Feds force Mississippi county to desegregate � after 40 years

By Daniel Tencer
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 -- 12:04 pm

Forty years after a Mississippi school district was ordered to desegregate its schools, a federal judge has finally enforced the order.

A US District Court judge in southern Mississippi has ordered the Walthall County school board to stop segregating students by allowing white students to transfer to a predominantly-white school outside of their residence area and by "clustering" white students into separate classrooms in predominantly black schools.

“The district shall cease using race in the assignment of students to classrooms in a manner that results in the racial segregation of students,” Judge Tom S. Lee said in his order, as quoted at the Christian Science Monitor. “The district shall randomly assign students to classrooms at the Tylertown Elementary Schools through the use of a student management software program.”

"More than 55 years after Brown v. Board of Education, it is unacceptable for school districts to act in a way that encourages or tolerates the resegregation of public schools," said Thomas E. Perez, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, in a statement. "We will take action so that school districts subject to federal desegregation orders comply with their obligation to eliminate vestiges of separate black and white schools."

The Justice Department stated:

[T]he district's practice of permitting hundreds of students – the vast majority whom are white – to attend schools outside their assigned residential attendance zone without restriction prompted a disproportionate number of white students to attend a single school in the district, leaving a number of other schools disproportionately black.

Indeed, evidence in the case suggested that the community regarded certain schools in the district as "white schools" or "black schools." The United States also asserted that officials in certain district schools grouped, or "clustered," white students together in particular classrooms, resulting in large numbers of all-black classes at every grade level in those schools.

Under Judge Lee's order, students will only be allowed to transfer schools in cases of “extreme hardship or emergency.”

According to the Washington Post, 64 percent of Walthall County public school students are black, and 35 percent are white.

The remainder of the story can be found at:

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0414/feds-force-county-desegregate-40-years/