Court Orders School District To End Segregation—62 Years After Supreme Court Ruling

If you’ve ever found yourself in a funk because you can’t stop thinking about the injustices produced by institutional racism, you start looking for little victories to hold on to—triumphs that prove hope is worth nurturing. One of those soothing victories might be, “Well, at least Brown v. Board of Education legally enforced integration in schools.” But, somehow, the city of Cleveland, Mississippi has managed to sidestep that legal mandate from 1954 and keep its school system almost entirely segregated along racial lines for the past 62 years.

Until today. The town that wishes time forgot was just ordered by the United States District Court for The Northern District of Mississippi to integrate its schools once and for all. A plan devised by the United States orders that School District Four in Bolivar County will “beginning in the 2016-2017 school year, assign all students in 9th-12th grades to a single comprehensive high school housed in the current Cleveland High and Margaret Green facilities. It also calls for all faculty and staff currently assigned to the two high schools to be re-assigned to the consolidated high school.”

And if you read the 96-page ruling published with the decision, it makes clear that this lack of adherence to the Constitution wasn’t just some 60-year accident. District Four has actively been stalling integration efforts for decades—despite numerous instances of legal intervention—maintaining black schools on the city’s east side and white schools on the west.

If you’re wondering how in the hell this has been allowed to happen, here is a brief history of the bad decisions made by educators in Cleveland, Mississippi.

The first attempt to force District Four to integrate after Brown v. BOE was made in 1965, when 131 black children filed a complaint (through their parents) saying their school system was continuing to enforce segregation practices despite the landmark court case making it unconstitutional 11 years prior. In 1969 a judge ordered the district to integrate populations and “locate any new school and substantially expand any existing schools with the objective of eradicating the vestiges of the dual school system.”

Sixteen years later, in 1985, the courts had to intervene again, because District Four’s efforts to combine populations were wildly insufficient, despite being held to account with annual and quarterly status reports meant to track their “progress.” The court found that 19 years after the initial complaint against District Four’s segregation policies, it was still hiring staff and administrators for schools based on race (white teachers for white schools, black teachers for black schools), building new schools “in areas such that black students continue to attend schools with 100% black enrollments,” and also allowing the schools with black populations to sit in poorer conditions than the white schools.

-Read More here Good.is