinions emanating from Brown. These decisions, however, went beyond Brown's order to discontinue segregation in public schools, which had been accomplished by mandatory school assignments on the basis of race.

When Green authorized "desegregation" in 1968 in a rural area by the trial courts by same means of mandatory racial assignments used earlier in segregating students, the court spoke with one voice without even the explication that such a "drastic extension of Brown" deserved. When such "reverse" discriminatory action in urban areas in 1971 was approved by the Swann Court, complaints such as Justice Hugo Black raised at oral argument — to the judicial power to rearrange the lives of people who chose to live near schools by busing their student-children elsewhere — were not taken notice of in the interest of unanimity.

There was no break in the unanimity policy until 1972 when there was a dissent to a busing order in Keyes by Chief Justice (then- Justice) William H. Rehnquist, reminiscent of the dissent of Justice John Marshall Harlan in the Plessy case, which was overruled by Brown, that our color-blind Constitution did not permit seating assignments in a public facility solely on the basis of race:

The drastic extension of Brown which Green represented was barely, if at all, explicated in the latter opinion. To require that a genuinely "dual" system be disestablished, in the sense that the assignment of a child to a particular school is not made to depend on his race is one thing. To require that school boards affirmatively undertake to achieve racial mixing in schools where such