Two Cleveland, Mississippi, schools which are only 40 percent white have been ordered to forcibly mix with neighboring 99 percent black schools—because the US Department of Justice still thinks they are too white.

US District Judge Debra Brown ruled last week that Cleveland must merge its two high schools and two middle schools to provide the “constitutionally guaranteed right of an integrated education.”

Brown ordered the district to merge East Side High, where all but one student is black, with Cleveland High, where 48 percent of students are white and 45 percent are black.

Similarly, the district must merge D.M. Smith Middle, where all but two students are black, with Margaret Green Junior High, where 41 percent of students are white and 54 percent are black.

Across the entire 3,700-student district, only about 29 percent of students are white and 67 percent are black. The state counts the remainder as Asian or Hispanic.

“The court concludes that the continued operation of East Side High and D.M. Smith as single-race schools is a vestige of discrimination and that, therefore, a plan which allows such continued operation must be rejected,” the judge wrote.

Judge Brown added that the “delay in desegregation has deprived generations of students of the constitutionally guaranteed right of an integrated education.”

Jamie Jacks, a lawyer for the district, said school board members believed they proposed constitutional options to keep open two high schools, although one local plan would have combined middle schools.

“The district’s plans allowed for student and parent choice,” Jacks wrote in a statement. “If the board appeals, it would request that the existing open enrollment plan continue while the appeal is pending.”

The school district presented expert testimony that white parents were likely to flee to private schools. Beyond Cleveland, only four of 22 other districts in Mississippi’s Delta region have student bodies less than 80 percent black.

“Six decades after the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education declared that ‘separate but equal has no place’ in public schools, this decision serves as a reminder to districts that delaying desegregation obligations is both unacceptable and unconstitutional,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement.

“The court’s ruling will result in the immediate and effective desegregation of the district’s middle school and high school program for the first time in the district’s more than century-long history.”

In her ruling, Judge Brown also ordered the parties to submit a proposed timeline to implement the plan in such a way as to ensure the immediate termination of the school district’s dual system. She set the deadline for no later than 21 days from the entry of her opinion, which was issued at the end of last week.

The ruling is the clearest indication yet that the establishment has no interest in “integration”—because whites are already a minority in the Cleveland schooling system—but rather in exterminating whites completely.