Further, while the town has acquired a significant number of medium and high intensity mercury vapor street lighting fixtures, every one of them has been installed in white neighborhoods.

[2]Funding for services and infrastructure came not from specially collected fees but from ad valorem taxes levied generally among the town's residents.

[3] Andrew Hawkins, a carpenter,[4] his wife Mary Lou Hawkins, and twenty other black residents of Shaw[5] filed a class-action lawsuit against the mayor and aldermen of Shaw under 42 U.S. Code § 1983 ("Civil action for deprivation of rights"), a statute introduced by the Second Enforcement Act of 1871 which offers legal relief for violation of constitutional rights.

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.

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.

[10]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.

[6] Reviewing the facts, the court found Shaw to be starkly segregated, and the unequal services explicable only in terms of racial discrimination.

[14] The decision left open the issue of unequal provision of services according to wealth and for this reason some commentators doubted its wide applicability.

[15][16] The 1976 Supreme Court case Washington v. Davis limited the principle of Hawkins v. Town of Shaw by holding that racially unequal effect of a law, without racist intent, does not violate the constitution.