Department of Justice rules schools in Cleveland, Mississippi, required to desegregate

Cleveland’s epic legal case began in 1965, when a group of black parents sued to stop the district from maintaining segregated schools. In the summer of 1969, the court ordered Cleveland to cease discriminating on the basis of race and eliminate the effects of the "dual school system." Though the plaintiffs won the legal victory — and black students were allowed to enroll in the all-white Cleveland High for the first time that September — roughly 1,000 white locals gathered in the streets to show their opposition to integration, and local leaders vowed to fight it.Fight they have: For the past half-century Cleveland has carried on with two sets of schools with wildly different demographics. While East Side and D.M. Smith are almost uniformly black, Cleveland High and Margaret Green Junior High, the historically white high school and middle school, have nearly even black-white splits. As a result, Cleveland has some of the most integrated — and some of the most segregated — public schools in the region. [The Atlantic]