Sixty years later, the schools in the district with the highest white enrollment—Forest Park, Jefferson, Pulaski Heights, Roberts, and Terry—are allegedly the only schools where individual computers are distributed to students, according to the lawsuit against the state. By contrast, Washington Elementary, which is just 2 percent white, has bug and rat infestations; Cloverdale Middle School, 3 percent white, has inoperable bathrooms and an inadequate library; Dunbar, 10.5 percent white, has only fake, cardboard keyboards for students to use during a typing class.

Lakesha Smith’s son attended Fair High School, which is one of the schools that the state deemed academically distressed. At Fair, Smith says, teachers didn’t talk about reading or grammar, but rather what brands of clothes they wear. Her son started using grammar she disapproved of, saying things like, “Is you going to take me to the store?” When she visited Fair, there were students walking around in the hallways, cursing. After two years of advocating, she got her son transferred to Central High, the district’s flagship school. Central was a different world, she said. There were Russian and Chinese classes, pep rallies, and computer labs.

From 2004 to 2015, Karen DeJarnette was the director of planning, research, and evaluation in the Little Rock school district, where she was in charge of monitoring black student achievement. In her inspections, she found that some schools, predominantly in the poorer (and minority) parts of town, were plagued with mold and asbestos, had water that dripped through the ceiling, and, sometimes, lacked functioning toilets. Most of the subpar schools were in the east and south parts of town, where test scores were lower, which is no coincidence, she told me. “There was a direct correlation with under or poorly-resourced schools and poor results of students on standardized tests,” she said.

DeJarnette pointed out the disparities in the reports she compiled for the district, but her comments weren’t acknowledged, she said. Instead, according to her, the board and administrators would talk about how badly some schools were performing, without talking about how under-resourced those schools were.

I asked Baker Kurrus, the former Little Rock School District superintendent, how resources were distributed among schools. (Our conversation took place when he was still in office.) He said that funding was based on enrollment, but that some schools get more if their students are struggling. Paying for facilities, though, is population-driven. That’s why, rather than replace Cloverdale, a middle school on the south side of town, Kurrus advocated for building a new middle school in the white, west side of town. The district knows that Cloverdale is struggling; on a district report card, the school received an “F” grade because of the low number of students at proficiency levels. But the west side of town is growing. “The demographics demand a school in that area; it’s a high-growth area,” he told me.

The growth of the outlying areas of Little Rock, then, takes away resources from the center city. But Kurrus and other advocates argue that for the district to remain integrated, it needs to make sure it retains white students. A district with only black students, by definition, can’t be integrated. And white parents will flee if their needs are ignored. The white, west side “is a good chunk of the tax base,” says Bill Kopsky, the head of the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, an advocacy group. “You cut those people off, you cut off your nose to spite your face.”