Ruling Ends Historic Forced Busing Program : Desegregation: Judge nullifies N. Carolina decision that led to efforts nationwide to achieve racial balance in schools.

A court decision that helped launch the contentious era of forced school busing was nullified Friday with a federal judge’s ruling that the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district in North Carolina had done all it could to end segregation.

Although the ruling by U.S. District Judge Robert Potter is not the first to declare a district officially desegregated, the case has been closely watched around the country because of what it symbolizes: the potential close of a chapter in American history.

Friday’s ruling came on behalf of seven white parents who had objected to the district’s use of race as a factor in assigning students to magnet schools. They had asked Potter to declare the schools in the 100,000-student district integrated.

In doing so, Potter ordered an end to the busing of students as a means of reducing segregation. The school system also must stop “assigning children to schools or allocating educational opportunities and benefits through race-based lotteries, preferences, set-asides or other means that deny students an equal footing based on race,” the judge’s 115-page ruling said.

Potter, who as a private attorney had been a leading opponent of Charlotte’s busing plan, said the district was “standing in the schoolhouse door and turning students away from magnet programs based on race.” Deliberate racial segregation is prohibited by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education.

He said the district had a “single-minded focus on racial diversity” that viewed students not as children but as “cogs in a social experimentation machine.”

Clint Bolick, an attorney with the Washington-based Institute for Justice, a conservative legal group, said Potter’s decision means “the nightmare of forced busing is finally coming to an end. Busing has ravaged inner-school districts all across the country.”

Lee Parks, attorney for the plaintiffs, exulted in the victory and said it shows that the social and economic costs of forced busing outweigh its educational benefits. Busing, he said, “has really weakened the foundation of the public school system, which has always been the parents.”

But Gary Orfield, a Harvard University professor who tracks racial segregation in schools, predicted dire effects from Potter’s decision.

“It says that, in the South, if you’ve been desegregated for a long time . . . the courts are going to force you to resegregate,” Orfield said.

School officials have 30 days to decide if they will appeal the ruling, which won’t go into effect until next year, said Leslie Winner, an attorney for the school district.

The ruling comes as civil rights activists are increasingly concerned that school segregation is reemerging. At the same time, courts and other public officials are running out of patience with seemingly endless desegregation programs.

The Charlotte case also demonstrates how dramatically the political and racial dynamics have changed in the nearly three decades since the Supreme Court ruled in 1971 in Swann vs. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education. In that case, the court for the first time authorized the use of mandatory busing, redrawn attendance zones and even quotas to reverse the effect of deliberate racial segregation of schools.

The Supreme Court decision upheld a federal court ruling in 1969 ordering Charlotte to desegregate. That set in motion busing plans across the country, including in Pasadena and Los Angeles. In 1970, Pasadena became the first school district outside the South to be forced to bus students to achieve racial balance. That ruling was rescinded six years later when it was already clear that, because of white flight and segregated housing patterns, school segregation was not deliberate.

Los Angeles was ordered to begin busing students in 1970 by a state court. The state’s Constitution was amended in 1979 to bar courts from using busing to remedy segregation.

At the time the Supreme Court decided the Charlotte case, the district’s enrollment was about 70% white and its leaders had to be taken to court to force them to improve services for blacks. Now the district is about 50% white, and about 20% of the district’s students attend magnet schools, where enrollment is controlled by race.

In addition, attendance zones are drawn so that some students ride buses rather than attend the nearest school. Still, the school district argued that those measures had not erased the harmful vestiges of deliberate racial segregation.

Charlotte Supt. Eric Smith said the current lawsuit, which reopened the Swann case, had divided the district.

The school district hired experts who testified that racial disparities were growing and hurting black students.

The plaintiffs argued that, although that may be true, the school district had done all it could to make sure schools were racially balanced.

Bill Capacchione initiated the lawsuit when his daughter, Cristina, was twice denied admission to the communication magnet program at Olde Providence Elementary School. The family later moved to California and now lives in Torrance, where she attends a public school.

“I really felt that my daughter’s constitutional rights were violated,” Capacchione said in explaining the lawsuit. “I strongly believe that opportunity for people should not be limited by the color of their skin.”

Other U.S. cities have also been freed from court-ordered desegregation plans in recent years, including Cleveland; Denver; Kansas City, Mo.; Jacksonville, Fla.; and Norfolk, Va.

Those cases and others were launched since the nation’s top court ruled in 1991, in a case involving the schools in Oklahoma City, that court orders requiring desegregation were not intended to be permanent. Control of the schools should be returned to local communities under certain conditions, the justices said.

At the time, about 800 school districts, mostly in the South and the Midwest, were still operating under federal court decrees. The U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Civil Rights said Friday that it is involved in desegregation orders in at least 500 school districts. But an unknown number of districts also are operating under orders issued in cases without any federal involvement.

In central Charlotte, the population is largely black; the central city is ringed by integrated neighborhoods, and the outlying parts of the district are predominantly white.

Winner, the school district’s attorney, said that the housing pattern will make it likely that some schools will be segregated and unequal if all students attend the school in their neighborhood. But, she said, the school district could devise a choice system that might aid integration.

“We’ve got our work cut out for us,” Supt. Smith said.

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Times researcher Edith Stanley in Atlanta contributed to this story.