Judge Orders Mississippi Schools to Desegregate

[Flagg]

ABC NEWS (Yes, from 2010)

Segregation in Mississippi Public Schools in 2010?
Federal Judge Orders Mississippi School District to End Policies

By PIERRE THOMAS and JASON RYAN
WASHINGTON, April 14, 2010

A federal judge in Mississippi has ordered a school district in the state to change school attendance policies that he said amount to racial segregation.
The Justice Department had been investigating the Walthall County school district for several years, alleging what it called was a "flagrant violation" of a desegregation court order from 1970.

Federal District Judge Thomas Lee agreed with the Justice Department's claim that the school administration was transferring mostly white students out of district to a "racially identifiable white school," while the enrollment in their home district "has become predominantly black."

Prosecutors charged "that District annually permits over three hundred transfer students -- the vast majority of whom are white to attend Salem Attendance Center even though they reside in the Tylertown attendance zone."

"As a result of these transfers, Salem Attendance Center has allegedly become a racially identifiable white school while the student enrollment of the Tylertown schools has become predominately black," the judge wrote.

The district allegedly also "clustered" students in the individual schools, creating a "disproportionate numbers of white students into designated classrooms" at elementary schools in Tylertown, "resulting in significant numbers of segregated, all-black classrooms at each grade level."

Calls to Danny McCallum, the superintendent of education for Walthall County and Conrad Moore, the lawyer representing the county, were not returned today.

In November 2007, the Justice Department requested information from the school district to determine if it was in compliance with the 1970 desegregation order.

The Justice Department proposed a consent decree to remedy fixes to the school board's practices, but according to a Justice Department brief filed in the case, "on September 8, 2009, the Walthall County School Board rejected the United States' consent decree without proposing an alternative solution or inviting further negotiation."

Justice Department: Unacceptable to Encourage or Tolerate Resegregation

In a statement, Thomas Perez, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division said, "More than 55 years after Brown v. Board of Education, it is unacceptable for school districts to act in a way that encourages or tolerates the resegregation of public schools. We will take action so that school districts subject to federal desegregation orders comply with their obligation to eliminate vestiges of separate black and white schools."
Today's order by District Court Judge Tom S. Lee follows last week's notice by the school district, "that it does not intend to file a response to the United State's Motion for Further Relief."

The judge's order signed today calls for the policy to be reversed and for more oversight and specific guidelines under which student transfers must be approved.

Before the 2007 issue there had been other problems, noting how the district used duplicate bus routes to transport children. Going back to the late 1980s, records show that the school district spent about $54,000 a year running duplicate bus routes to transfer children to different school districts.

Every fucking time there's a story about how fucked up the south is and one of my fellow Confederates by birth gets their panties in a twist I'm linking to this thread.

[Mr Bean]

This is new?
I went to a 45% Black, 55% White high school in the 90's in North Carolina. Despite the fact the school was 45/55 I had classes with exactly one black student during Freshmen year. Given name densities and random assigning you can't have freshmen eight homerooms all somehow end up 100% White + the Asian kids or 100% Black + the Hispanics

Given a Freshmen class of 241 kids, how is it that there are three all white homeroom classes and one mixed(all white+Asians), two all black homerooms an and one mixed(Black+Hispanics) IE whites %(In our school homerooms stayed together, you reported to home room at the start of the day and all 28 kids went to the classes in the same order science->math->elective>english->history-Elective or Math->science->elective-elective-English ->history... you get the idea)

So nine total home rooms and 3 all white + the 2 all black and both mixed homerooms containing the extras. In our case ours had only 25 including every Asian child in the school at my grade. And the other which had every Hispanic child. I was not until showing my yearbook to some friends when I moved to Connecticut a year or two later that one of them asked why all the homerooms were white/black. Something I had never noticed until it was pointed out.

[Darth Wong]

More articles on the same phenomenon.

http://uncpressblog.com/2010/04/14/toda ... d-schools/

School districts–in the South and elsewhere–are under the false impression that desegregation law no longer exists and, as this Mississippi case shows, they may run into serious problems as a result. The Supreme Court has limited the duration of desegregation orders–if they are fully carried out–and allowed school districts to return to neighborhood schools, even though they may be segregated. It has not, however, released all school districts from existing plans and orders, and it has not changed the legal principle that actions which obviously increase segregation can be new violations producing new orders either in an existing case or in a new case. School districts that have quietly taken a number of actions that violate these principles need to clean up their acts or face a real risk that someone else may force them to make changes that are out of their control.

During the Bush years there was no civil rights enforcement to speak of. The Office for Civil Rights and the Justice Department were in the hands of active critics of civil rights law who gave top priority to rolling back its requirements. Though the Obama Administration has taken no dramatic steps in this area, there are now officials who are going to look much more carefully at potential violations.

Most southern school systems desegregated not under court orders but under Office for Civil Rights plans negotiated under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Many of those districts have been unilaterally changing those plans in ways that increase segregation without gaining the permission of federal officials, tacitly assuming that they had the freedom to do that. They do not. They could be required to reverse those actions and take additional steps to make up for the harm they have caused.

If school districts systematically take actions that have the impact of creating segregation and they reject alternatives that would produce integrated schools, they are engaging in the kinds of actions that triggered far-reaching desegregation orders in many northern cities and were found to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the 1973 Denver (Keyes) decision. The Supreme Court has not overruled that decision and it is the law of the land.

I encounter many Keyes violations as I look around the country, and I think the violations may be especially common in the South, where people seem to assume that the civil rights rollback has gone much further than it actually has. If districts are going to go back into court, many will also face questions about what they have done about the exploding population of Latino students, who also have desegregation rights under Keyes–rights which were never acknowledged in most southern desegregation plans. These students are often in highly segregated and unequal schools. If the pattern shows that it was done intentionally or it violates the Keyes standard, that could become another major issue.

The time for sleepwalking through resegregation–which is clearly related to diminished educational success–is over, and school authorities need to take this into account for both legal and educational reasons.

–Gary Orfield
professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and codirector of The Civil Rights Project at UCLA
coeditor of "School Resegregation: Must the South Turn Back?"

And here's a link to a Harper's article from 18 years ago discussing the same phenomenon.

http://www.slaverybyanothername.com/oth ... rn-school/

Fuck the South. And fuck all of the Southern apologists too. They tried to fight desegregation, and when they couldn't beat it head-on, they've been trying to weasel away from it ever since.

[Flagg]

Fuck the South. And fuck all of the Southern apologists too. They tried to fight desegregation, and when they couldn't beat it head-on, they've been trying to weasel away from it ever since.

I'm just kinda surprised because from what I recall, all my classes throughout elementary, jr, and sr high were heavily integrated. It may just have been the area of Florida I lived in, though. But thinking about it for a few minutes, yeah, it makes perfect fucking sense.