Officials referred to the ongoing desegregation order in Louisiana’s schools as a “historical wrong” and said that other orders that date back to the Civil Rights Movement need to be reevaluated when the Justice Department reversed its decision this week.
According to Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump administration is “getting America refocused on our bright future” as they announced Tuesday that the 1966 legal arrangement with Plaquemines Parish schools will be terminated.
An anonymous source familiar with the matter told us that Trump administration officials in the Justice Department have voiced their desire to pull out of other desegregation orders that they believe place an undue burden on schools.
Decades after the Supreme Court abolished racial segregation in education, dozens of Southern school districts are still bound by court-enforced agreements that mandate integration efforts. While some perceive the continued existence of the court orders as evidence that segregation was never fully abolished, school administrators in Louisiana and elsewhere view them as obsolete and should be erased.
After being given carte blanche by Congress to pursue segregationist schools in the 1960s, the Justice Department launched a flurry of civil rights lawsuits. When districts demonstrate they have eradicated segregation and all of its traces, the restrictions can be rescinded, a practice known as consent decrees.
A long-running integration case has plagued the small Louisiana district.
The Trump administration cited administrative negligence in the Plaquemines case. Although the district in southeast Louisiana’s Mississippi River Delta Basin was determined to have integrated in 1975, the case was ordered to remain under the court’s supervision for an additional year. A court document claims that the record of the case “appears to have been lost to time” since the judge passed away the same year.
The parties are satisfied that the United States’ claims have been fully resolved, given that this case has been stayed for fifty years without any action by the court, the parties, or any third party, according to a joint filing from the Justice Department and the office of Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill.
According to Shelley Ritz, the superintendent of Plaquemines, officials from the Justice Department continued to visit the department annually up until 2023, seeking information on matters such as hiring and disciplinary actions. With a student body of less than four thousand, she said that the paperwork was an unnecessary burden.
The data had to be compiled for hours, she claimed.
Louisiana “got its act together decades ago,” stated Leo Terrell, senior counsel to the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. He said that it is “past time to acknowledge how far we have come” and that the firing rectifies a wrong from the past.
Murrill formally requested that the Justice Department end all other pending school closures in her state. She issued an oath promising to collaborate with educational institutions in Louisiana in an effort to “put the past in the past.”
Opponents of the action argue that it is incorrect. According to Johnathan Smith, a former employee of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under President Joe Biden, the fact that many orders have been only partially executed in the last few decades does not indicate that the problems have been resolved.
That the school system is still segregated is likely what it signifies. According to Smith, who is currently serving as chief of staff and general counsel for the National Center for Youth Law, the majority of these districts are much more divided now than they were in 1954.
Desegregation orders encompass a variety of directives.
According to statistics in a court filing this year, more than 130 school districts are subject to desegregation decrees issued by the Justice Department. Most live in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia; a lesser percentage lives in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. The Education Department has separate desegregation agreements with a few additional districts.
A variety of remedies, such as busing mandates or district policies permitting children from schools with a majority of Black kids to move to schools with a majority of white students, can be included in the orders. School districts and the federal government have agreements in place, but if segregation is detected again, other parties can petition the court to step in.
When the Leeds school district in Alabama ceased providing school lunches in 2020 because to the COVID-19 outbreak, the NAACP cited a consent order. The desegregation order was allegedly violated, according to the civil rights organization, as it disproportionately affected Black children. Meals will be resumed when the district agreed.
The NAACP claimed that a predominantly Black elementary school in Louisiana was unfairly exposing its Black pupils to health concerns, therefore last year the school board there shuttered the institution. The school was located near a petrochemical industry. Following a request filed by the NAACP to invoke a desegregation order that was in place at St. John the Baptist Parish for decades, the board reached the conclusion.
Possible legal problems may arise when cases are closed.
Concerns that the firing would roll back decades of advancement have prompted some to express their disapproval. Many of the districts that were released from court orders had much more pronounced increases in racial segregation, according to the research.
Halley Potter, a senior scholar at The Century Foundation who researches educational inequality, stated, “In very many cases, schools quite rapidly resegregate, and there are new civil rights concerns for students.”
New Orleans-based anti-discrimination law expert Robert Westley argued that lifting the orders would demonstrate that desegregation is not a top concern.
The reversal of course that began a while ago has been fully signaled, according to Westley. Addressing issues of racial discrimination in schools is no longer a priority for the United States government. That was it.
According to Raymond Pierce, president and CEO of the Southern Education Foundation, there would be strong legal resistance to any effort to dismiss further cases.
It shows that a lot of people in the United States don’t care about the chances to get a good education. He said that it showed a lack of concern for the importance of a well-educated workforce in the United States. “And it stands as an affront to legal principles.”