New Jersey has been hit with a major legal challenge calling for the statewide desegregation of its public schools, which remain some of America's least integrated despite the state's increasingly diverse population.

Led by a retired state Supreme Court justice, a coalition of civil rights groups filed a lawsuit Thursday to challenge the state's school system as unconstitutional and request sweeping action to end segregation.

"The fight to integrate New Jersey's schools is the great unfinished civil rights struggle of our time," said Christian Estevez, president of the Latino Action Network, one of the plaintiffs in this suit. "This lawsuit is the next step in building a future where all children get the chance to succeed."

Though the majority of New Jersey's school-age population is non-white, the state's schools remain staggeringly segregated, according to recent studies.

New Jersey is America's sixth most segregated state for black students and the seventh most segregated for Latino students, according to a 2017 analysis by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA.

A recent Center on Diversity and Equality in Education study found almost 25 percent of New Jersey schools are "desperately segregated," with student enrollment more than 90 percent white or more than 90 percent non-white.

About 66 percent of New Jersey's African American students and 62 percent its Latino students attend schools that are more than 75 percent non-white, according to the lawsuit.

Such segregation prevents hundreds of thousands of students of color from reaching their full potential, the suit says.

"New Jersey's segregated schools have failed our children for far too long," said Richard T. Smith, president of the New Jersey NAACP, another plaintiff in the case.

Gov. Phil Murphy's administration declined to comment on whether it will fight the litigation, but spokesman Dan Bryan said, "Gov. Murphy believes strongly that we must combat the deeply rooted problem of segregation."

The lack of integration stems from residential segregation, school district boundaries and the high correlation between race and socioeconomic status, the suit claims. Because of the dearth of affordable housing outside of low-income urban areas, children of many minority families are subject to de facto segregation, something the state Supreme Court has already called unconstitutional, the suit contends.

The desegregation effort is spearheaded by the New Jersey Coalition for Diverse and Inclusive Schools, a new nonprofit organization chaired by former state Supreme Court Justice Gary Stein.

Stein's son, Michael, will represent the plaintiffs, along with Lawrence Lustberg, a prominent attorney who argued New Jersey's high-profile same-sex marriage case in state court.

The complaint, filed in Mercer County, asks the court to strike two key aspects of state law: the requirement that students (with few exceptions) must attend the school district in which they live, and the requirement that charter schools give priority to students in the district the school is located.

"We are now tackling the root causes that allow segregation in our schools to continue decades after the Supreme Court outlawed explicit racial segregation," said Elise Boddie, a civil rights attorney and board member of the new nonprofit organization.

The suit calls on the state education commissioner to come up with a desegregation plan that could include an array of tactics used in different communities.

Potential options include consolidation of school districts, regional magnet schools or voluntary transfer programs that allow students in predominantly minority districts to attend other schools, according to the lawsuit.

"It would not blow up the whole system, it would simply knock down a fence that is a barrier to diversity," Gary Stein said.

The case is not an attack of Murphy and is not meant to be a hostile one, Gary Stein said.

"It is brought in the state's own interest to require New Jersey to deal with its unfinished business - ending segregation by race and poverty in its public schools," he said.

The group chose Thursday to file the lawsuit because it is the anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that banned racial segregation in schools.

Along with the civil rights groups, the plaintiffs include nine children and the United Methodist Church of Greater New Jersey.

Adam Clark may be reached at adam_clark@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on twitter at @realAdamClark. Find NJ.com on Facebook