The Justice Department on Monday ordered the school district in Cleveland, Mississippi, to desegregate, effectively ending a five-decade-long legal battle that has been waged nearly since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The court concluded that "the delay in desegregation has deprived generations of students of the constitutionally-guaranteed right of an integrated education."
The court rejected two proposals put forward by the school district as unconstitutional, and decided that the only way to desegregate was to consolidate Cleveland's high schools and middle schools. But how has segregation gone on so long in the first place in Cleveland? According to The Atlantic:
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]
In their decision Monday, the court noted that, "Although no court order can right these wrongs, it is the duty of the district to ensure that not one more student suffers under this burden."
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