Republican leaders in Louisiana are pushing to end the last remnants of federally ordered school desegregation in their state, arguing that the era of racial exclusion is in the past and that the U.S. government has forced burdensome requirements on school districts long enough.
They may have found allies in the Trump administration, as it seeks to slash federal bureaucracy and roll back diversity efforts across the country.
It has been 71 years since the Supreme Court made racially segregated schools illegal in its landmark 1954 ruling, Brown v. Board of Education. Louisiana officials say that federal orders forcing school districts to comply with the decision are outdated and no longer needed, and that the country needs to move on.
Civil rights advocates see the effort as part of a broader attack on Black students and civil rights under the Trump administration, at a time when U.S. schools are only growing more segregated.
Nationally, more than 300 desegregation orders are estimated to still be on the books from the 1960s and 1970s, when school districts resistant to integration were put under the supervision of federal courts. In the decades since, many orders have gone dormant, with little federal enforcement.
In Louisiana, one of several Southern states with the bulk of remaining orders, the attorney general, with the support of the governor, is reviewing orders statewide and has vowed to work with school districts to “officially put the past in the past.”
The Justice Department has already dismissed one order, in a district south of New Orleans, which was left open for decades by mistake. Federal officials are open to lifting others.
“I don’t think it serves the interest of justice to have ancient consent decrees out there,” said Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general over civil rights under President Trump, who said her office would consider requests for dismissal on a case-by-case basis.
“It is 2025,” Ms. Dhillon said. “I haven’t heard a recent claim that there is government mandated segregation happening in 2025 in a school district.” She added: “If it’s happening, it’s wrong.”
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.
Civil rights advocates fear any rollback of desegregation orders would harm Black students, at a moment when the Trump administration has been campaigning against programs meant to help them, including diversity, equity and inclusion practices.
The administration is invoking Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color and national origin and which has historically been used to protect minority groups, to threaten and investigate school districts with certain D.E.I. policies.
President Trump also issued new guidance on school discipline, instructing schools to look at behavior alone, without taking into account racial disparities in punishment. He has ordered the federal government more broadly to stop considering “disparate impact,” which is when a seemingly race-neutral policy has different outcomes for different demographic groups.
“You have an administration that denies the past and wants to tell a singular story about America and this country that erases this racial inequality,” said Janel George, an associate law professor at Georgetown, who focuses on racial equity in education.
In many cases, school districts are still under federal oversight because they never proved that they desegregated, said GeDá Jones Herbert, chief legal counsel for Brown’s Promise, a group that supports school integration. An open desegregation order is a legal tool for students to take a district back to court “and say, ‘hey they are still not doing what they need to do,’” she added.
Decades of research have shown that racially integrated schools improve academic and life outcomes for Black students, with no measurable harm to white students. That is largely because integration allows students of color to share in resources that white students already have.
Liz Murrill, the Louisiana attorney general, argued the answer is not to keep school desegregation orders open for decades. She said many orders in her state had been dormant for 30 or 40 years, and others had racked up expensive legal bills for school districts.
If a district is engaging in discriminatory practices today, she said, “you file a new lawsuit for a new problem.”
In what Louisiana officials hope will be the first of many dismissals, the Trump administration lifted a desegregation order in Plaquemines Parish, south of New Orleans, last month, addressing what it called a “historical wrong.”
In 1975, a judge ruled that the district had sufficiently desegregated. But the case remained open, lost in a bureaucratic shuffle.
The dismissal came as a relief to school officials, who had recently been dealing with reams of federal paperwork on everything from the number of Advanced Placement classes at each school to the racial makeup of athletic clubs, said Shelley Ritz, the superintendent. “It was binders on top of binders,” she said.
That doesn’t mean there still isn’t important work to do, Dr. Ritz said.
Plaquemines Parish in many ways exemplifies the lingering debates around school desegregation, whether the country has done enough to remedy the harms of the past and how much schools should be held responsible for factors outside of their direct control.
The Justice Department took the Plaquemines Parish school district to court in 1966, a time when Leander Perez, a prominent segregationist, ruled the region. He was a towering political figure who opposed the integration of Ruby Bridges and other Black students in New Orleans and helped open all-white private academies in Plaquemines Parish.
His legacy lives on in infamy in a communal history that has been passed down over generations, said Dione Griffin-Cossé, 56, who attended an all-Black school in Plaquemines Parish in the 1970s and ’80s and still lives in the area.
Still, the news of the order’s end surprised her and some others, who said they thought the time of desegregation had already passed. “To me, that’s long gone,” she said.
Today, the Plaquemines Parish school district is racially mixed, with a student body that is about 50 percent white, 25 percent Black, 12 percent Hispanic and 5 percent Asian. Many of the individual schools are themselves relatively diverse. But the bulk of white students attend schools on the north side, in a more populated area close to New Orleans.
That is largely the result of housing patterns, Dr. Ritz said.
Plaquemines Parish lies at the tip of Louisiana’s boot, in an area prone to flooding. The southern part of the district is at especially high risk. There, families are poorer, and students are largely Black or Hispanic.
Across the country, Black and Hispanic students are most likely to attend high poverty schools, which research shows is a driving factor in the country’s wide gaps in academic achievement. That’s also the case in Plaquemines Parish, which ranks among the best in the state for student growth and achievement, but where students in the southern end of the district still post lower test scores.
Dr. Ritz pointed to a number of investments the district had made to help attract qualified teachers to lower-income schools on the southern end. That includes opening day care centers for the children of employees and subsidizing apartments for teachers. “We are truly committed to every student in Plaquemines,” Dr. Ritz said.
The Supreme Court endorsed the idea that schools should not be on the hook for housing segregation in a series of rulings dating to the 1970s that set off a gradual unwinding of desegregation efforts across the country.
In 1974, during a period of fierce public pushback to the busing of students, the Supreme Court made its first major turn away from mandated integration.
The case involved a plan to integrate students from Detroit, which was majority Black, with its surrounding suburbs, which were predominantly white. The court ruled that schools did not have to desegregate across district lines, even if the result was segregation.
The case would limit efforts to integrate outside of the South, where desegregation occurred at schools within individual districts.
Then in 1991, the court ruled that districts already under federal court order could be released if they had addressed segregation “as far as practicable,” though segregation may still remain as a result of private residential choices.
The new efforts to roll back remaining desegregation orders may simply signal the official end of a movement that peaked long ago.
U.S. schools have only grown more segregated in recent decades, in part because of the lifting of desegregation orders, but also because of the rise of charter schools, according to research by professors Sean Reardon of Stanford University and Ann Owens of the University of Southern California.
Today, schools are more segregated than they were in the late 1980s.
“The country has just sort of decided that segregation is not a problem that it wants to focus on,” Dr. Reardon said.
Sarah Mervosh covers education for The Times, focusing on K-12 schools.
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