Cleveland is one of 179 school districts in the country involved in active desegregation cases. Mississippi has 44 of these cases—more than any other state. But Cleveland’s case is unusual. Nationally, there’s been a trend of "resegregation" in recent years, as school districts released from court oversight revert to the racial divisions common before school desegregation was mandated by the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

But, in Cleveland, full desegregation never happened in the first place.

"You’re starting from scratch," says Wendy Scott, dean of Mississippi College School of Law and an expert in school desegregation. "There are only a handful of cases like that."

Though extreme, the still-unresolved Cleveland case highlights the remarkable persistence of school segregation, despite decades of efforts to address it. As Scott notes, this isn’t just a problem of the Deep South or small towns. "The very same issues can be found in any school district in America."

Cleveland’s epic legal case began in 1965, when a group of black parents sued to stop the district from maintaining segregated schools. In the summer of 1969, the court ordered Cleveland to cease discriminating on the basis of race and eliminate the effects of the "dual school system." Though the plaintiffs won the legal victory—and black students were allowed to enroll in the all-white Cleveland High for the first time that September—roughly 1,000 white locals gathered in the streets to show their opposition to integration, and local leaders vowed to fight it.

Fight they have: For the past half-century Cleveland has carried on with two sets of schools with wildly different demographics. While East Side and D.M. Smith are almost uniformly black, Cleveland High and Margaret Green Junior High, the historically white high school and middle school, have nearly even black-white splits. As a result, Cleveland has some of the most integrated —and some of the most segregated—public schools in the region.

Over the years, the district has, for the most part, waged its end of the legal battle with half-hearted tweaks designed to encourage white enrollment. In 1990, Cleveland created a magnet program that used enriched math and science instruction to entice white students to attend classes at a mostly black elementary school.A few years later, after that didn’t work, the district added more magnet programs, this time at East Side High. But that effort wasn't successful—at least when it came to getting whites to enroll in black schools.

Then there was the "freedom of choice" plan, which allowed students from either side of the old railroad tracks that divide the mostly black side of town from the white side to enroll in any of the town’s high schools or middle schools. More than 200 black students enrolled at Cleveland through the program, but white students uniformly passed on enrolling at East Side. And, in 2012, Cleveland introduced popular International Baccalaureate programs based on well-respected curricula at two of its all-black schools, including East Side High. These were meant to draw white students into the schools. By one measure, the program succeeded: 49 white Cleveland High students now come over to East Side to take the classes. But, still, none have enrolled at the school.