Mississippi school desegregates students

Chantel Frank, Reporter

Sixty two years after Roe vs. Wade, a school in Cleveland, Mississippi, ,is just now being desegregated by the U.S. Supreme Court. A west Mississippi town of about 12,000 citizens is still divided between black and white students.

The Illinois Central Railroad that runs through the town serves as a “separation line”. The schools on the east side of the tracks, (Cleveland High School, Margaret Green Junior High School and Parks Elementary) are all black or virtually black, with less than 20 percent of the student population white (cnn.com).

According to cnn.com, this case has been dodging its way through the judicial system for the past 50 years. Parents and guardians filed a claim, stating that Cleveland District Schools are operating their schools on a ¨racially segregated basis.¨ According to wmur.com (an ABC affiliate), U.S. District Judge Debra M. Brown, declared that the public schools have denied the constitutional right of integrated education. Brown’s decision involved competing plans to desegregate the schools, two put forward by the school district and another by the federal government. The federally proposed plan calls for combining the district’s high schools and middle schools at the beginning of the 2016-2017 academic year.

District administrators have argued that the plan will trigger “white flight” and proposed their own alternative plans, but were denied and called unconstitutional by the government, according to the National Post. They have since refused to comment.