Trump DOJ Drops Dozens Of School Desegregation Cases, But The Most Segregated Schools Are In The North

Source: Pen Sangraksawong / Getty

The Trump administration is walking away from one of the federal government’s oldest tools for enforcing Brown v. Board of Education.

The Justice Department said Thursday it has ended more than 50 decades-old consent decrees aimed at undoing Jim Crow-era school segregation, CBS News reports. Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the department’s Civil Rights Division, called the orders onerous and outdated. She said federal oversight no longer reflects what classrooms look like today.

The New York Times puts the total at 57 cases dropped since Trump returned to office. Nearly 80 percent were in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia and Louisiana. The department says it is reviewing every remaining desegregation case filed in the 1960s and 1970s.

Those orders did more than balance enrollment. They required equal funding, decent facilities, and fair access to advanced classes, The New Republic notes. Courts have also long held that the passage of time alone doesn’t prove discrimination is over, the Associated Press reports. To be released, districts traditionally had to show they had removed segregation’s lingering effects as much as possible.

Critics were blunt. Democrats on the House Education and Workforce Committee said the move was “turning us back toward the Jim Crow era.” Kristen Clarke, the NAACP’s general counsel and a former head of the Civil Rights Division, called it “a stain on our democracy.”

But the focus on the South obscures a harder truth. By several measures, the nation’s most segregated schools for Black students are in the North.

New York has long ranked as the most segregated state for Black students, according to UCLA’s Civil Rights Project. In fact, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones’ recent viral piece in The New York Times shows just how this type of segregation affected her family.

In 2018, 90 percent of Black students in New York attended predominantly nonwhite schools, and nearly two in three attended schools where fewer than 10 percent of students were white. Illinois, California, and Maryland also showed extreme segregation. The Northeast has been the most segregated region for Black students, while the South, despite losing ground since the late 1980s, remained the least segregated.

Northern segregation grew largely out of housing patterns and school district lines rather than Jim Crow laws. In 1974, the Supreme Court’s Milliken v. Bradley decision barred desegregation plans that crossed district lines in metro Detroit, which left much of that segregation beyond the reach of court orders.

A Century Foundation analysis found that segregation between school districts is the main driver of racial isolation in most metro areas, especially in the Northeast and Midwest. Cities like Milwaukee, Newark, Chicago, Detroit and New York ranked among the most segregated.

Seventy-two years after Brown, the South is losing its federal oversight, while segregation in the North, largely untouched by such orders, persists. 

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