The school desegregation cases are inapposite. Each involved remedies for clearly determined constitutional violations.... Racial classifications thus were designed as remedies for the vindication of constitutional entitlement.... [emphasis added]

The school desegregation cases are inapposite here because the determination of a constitutional violation twenty years ago by the City School District was made in the absence of the claims of individual rights such as are asserted here. Assuming that the plaintiff-class can claim at this late date that its status entitles it to rely upon a residue of such a violation as preventing relief as to these individual claims, such "lingering effects" could not, after twenty years of court-supervised affirmative action, amount to a "clearly determined constitutional violation."

Nor is the continued court-ordered busing of these intervenors justifiable any longer as necessary "to get beyond race." As expressed by Justice Harry A. Blackmun in Bakke, 438 U.S. at 403, "(a)t some time, however, beyond any period of what some would claim is only transitional inequality, the United States must and will reach a stage of maturity when (affirmative) action along this line is no longer necessary." That time, insofar as taking the race of intervenors into account in their school assignments, has been reached here. For the indefinite continuance of the "reverse" discrimination against these intervenors, under facts so different from those when the case was initiated, crosses the line of demarcation from permissible to impermissible affirmative action.

II — B. Protracted Judicial Assignment of Intervening Students on a Racial Basis Infringes Upon Their Liberty and Privacy, in Violation of the Constitution.

Children are not mere creatures of the State. Pierce, 268 U.S. at 535. They are protected by the Constitution from federal authority infringing upon their liberty and privacy. The Due Process Clause of the 5th Amendment provides that no person shall "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." The Warren Court, in construing that clause, pointed out in Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497 at 499