Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School Children v. Ann Arbor School District Board, 473 F. Supp. 1371 (E.D. Mich. 1979)

The full published opinion in the Ann Arbor “Black English” case. Eleven Black children at Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School, residents of the Green Road Housing Development, sued under Section 1703(f) of the Equal Educational Opportunity Act. Judge Charles W. Joiner heard expert testimony on the linguistics of Black English, found it “a language system having its genesis among black people,” found that “the unconscious but evident attitude of teachers toward the home language causes a psychological barrier to learning by the student,” and held the School Board in violation of the statute for failing to help its teachers take the home language into account in teaching the children to read standard English. The court ordered the Board to submit a plan within thirty days. The order of August 24, 1979 did NOT approve the plan: the court stated it “is not approving or adopting the plan proposed” but was “declaring that in its judgment under the facts of this case, the plan as modified complies with the law as stated by Congress.” Compliance, not endorsement; the court held its courts-do-not-judge-pedagogy line to the end. The opinion also states plainly that the case was not an effort to require that Black English be taught.

Retrieval note (2026-08-02): the CourtListener capture truncated at 50,278 of 78,346 characters, cutting off mid-way through the August 24 order; the complete order was recovered from ERIC ED183684 (https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED183684.pdf) and both are preserved at reference/docket/sources/. Full text of both parts read.