required to use the seats assigned to them according to race.

As the result of the 1976 California Supreme Court decision in Crawford v. Board of Education, parents and children of all races living in the Los Angeles Unified School District are again asking a similar question: "Is it fair that public school students be forced to give up their seats in the public school nearest their homes to those of another race and move to seats on a bus to be transported to a school many miles farther from home, solely because of their race?"

Like Mrs. Parks, when they fail to submit to the assignment ordered solely because of their race, they and their parents face punishment; and their punishment can go beyond the fine Mrs. Parks received, to include loss of personal liberty for violation of California's compulsory school attendance laws.

The efforts by Mrs. Parks, and those of many people of all races, to end discrimination against blacks were never intended, I submit, to be transformed into the race discrimination which is now occurring in the Los Angeles school district, and is threatened in metropolitan areas throughout California.

This transformation has been caused by the step-by-step judicial assumption of more and more legislative and executive power — mainly by the California judiciary — in a series of cases, as this article will show, which has serious implications for public school children in every state whose judges are tempted to follow the California course....

(Crawford) found that the Los Angeles school district had an obligation under the California Constitution...to take "reasonably feasible" steps to alleviate racial segregation regardless of the cause of such segregation.

"Busing," Crawford says, is "one potential tool which may be utilized to satisfy a school district's constitutional obligation in this field." There have