Coach-ruling reasoning revealed

• By DAVID J. MITCHELL
• Advocate Florida parishes bureau
• Published: May 2, 2008 - Page: 1B - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Replacing Amite High School’s white head football coach with a passed-over black candidate was necessary to bring “overdue compliance” with previous school desegregation court orders, a federal judge in New Orleans has found.

The Tangipahoa Parish School Board violated those orders when it made a “unilateral decision” to hire the white coach Jan. 23, 2007, under a hiring process that rated the white coach as the top candidate, the judge found in an order signed Wednesday.

On March 19, U.S. District Judge Ivan L.R. Lemelle had found  that the hiring process prematurely used “objective criteria” because the school system did not meet the 40-60, black-to-white hiring ratio required under 1970s-era orders. Those orders called for black coaching candidates to be hired until the ratio was met.

On that basis, in part, Lemelle issued an order calling for then-Istrouma High School head coach Alden Foster, who is black, to replace Amite High coach Mark Vining, who is white. They were the two top-scoring applicants.

Lemelle wrote Wednesday the board’s violation of past orders by hiring Vining necessitates replacing him.

“As part of the antidote to the societal afflictions caused by segregation and discrimination, ‘innocent persons’ may be called upon to ‘share the burden,’” Lemelle wrote, quoting language from a 1976 U.S. Supreme Court case.

And the board cannot circumvent the court’s ability to make that remedy by “simply re-characterizing said relief as reverse discrimination,” he wrote.

Lemelle’s reasoning is part of a 27-page explanation of the school system desegregation case’s long history with coach hirings, the legal underpinnings for his controversial decision and the court’s continuing authority to force new action in once-dormant litigation dating from 1965.

As the case came back to life amid complaints from civil rights activists last year, the records had to be shipped back to U.S. District Court in New Orleans from a Texas court archive.

Lemelle wrote the record contains convincing evidence of prior discrimination and stated the need for court-ordered remedies.

The board has not hired a black head football coach since a previous judge administering the case required one to be hired in 1977, Lemelle noted.

The board at the time had ignored a previous order to hire black coaches, so the court replaced a recently hired white head football coach with a black one and held the board in contempt.

“This Court cannot continue to allow the Tangipahoa (Parish) School Board’s interpretation of ‘all deliberate speed’ to further eschew the attainment of a unitary school system,” Lemelle wrote.