Schools in a Mississippi town have been ordered to desegregate more than half a century after the civil rights era.

In 1954 the US Supreme Court ruled, in the landmark case Brown v Board of Education, that separate schools for black and white pupils were unconstitutional.

But in Cleveland, an impoverished town of 12,000 people in in the Mississippi Delta, desegregation has been long delayed.

The local school district has 3,600 pupils, about two thirds of whom are black and one third white. Four of its 11 schools are more than 95 per cent black.

The schools with black pupils are on the east side of a set of disused railway tracks that split the district.

In 1965 a group of black parents brought a legal case to force the black and white schools to be combined, but the case has been in the courts ever since with the Cleveland School District objecting.

Some 51 years later US District Judge Debra M Brown, sitting in a federal court in the northern district of Mississippi, condemned the situation and ordered the school district to do so.

In a 96-page decision she wrote: "The delay in desegregation has deprived generations of students of the constitutionally guaranteed right of an integrated education.