The Department of Justice has lifted a decades-old school desegregation order in Louisiana this week. It overturned the 1966 legal agreement with Plaquemines Parish schools, which required them to integrate Black students. The agreement was put in place two years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which put an official end to segregation laws.
Officials called the 1966 legal agreement a “historical wrong,” according to the Associated Press. It was lifted as part of the Trump administration’s focus on “getting America refocused on our bright future,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said.
Why did the DOJ lift the school desegregation order?
Such agreements were put in place for schools that resisted integration in the 1960s. School districts were able to then prove that they had ended segregation in order to lift the decree.
In the case of the 1966 Plaquemines, the district in the Mississippi River Delta Basin in Louisiana was found to have integrated in 1975 but was put on watch by the court for another year. No changes had been made since.
“Given that this case has been stayed for a half-century with zero action by the court, the parties or any third-party, the parties are satisfied that the United States’ claims have been fully resolved,” the DOJ and the office of Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said in a statement.
Murrill added that she would help Louisiana schools “put the past in the past,” while senior counsel to the DOJ Civil Rights Division Leo Terrell said the state “got its act together decades ago.”
Experts say desegregation orders are essential to this day
“It probably means the opposite — that the school district remains segregated,” who worked in the DOJ Civil Rights Division during the Joe Biden administration, told the Associated Press. “And in fact, most of these districts are now more segregated today than they were in 1954.”
In 2020, the NAACP said that Alabama’s Leeds school district violated its desegregation order when it stopped offering school meals during the COVID-19 pandemic. It said the decision disproportionately affected Black students and meals eventually resumed.
In Louisiana, a school board closed a predominantly Black elementary school last year after the NAACP said it posed a health hazard for being located near a petrochemical facility. The school was closed after invoking a desegregation order.
“In very many cases, schools quite rapidly resegregate, and there are new civil rights concerns for students,” Halley Potter, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, said.
Civil rights activists say it is a step back in the fight against racial discrimination
“It’s really just signaling that the backsliding that has started some time ago is complete,” antidiscrimination law professor at Tulane University Law School in New Orleans, Robert Westley said. “The United States government doesn’t really care anymore of dealing with problems of racial discrimination in the schools. It’s over.”
Over 130 school systems follow desegregation orders, according to the Associated Press. The majority are in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi, while a smaller number of orders can also be found in Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina.
