When the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in the landmark Brown v Board of Education case, African-Americans won a major victory — they could no longer be segregated in their own schools. Racial integration had to take place — and the courts showed increasing impatience with small-scale efforts to achieve it. In the northern states districts set up busing programs to achieve racial parity, while in the South things largely persisted as they were.

On this day, April 20, in 1971 the Supreme Court expanded on its Brown decision in the case of Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education. The case was brought by the NAACP on behalf of nine-year-old James Swann and nine other families, who were attending mostly black schools in central Charlotte, in spite of the Brown mandate.

The Supreme Court affirmed its Brown decision that schools were mandated to achieve integration, but said that integration did not need to reflect the city’s racial mix. Schools just needed to show the racial makeup was not due to segregation. Most importantly, the court ruled that busing was an acceptable way to achieve the integration.