A judge for the US District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi [official website] on Friday ordered [opinion, PDF] a school district to desegregate its schools. Judge Debra Brown ordered the Cleveland School District [official website] to consolidate its high schools and middle schools after rejecting as unconstitutional two alternatives proposed by the district. In her 96-page opinion, Brown wrote:

Nearly fifty years ago, the United States Supreme Court announced that “[t]he haltingly slow days of all deliberate speed have given way to the mandated duty to immediately desegregate.” … In the decades since this pronouncement, the District has failed to meet this obligation as it concerns the high schools and middle schools in Cleveland, Mississippi. This failure, whether born of good faith, bad faith, or some combination of the two, has placed Cleveland in the unenviable position of operating under a desegregation order long after schools in bastions of segregation like Boston, Jackson, and Mobile have been declared unitary. More important, and of far greater harm, the delay in desegregation has deprived generations of students of the constitutionally-guaranteed right of an integrated education. 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.

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) [official website] welcomed the ruling [press release], with Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta, head of the Civil Rights Division, stating, “[t]his victory creates new opportunities for the children of Cleveland to learn, play and thrive together.”

In 2010 a federal judge ordered [JURIST report] a southern Mississippi school district to end its practice of allowing students to transfer from their assigned schools and classroom groupings, resulting in a segregated school system. The DOJ initially brought a lawsuit to enforce a 1970 order against the Walthall County School District [official website] that prohibited the district from racially segregating its schools. The US Supreme Court originally struck down school segregation in the 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education [opinion].