Why a Mississippi City Is Just Now Being Forced to Desegregate Its Schools

May 17 marks the 62nd anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, which outlawed deliberately placing black and white students in separate schools. The ruling was designed so that school districts could come up with plans for desegregating their own educational facilities, but six decades later, school segregation remains a problem. A new U.S. Government Accountability Office report found that the number of schools with at least 75 percent black, Latino, or poor students grew from 9 percent to 16 percent over the last 15 years across the country.

One city that just never succeeded at school integration is Cleveland, Mississippi, where the school district was sued by a group of parents way back in 1965 for its failure to comply with Brown. Black families were concentrated (both then and today) in neighborhoods to the east of a railroad track that split Cleveland in half, both physically and racially. Black children were forbidden from attending schools located to the west of the tracks, where white families lived almost exclusively, due to Jim Crow policies.