The administration isn’t defying civil rights law. Instead, it relies on Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race.
Back in January 2021, Axios reporter Russell Contreras surveyed the “experts” and determined that a trend toward racial “resegregation” in American public schools was gaining steam. The trend began under “Republican administrations from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan.” And yet, somehow these racially suspect reactionaries managed only to resegregate schools in America’s most politically homogenous left-wing enclaves.
“Among the nation’s 20 largest school districts,” Contreras confessed, “black students today have the least contact with white students in Chicago, Dallas, Miami, and Prince George’s County, Maryland.” Only this year, amid Florida’s rapid political transformation, could you consider Miami a GOP-dominated locality, and only just barely. The rest are Democratic bastions.
On Thursday, Contreras revisited the narrative he tried and failed to establish four years ago. This time, he set out to ensconce Donald Trump among the pantheon of supposedly segregationist Republican presidents.
In late April, the Trump administration embarked on an effort to put an end to “decades-old programs mainly aimed at improving education opportunities for nonwhite students,” the Axios reporter asserted.
His sprawling narrative — it’s a tell when Axios abandons “smart brevity” in favor of extended complexity — centers on schools in Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish. Plaquemines schools resisted desegregation after the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. In 1966, Lyndon Johnson’s administration responded by suing the district. The standoff culminated in a settlement that stripped local officials of control of the school’s destiny. “Now,” Contreras maintained, “President Trump’s Justice Department says it has ‘righted a historical wrong’ by ‘freeing’ the Plaquemines school board from federal oversight.”
Plaquemines is just one of dozens of school districts in the South operating under federal oversight amid court orders enforcing racial integration. The Trump administration’s efforts to withdraw those requirements would, in theory, let those districts abandon equal resource requirements, flexible transfer rules, and diverse hiring goals. It all sounds rather sordid if you elide the events that occurred in the intervening half century.
Let’s zoom in on Plaquemines, as Contreras had. “The district in the Mississippi River Delta Basin in southeast Louisiana was found to have integrated in 1975, but the case was to stay under the court’s watch for another year,” the Associated Press reported earlier this month. “The judge died the same year, and the court record ‘appears to be lost to time,’ according to a court filing.”
Despite her Republican affiliation, which Contreras was quick to point out, it’s hard to argue with Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill’s observation that the case in question has been stayed for decades without any additional claims, suggesting that Washington’s Johnson-era objections “have been fully resolved.”
In much the same way that the Environmental Protection Agency held fast to restrictions on Louisiana’s sovereignty based on decades-old infractions, the Education Department is operating on the assumption that racial attitudes in the South are fixed and immutable — frozen forever in the age of Jim Crow. But that’s not how the Supreme Court viewed federal efforts to enforce U.S. civil rights law in the South.
The Court had been compelled to review the constitutionality of the 1965 Voting Rights Act; specifically, the provisions that limit the sovereignty of certain states and localities that had demonstrated an “egregious history of racism.” For decades, the Court had upheld the constitutionality of those provisions while warning Congress that the formula used to determine which states and municipalities must have their redistricting plans cleared by federal regulators would have to evolve along with the changing times, and soon. Civil rights activists didn’t seem to believe that the Court would act if Congress didn’t, right up until the Court struck down the VRA’s preclearance provisions in 2013.
The same could be said of restrictions on Southern school districts. “The Supreme Court has said that school desegregation orders were meant to be temporary, and over the years, many have been lifted, usually after a district showed it had made efforts to desegregate,” the New York Times recently conceded. Indeed, in attempting to formally rescind the largely defunct restrictions on local schools, Trump isn’t defying civil rights law. Instead, the administration relies on Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race — regardless of whether it’s the positive or negative variety.
In his piece, Contreras failed to revisit schools in dark-blue Chicago, Dallas, or Maryland to seek out signs of racial progress. Plaquemines Parish seems to be doing all right on the diversity front. Nearly 24 percent of the district’s student body is black, while 52 percent is white — a ratio that’s a little more diverse than the county’s racial breakdown in the U.S. census.
None of this appears to matter to the “civil rights advocates” with whom Contreras spoke. They insist that “disparities in educational opportunities” like the “resegregation” that occurs when “white students disproportionately leave neighborhood schools for charter and private schools.” Well, now we’re talking not about oppression meted out by racially regressive authorities in high office. Rather, this is a complaint about the choices people make with their own time and money, to say nothing of the verdict it represents on the relative quality of education public schools provide. That hardly justifies the resources that already-integrated school districts have to devote to compliance and legal costs. Nor does it warrant stigmatizing these communities in perpetuity for the sins of past generations.
Ultimately, Contreras concludes his piece by conceding (against his own interest) that desegregation is not the activist class’s goal. As one such activist, the author Noliwe Rooks, told him, “Desegregation failed to address many Black students’ needs.” How “robust” were those efforts, she asked, “and where has it led us?” One thing we can say for sure is that it led us out of the status quo that prevailed in 1966. Progressives may be blind to progress, but the Trump administration deserves credit for acknowledging the evidence of our own eyes.