Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1970

Evans v. Abney

396 U.S. 435 | 90 S. Ct. 628 | 24 L. Ed. 2d 634 | 1970 U.S. LEXIS 3133

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Takeaway

In short, Evans v. Abney held that a state may allow a racially restrictive charitable trust to fail and revert to the settlor’s heirs when integration defeats an essential testamentary condition, so long as the result follows neutral state trust law rather than discriminatory state action.

Background

Senator Augustus O. Bacon’s 1911 will devised land and funds to the City of Macon, Georgia, in trust for a public park, Baconsfield. The will required that the park be used exclusively by white people and declared that the property could not be devoted to another purpose. For decades, Macon administered Baconsfield as a public park.

When city officials concluded that they could not constitutionally operate the park on a segregated basis, private trustees were appointed in their place. In Evans v. Newton, the Supreme Court held that Baconsfield retained the character of a public institution and therefore could not be operated on a whites-only basis, even by nominally private trustees.

On remand, Georgia courts held that racial segregation was an indispensable term of Bacon’s charitable plan. They declined to apply cy pres to strike the racial restriction, concluded that the trust’s sole purpose had become impossible, and held that the property reverted by operation of Georgia law to Bacon’s heirs. Black citizens of Macon, joined by the Georgia Attorney General in urging preservation of the park, challenged that result under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether the Fourteenth Amendment required Georgia courts to apply cy pres and preserve Baconsfield as an integrated public park.

Holding

No. The Constitution did not require Georgia courts to reform the trust by deleting its racial restriction.

Reasoning

Georgia’s cy pres doctrine permits a court to carry out a testator’s general charitable intent when the particular method chosen becomes impossible. But the doctrine does not apply when the testator intended only the particular charitable purpose stated and would have preferred the trust to fail rather than be altered.

The Georgia courts reasonably construed Bacon’s will to make racial exclusion essential, rather than incidental, to his plan. Bacon repeatedly specified that the park was solely and perpetually for white residents and stated his belief that the races should remain socially separate. Those provisions supported the state courts’ conclusion that he lacked a broader charitable intent that could be carried out through an integrated park.

Construing a will and determining whether cy pres applies are ordinarily matters of state law. The Fourteenth Amendment did not require Georgia courts to construe Bacon’s intent differently from the way they would construe any other charitable trust merely because the trust’s stated condition was unconstitutional.

Issue #2

Whether terminating the trust and allowing the property to revert to Bacon’s heirs violated equal protection or due process by penalizing compliance with the constitutional duty to desegregate the park.

Holding

No. The termination resulted from a neutral application of Georgia trust law to Bacon’s private testamentary intent, not from unconstitutional state discrimination.

Reasoning

Once Evans v. Newton made continued segregated operation impossible, Georgia law treated the trust’s specific purpose as failed. Under the State’s longstanding resulting-trust rule, property subject to an express trust whose purposes fail reverts to the testator or the testator’s heirs. The will and neutral trust law therefore supplied the basis for the result.

The Court distinguished a case in which a city itself closes a park solely to evade a desegregation order. Here, the Court found no evidence that the Georgia judges acted from racial animus or that the State injected the discriminatory motive. The racial condition instead reflected Bacon’s own views and his preference, as found by the Georgia courts, that the park end rather than be integrated.

The decision also differed from Shelley v. Kraemer. Georgia did not enforce a racial restriction by continuing to exclude Black citizens from the park; it eliminated the park as a public facility. Had the park remained open, both Black and white citizens would have had an equal constitutional right of access, and its closure deprived both groups of that benefit.

The Court rejected the claim that the judges had to resolve any uncertainty about Bacon’s intent in favor of keeping the trust alive. Their only relevant choice was a conventional judicial one: interpreting the will under ordinary state-law principles. A neutral interpretation that ended a benefit for everyone did not itself deny equal protection.

Dissents

Justice Douglas

Reasoning

Justice Douglas argued that reversion to Bacon’s heirs frustrated Bacon’s will at least as much as integration would. Bacon gave the City of Macon all remainders and reversions after the life estates ended and emphatically sought to keep the property dedicated to municipal use rather than alienated. Returning the land to private heirs therefore abandoned, rather than preserved, a central testamentary objective.

In Douglas’s view, cy pres should preserve the land for a municipal park or another municipal purpose. An integrated facility would still serve white citizens as well as Black citizens and would come closer to Bacon’s basic desire for public municipal use than total loss of the property to the city.

Douglas also stressed that Bacon’s racial-separation objective could not reliably be achieved through reversion. Private commercial or residential uses of the land would themselves be subject to constitutional and statutory restraints against racial discrimination. The reversion was thus only a symbolic, state-sanctioned gesture toward segregation and operated as a penalty for compliance with the Constitution.

Justice Brennan

Reasoning

Justice Brennan viewed the case as a direct closure of a public facility solely because it could no longer be operated on a segregated basis. Baconsfield had been publicly owned, publicly administered, and improved with city and federal resources for nearly half a century. But for the constitutional requirement of desegregation, Macon would have retained and operated the park. Under Griffin v. County School Board, he argued, a State may not abandon a public facility for the purpose of avoiding its equal-protection duties.

Brennan rejected the majority’s conclusion that the discriminatory motive was purely private. Macon accepted Bacon’s gift and thereby entered an arrangement under which private interests could compel a reversion if the city fulfilled its constitutional duty. A public body cannot contract away its power and obligation to operate a public park consistently with the Fourteenth Amendment, nor can a reversion enforce such an unconstitutional restraint.

He further concluded that the Georgia courts’ enforcement of the restriction constituted state action under Shelley v. Kraemer. The record did not show that Macon or the park’s white users preferred forfeiture to integration; the Georgia Attorney General affirmatively sought to preserve the park for all citizens. A state court therefore used a privately drafted racial condition to prevent willing persons of different races from sharing a public facility.

Finally, Brennan reasoned that Georgia had specifically encouraged the discriminatory arrangement. State statutes expressly authorized racially restricted public-park trusts, giving racial discrimination a specially protected legal status. Under Reitman v. Mulkey and Justice White’s analysis in Evans v. Newton, that state encouragement made the trust’s racial condition—and the reversion enforced because of it—unconstitutional state action.