Last week, the Justice Department lifted a school desegregation order in Louisiana, calling its continued existence a “historical wrong” and suggesting that others dating to the Civil Rights Movement should be reconsidered.
Civil rights activists say many orders have been only loosely enforced in recent decades, but that doesn’t mean problems are solved, says Johnathan Smith, who worked in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during the Biden administration.
“It probably means the opposite — that the school district remains segregated. And in fact, most of these districts are now more segregated today than they were in 1954,” says Smith, who is now chief of staff and general counsel for the National Center for Youth Law.
Last year was the 70th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling that separating children in public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional. “It signaled the end legalized racial segregation in the schools of the United States,” says the National Archives in its summary of the ruling.
The ruling was so important in American history and progress that the Archives includes its summary among its Milestone Documents, including the Declaration of Independence, the $7.2 million check for the purchase of Alaska from Russia, Thomas Edison’s patent application for the light bulb, the surrender agreement signed by the German Army 80 years ago today.
Last year, an Associated Press analysis found that while schools in recent decades have grown far more diverse, they are, by some measures, more segregated.
On one hand, the number of African American and white students who go to school almost exclusively with students of the same race is at an all-time low, AP said.
On the other hand, “huge shares of students of color still go to schools with almost no white students. Hispanic segregation is worse now than in the 1960s. The nation’s largest school districts, in particular, have seen a surge in segregation since the 1990s, according to research from Stanford University’s Educational Opportunity Project,” AP said.
More than 130 school systems are under Justice Department desegregation orders, AP says, citing records in a court filing this year. The vast majority are in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi, with smaller numbers in states including Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina. Some other districts continue to be under separate desegregation agreements with the Education Department.
Last week’s Justice Department dismissal has raised alarms among some people who fear it could undo decades of progress. Research on districts that have been released from orders has found that many experienced greater increases in racial segregation than those under court orders, AP says.
“In very many cases, schools quite rapidly resegregate, and there are new civil rights concerns for students,” says Halley Potter, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation who studies educational inequity.