05.17.16

By: Christine Hauser
Source: New York Times

Mississippi District Ordered to Desegregate Its Schools

A federal court has ordered a town in Mississippi to desegregate its high schools and middle schools, ending a five-decade legal battle over integrating black and white students.

The ruling by the United States District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi, made Friday but announced Monday, means the middle and high school programs in the Cleveland School District, in the western part of the state, will be combined for the first time in their century-long history.

In her decision, Judge Debra M. Brown said, “Although no court order can right these wrongs, it is the duty of the district to ensure that not one more student suffers under this burden.”

Judge Brown rejected two alternatives proposed by the district as unconstitutional and ordered it to adopt a Justice Department desegregation plan, and to provide a timeline for doing so.

The head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, Vanita Gupta, said in a statement Monday, “This victory creates new opportunities for the children of Cleveland to learn, play and thrive together.”

School officials could not immediately be reached for comment on Tuesday. But a statement on the Cleveland School District’s website Tuesday said it was examining the decision and “considering its options for appeal.”

Government data released Tuesday suggested that segregation was creeping back in some school districts, with poor, black and Hispanic students increasingly isolated from white peers.

The report, by the Government Accountability Office, showed that 16 percent of public schools had high proportions of poor and black or Hispanic students in the 2013-14 school year, up from 9 percent in 2000-01.

It said 75 to 100 percent of those students were eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, a commonly used indicator of poverty. The schools offered fewer math, science and college preparatory courses and had higher rates of students held back in ninth grade, suspended or expelled.

Representative Robert C. Scott, Democrat of Virginia, who requested the G.A.O. report in 2014 with Representative John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, said in a statement that it confirmed that the nation’s schools were still largely segregated by race and class.

“What’s more troubling is that segregation in public K-12 schools isn’t getting better; it’s getting worse, and getting worse quickly, with more than 20 million students of color now attending racially and socioeconomically isolated public schools,” Mr. Scott said in a statement.

The Mississippi case began with an action filed on July 24, 1965, on behalf of 131 children. The suit accused the Bolivar County Board of Education and some of its members of operating public schools on a racially segregated basis. The Cleveland School District is part of Bolivar County.

A Justice Department motion filed in 2011 illustrated the inequities between the poor and well-off in Cleveland, a Mississippi Delta town with a population of about 12,000. Before 1969, schools on the west side of the railroad tracks that run through Cleveland were white and segregated by law. Schools on the east side of the tracks were originally black.

“More than 40 years later, these schools maintain their character and reputation as white schools, with a student body and faculty that are disproportionately white,” the department said.

The court ruled that the district must consolidate the virtually all-black D. M. Smith Middle School with the historically white Margaret Green Junior High School. It must also consolidate the mostly black East Side High School with the historically white Cleveland High School, and review educational programs to identify new ones for the consolidation.

The decision came six decades after the United States Supreme Court declared in Brown v. Board of Education that “separate but equal has no place” in public schools. But on the 62nd anniversary of that decision, which was Tuesday, it is still struggling to take hold.

Segregation is not just a characteristic of Southern states. Some of the most severely segregated conditions for Latino and African-American students occur in New York, Maryland and Illinois, the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a report on Monday.

Sixty-five percent of New York’s black students attend overwhelmingly nonwhite schools, compared with 45 percent in Mississippi, the report shows.

Erica Frankenberg, an author of the report, said in a telephone interview that, decades after the Brown decision, some school districts had lagged in ending segregation because doing so requires separate legal challenges to policies that are enforced and enacted at the local and state levels.

Factors such as school board decisions, political opposition and discriminatory housing policies can hinder progress in districts, Ms. Frankenberg said.

“It is asking the perpetrators of segregation to be in charge of fixing the segregation,” she said. She added that she believed there were several hundred legal school desegregation cases nationwide.

The Justice Department is still monitoring and enforcing 178 open federal desegregation court cases, many originating 30 or 40 years ago, the G.A.O. report noted.