Justice Department Moves to End More Than 50 Jim Crow-Era School Desegregation Orders

The Justice Department said Thursday it is seeking to end more than 50 long-standing court orders that were put in place decades ago to root out racial segregation in public schools across the country.

Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general who runs the department's Civil Rights Division, said her office was "ending prolonged federal oversight of these school districts" because the arrangements do "not reflect the reality of those classrooms today." She called the consent decrees "onerous and outdated."

The department did not release a full list of the roughly 50 cases. It cited examples including decrees covering Waterbury, Connecticut, and Flagler, Florida. A federal judge must sign off before any consent decree is dissolved, and it was not immediately clear how many of the cases have already been formally dismissed. The department said it is conducting a "case-by-case review" of every pending desegregation case filed in the 1960s and 1970s. "After concluding that a school district has achieved unitary status, the Department will seek dismissal of the case," it said. "Unitary status" is the legal finding that a district has eliminated the remnants of Jim Crow-era segregation.

Many of the orders trace back to the years after the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down the "separate but equal" doctrine the court had endorsed in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. For decades, the Civil Rights Division's Educational Opportunities Section enforced Brown through court-monitored agreements that required districts to change how students were assigned to schools and to rewrite other policies. As of May 2022 the department still represented the federal government in about 140 school desegregation cases. Since last year it has asked courts to close cases in several districts, and judges in Tennessee, Florida and Mississippi have agreed.

Civil rights advocates reacted sharply. Kristen Clarke, who led the Civil Rights Division under President Biden and is now general counsel at the NAACP, told CBS News the administration's "relentless campaign to dismantle work done to end racial segregation in our nation's public schools" is "a stain on democracy." "Brown vs. Board of Education stands as the singularly most important decision ever issued by the Supreme Court and it has taken continued partnership between the government and school districts to keep school systems on track," Clarke said. "No doubt, this Justice Department's actions threaten to fuel resegregation and discrimination in public schools, to the peril of all of our children."

The move fits a broader overhaul of the division since Dhillon arrived last year. She has dismissed or declined to pursue many of the race-discrimination cases that were once its core work, and more than 75% of its staff have resigned or retired early, CBS News has reported. Under Dhillon the division has opened investigations into diversity, equity and inclusion programs at universities, sued to bar transgender athletes from girls' and women's sports, and litigated against dozens of states to obtain unredacted voter registration lists.