Washington (AP) – When the Department of Justice lifts it up School separation In Louisiana this week, authorities called its ongoing existence “historical wrong,” suggesting that others should reconsider dating the civil rights movement.
The end of the 1966 legal agreement with the Plaquemins Parish schools announced on Tuesday that the Trump administration will “focus on America on our bright future,” Assistant Attorney General Hermet Dillon said.
Officials appointed by the President within the Department of Justice Donald Trump Those familiar with the issue of being allowed anonymous because they were not allowed to speak publicly, they expressed their desire to withdraw from other racist orders that they view as an unnecessary burden on the school.
Dozens of school districts in the South remain under a court mandatory agreement that determines measures to tackle integration decades after the Supreme Court collapses. Racism in Education. The court has ordered the courts as a sign that the government has never eradicated segregation, and Louisiana and some schools view the order as an interpretation that should be wiped out.
The Justice Department opened a wave of incidents in the 1960s after Congress unleashed the department in the 1960s to chase schools resistant to separation. Known as a consent declaration, the order can be cancelled when it is proven that the district has excluded Separation and its heritage.
The small Louisiana area has long-term integrated cases
The Trump administration called the Plaquemines incident an example of administrative neglect. The districts in the Mississippi River Delta Basin in southeast Louisiana were found to have been consolidated in 1975, but the case was to remain under the courtroom clock for another year. The judge passed away in the same year, and according to court filings, the court records “appear to have been lost in time.”
“This case has been staying for half a century in a zero court, party or third party case, and we are pleased that the US claim has been fully resolved, according to a joint filing from the Department of Justice and Louisiana Attorney General Liz Maril.
Plaquemines Principal Shelley Ritz said Justice Department officials visited each year in 2023 to request data on topics such as employment and recruitment. Discipline. She said the paperwork is a burden for the district with fewer than 4,000 students.
“It was a few hours of compiling the data,” she said.
Louisiana “summarized the act decades ago,” said Leo Terrell, senior adviser to the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, in a statement. He added that the termination corrected historic mistakes and was “past time to acknowledge how far we have come.”
Maril asked the Department of Justice to close orders for other schools in her state. In a statement, she vowed to work with Louisiana schools to help them “put the past in the past.”
Civil rights activists say it’s the wrong move. Jonathan Smith, who worked for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during President Joe Biden, said many orders have only been slowly enacted in recent decades, but that doesn’t mean the issue will be resolved.
“That probably means the opposite – the school districts remain isolated. In fact, most of these districts are now more quarantined today than in 1954,” said Smith, a chief of staff and advisor at the National Center for Youth Law.
Separate orders include various instructions
More than 130 school systems are based on the Department of Justice’s separation order, according to records from court filings this year. The majority are in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi, with fewer in states such as Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina. Several other districts are under separate separation agreements with the education sector.
Orders can include a variety of remedies, from bus requirements to district policies, that allow students from primarily black schools to move to primarily white schools. The agreement lies between the school district and the US government, but other parties can ask the court to intervene when signs of quarantine resurface.
In 2020, the NAACP called for a consent ruling in the Leeds School District in Alabama when it stopped providing school lunches during the Covid-19 pandemic. Civil rights groups said it would disproportionately hurt black students by violating racist orders. The district agreed to resume dining.
Last year, Louisiana’s Board of Education closed primarily black primary schools near petrochemical facilities after the NAACP said disproportionately. Putting black students at health risks. The board decided after the NAACP filed an allegation invoking a decades-old racism order in St. John the Baptist Parish.
Closing cases can lead to legal challenges
The layoffs sparked an alarm among those who feared that decades of progress could be cancelled. Studies of districts released from the order find that there is a significant increase in racism compared to those that many have received court orders.
“In a very often, schools repeat very rapidly, and students have new civil rights concerns,” said Halley Potter, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, which studies educational inequality.
Robert Westley, a professor of anti-discrimination law at Tulane University Law School in New Orleans, said the end of the order will signal that separation is no longer a priority.
“It just shows that the backslide that started a while ago is complete,” Westley said. “The US government doesn’t care anymore about addressing the issue of racism in schools. That’s over.”
Raymond Pierce, president and CEO of the Southern Education Foundation, said attempts to stop further lawsuits would face heavy opposition in court.
“This represents a ignorance of education opportunities in most of America, which represents a ignorance of the need for America to have an educated workforce,” he said. “And that represents a disregard for the rule of law.”
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Associated Press Writer Sharon Lurye contributed from New Orleans.
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