them equal protection under the law. Among the lawyers for the plaintiffs from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund was Jack Greenberg, part of the team that brought Brown v. Board of Education to the Supreme Court in 1954. District Court decision The United States District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi ruled, in favor of the defendants, to dismiss the complaint. The District Court determined that the government of Shaw in its advancement of municipal services had acted conservatively and reasonably, based on principles of public interest rather than discrimination based on race (and that furthermore even the extent of de facto discrimination was in doubt): Plaintiffs have compiled certain statistics which they claim support a charge that defendants and their predecessors in office have racially classified the black and white neighborhoods by providing better or more complete facilities to the latter neighborhoods, but they would ignore all legitimate deductions to be made from the evidence running counter to statistical racial disparity. But we do not understand that a court may adopt that manner of reasoning. If actions of public officials are shown to have rested upon rational considerations, irrespective of race or poverty, they are not within the condemnation of the Fourteenth Amendment, and may not be properly condemned upon judicial review. Persons or groups who are treated differently must be shown to be similarly situated and their unequal treatment demonstrated to be without any rational basis or based upon an invidious factor such as race. Residential racial segregation was not a severe problem in the eyes of the District Court, which in its summary of the facts wrote: There are various patterns of residential neighborhoods in the town. In some instances white and Negro residents live on the same streets, yet in other instances, particularly in the oldest and newest subdivisions, there are separate white and Negro neighborhoods. A significant portion of the Negro population resides in the town's peripheral or outer area, with substantial numbers of white people residing near the town's business or commercial center. Appeals Court reversal A panel of the Appeals Court on January 23, 1971, found that Shaw had failed to demonstrate a compelling interest in its unequal infrastructural development. Reviewing the facts, the court found Shaw to be starkly segregated, and the unequal services explicable only in terms of racial discrimination. The majority decision, written by judge Elbert Tuttle