Mississippi Schools Finally Must Desegregate—62 Years After Brown v. Board of Ed

[jimmy olsen]

 Missississippi

http://www.slate.com/blogs/schooled/2016/05/17/justice_department_orders_schools_in_mississippi_town_to_desegregate_decades.html

These Mississippi Schools Finally Must Desegregate—62 Years After Brown v. Board of Education

By Laura Moser

In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education, that "separate but equal" schools violated the Constitution. Sixty-two years later, after a federal court rejected alternate schemes proposed by the school district last week, the U.S. Department of Justice has ordered the tiny Delta town of Cleveland, Mississippi, to desegregate its schools, which have been frozen in a pre-Brown universe—not simply resegregated, like many schools in the country, but never integrated in the first place.

The Justice Department's decision has been a long time coming: It's the latest salvo in a lawsuit that was originally filed by black parents in Cleveland in 1965—a full half-century ago, and just over a decade after Brown.

In a statement released Monday by the Justice Department, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, said, "Six decades after the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education declared that 'separate but equal has no place' in public schools, this decision serves as a reminder to districts that delaying desegregation obligations is both unacceptable and unconstitutional."

As of last year, 359 of the 360 students at Cleveland's East Side High, according to the Hechinger Report, were black; the racial makeup of the historically black D.M. Smith Middle School was similarly lopsided. While the traditionally white middle and high schools are more racially mixed in a town with a student population that's 66 percent black and 30 percent white, the black schools have never had more than a handful of nonwhite students enrolled. Under the Justice Department's plan, the city must combine the middle and high schools for the first time in more than 100 years.

In an era when schools are becoming resegregated not just in the Deep South but all over the country, the "inadequate dual system" in never-integrated Cleveland—where there is an actual railroad track dividing white and black neighborhoods—offers an extreme case. To avoid consolidating the schools, the town of 12,000 has tried magnet programs and International Baccalaureate offerings to attract white students to the black schools, so far without success. After decades of punting, the town finally has to take real action. They've certainly waited long enough.

[Eddie Teach]

the black schools have never had more than a handful of nonwhite students enrolled.

I bet this reporter also blames silly statements like this on her phone. 

[derspiess]

I dated a girl from Cleveland, MS once.  Once.

[Monoriu]

What is meant by "in an era when schools are becoming resegregated"? 

[alfred russel]

Missississippi

Tim Slate

What the article doesn't point out is the school district is only 29% white and the county 32%--this isn't the case of a white voter base segregating the black students into a second tier school. Whites aren't a majority in any of the 11 schools in the district.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/17/us/cleveland-mississippi-school-desegregation/index.html

[Admiral Yi]

Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General

That rolls right off the tongue.

Dorsey beat me to it.  This is not about desegregation.  Blacks and whites are not segregated in Cleveland MS schools.

[CountDeMoney]

the black schools have never had more than a handful of nonwhite students enrolled.

I bet this reporter also blames silly statements like this on her phone. 

lulz, you called it

Correction, May 17: This post originally said that Cleveland's East Side High School and D.M. Smith Middle School have never had more than a handful of nonwhite students enrolled; they have never had more than a handful of nonblack students.

[Camerus]

How often are schools forcibly merged for "desegregation" purposes in the US these days? I remember hearing about forced busing or something like that, but that was back in the 90s.

[LaCroix]

What is meant by "in an era when schools are becoming resegregated"? 

when black communities enter a neighborhood, white community leaves and moves to a white neighborhood. soon, the whole area in the school district is all/mostly black because no/few white families stayed. it's not government sponsored segregation, which was the issue in the past, so it's a matter of how can you regulate the way people naturally move? you can't, so new segregation cases are pretty rare--most schools once involved in state-sponsored segregation policies have since been forcibly desegregated

[Admiral Yi]

Another version is white kids all going to a private school.

[Martinus]

What is meant by "in an era when schools are becoming resegregated"? 

when black communities enter a neighborhood, white community leaves and moves to a white neighborhood. soon, the whole area in the school district is all/mostly black because no/few white families stayed. it's not government sponsored segregation, which was the issue in the past, so it's a matter of how can you regulate the way people naturally move? you can't, so new segregation cases are pretty rare--most schools once involved in state-sponsored segregation policies have since been forcibly desegregated

So in other words, the article is bullshit, right? I mean it's like saying most schools in Kenya are segregated because all schoolchildren are black.

[DGuller]

They would also be perfectly diverse.

[LaCroix]

So in other words, the article is bullshit, right?

that's just what resegregation probably means. I haven't read the federal decision to know what happened. one thing, though, is that resegregation is usually, but not always, in cities/city suburbs, not tiny backwater towns.

[grumbler]

What is meant by "in an era when schools are becoming resegregated"? 

Schoold districs and school assignments are run geographically, so that students (generally) go to the closest schools for their age group.  Since housing in America is segregated geographically (good neighborhoods over here, bad ones over there) and since poverty in a given area is closely tied to "race"/ethnicity, the poorest people tend to go to the same schools.  The US tried the experiment of desegregation by busing students to more distant schools in order to balance out the student bodies by  ethnicity/"race"/whatever,  but it was expensive, unpopular, and insufficiently successful to continue.  Once busing was stopped, schools reverted to their previous, segregated, status (helped, no doubt, in some communities, by the judicious drawing of school boundaries so that more affluent kids didn't get 'stuck" in a majority minority school).

The achievement gap problem probably lies more in the home environment than the school environment, but the differential in school spending per pupil between the richest and poorest school districts plays a role as well.

[grumbler]

So in other words, the article is bullshit, right? I mean it's like saying most schools in Kenya are segregated because all schoolchildren are black.

Pretty much, yes.  The issues in the town were not the issues raised in Brown (which was about legal segregation), they are about issues raised by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which deals more with outcomes than did the Supreme Court decisions).