What Year is this? In Mississippi The Fight For School Desegregation Continues

Over half a century after the landmark Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board, one would hope that the term school segregation would be a vestige of the past. But in the heart of the deep South, the fight to end school segregation is far from a bygone era.

On Thursday, the Department of Justice told the Associated Press that there are currently 32 school districts in Mississippi under federal desegregation orders out of 144 school districts in total. If you’re not a legal scholar, or frankly, even if you are, you might be wondering what that means.

A desegregation order is a plan that has “that has been ordered or submitted into the federal or state court… that remedies or addresses a school district’s actual or alleged segregation of students or staff on the basis of race or national origin.” A school district remains under that plan until “the court, agency or other competent officials finds that the district has satisfied its obligations.”

So in case anyone was curious, it’s not a good sign to be under a desegregation order, and Mississippi is a pretty bad offender. In 2017, the Cleveland, Mississippi, school district was in the spotlight after years of litigation. The school board agreed to end their practice of having one white and one Black school after nearly 50 years of litigation from the DOJ and outside groups.

While it’s worth highlighting Mississippi, it’s certainly not the only place in the nation with a practice of perpetuating racially segregated schools. In fact, as of 2017, roughly 70 percent of all Black Children in the country went to schools that are highly segregated by race, according to the Economic Policy Institute. And a report from the Civil Rights Project in 2021 found that school segregation in New York for Black students was the worst in the nation.

Most school segregation is far less explicit than the standard practice before Brown v. Board and Brown v. Board II., But the Supreme Court has continued to chip away at any tools that could be used to promote school integration.

And at this point, with the exception of some renewed efforts at fixing the problem from the DOJ, it doesn’t look like we’re trending in the right direction.