Editing Byron White (section)

===Civil rights===
[[File:Virginia Thomas.JPG|thumb|upright=1.05|White swears in Justice [[Clarence Thomas]] as Thomas' wife, [[Virginia Lamp Thomas|Virginia Lamp]], looks on (1991)]]
White consistently supported the Court's post-''[[Brown v. Board of Education]]'' attempts to fully [[school integration in the United States|desegregate public schools]], even through the controversial line of forced busing cases.<ref>(See ''[[Milliken v. Bradley]]'' (White, J., dissenting)).</ref> He voted to uphold [[affirmative action]] remedies to racial inequality in an education setting in the famous ''[[Regents of the University of California v. Bakke]]'' case of 1978. Though White voted to uphold federal affirmative action programs in cases such as ''[[Metro Broadcasting, Inc. v. FCC]]'', 497 U.S. 547 (1990) (later overruled by ''[[Adarand Constructors v. Peña]]'', 515 U.S. 200 (1995)), he voted to strike down an affirmative action plan regarding state contracts in ''[[City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co.|Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co.]]'' (1989).

White dissented in ''[[Runyon v. McCrary]]'' (1976), which held that federal law prohibited [[private school]]s from discriminating on the basis of race. He argued that the legislative history of 42 U.S.C. § 1981 (popularly known as the "[[Ku Klux Klan]] Act") indicated that the Act was not designed to prohibit private racial discrimination but only state-sponsored racial discrimination (as had been held in the ''[[Civil Rights Cases]]'' of 1883). White was concerned about the potential far-reaching impact of holding private racial discrimination illegal, which if taken to its logical conclusion might ban many varied forms of voluntary self-segregation, including social and advocacy groups that limited their membership to blacks:<ref>See Runyon, 427 U.S. 160, 212 (White, J., dissenting)</ref> "Whether such conduct should be condoned or not, whites and blacks will undoubtedly choose to form a variety of associational relationships pursuant to contracts which exclude members of the other race. Social clubs, black and white, and associations designed to further the interests of blacks or whites are but two examples". ''Runyon'' was essentially overruled by 1989's ''Patterson v. McLean Credit Union'', which itself was superseded by the [[Civil Rights Act of 1991]].