While on Facebook today, I came across an article titled “After
50-Year Legal Struggle, Mississippi School District Ordered To Desegregate”,
and I wanted to share it with you guys as my bonus material. As we discussed in class, in May of 1954,
the U.S. Supreme Court declared that segregated schools were unconstitutional
because “separate schools are inherently unequal”, and violate the "equal
protection clause" of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. According to the article, fifty years after
the court’s ruling in Brown v Board of Education, the Cleveland, Mississippi,
school district has yet to integrate.
The district was first taken to court for failure to integrate in 1965. In 1989 the school district again was taken
to court for failure to integrate.
Fifteen years later the school again were in court for failure to segregate,
and then again in 2011. In the latest case,
the school district argued that “forcing integration by merging would cause
white families to turn to private schools, causing a drop in enrollment”, but
this argument meant nothing to the court who wants both of the high schools in
the district to be merged into a single school with around 1,000 students, and
to also combine middle schools.
The thing I found most shocking out of everything I read in
the article was that this school district is far from being the only school
district to fail to integrate. As recently as 2014, the U.S. Justice Department
was a plaintiff in 43 similar lawsuits in the state of Mississippi alone. It is crazy that fifty years after Brown v.
Board of Education that we still have segregated schools. As Judge Debra Brown wrote “The delay in
segregation has deprived generations of students of the
constitutionally-guaranteed right of an integrated education”. All children deserve the right to a quality
education no matter what side of the rail tracks they live on (A railroad track
runs through Cleveland Mississippi and African Americans live on the east side
of the tracks; white people live on the west side) or what color their skin
is. I am glad that the government has
continued to track the Cleveland Mississippi school district (as well as other
school districts who have had failures to integrate). Hopefully this will be the last time the
school district ends up in court for failure to integrate.
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