For most of the past six decades, a federal court has had a say in how one Louisiana school system runs. As of this week, it no longer does.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday ended more than 60 years of federal oversight of the Concordia Parish School Board, lifting a desegregation mandate that had ordered the district to eradicate segregation in its schools. It is a victory for President Donald Trump's administration, which has pushed to close out court-ordered desegregation plans dating to the Civil Rights era.
The reversal is striking because of who used to be on the other side. The U.S. Justice Department spent decades fighting to keep these orders in force. Under Trump it has changed course, with officials casting the remaining orders as federal intrusion into local schools. Louisiana officials agree they are no longer needed and describe them as relics of a time when Black students were forbidden from attending some schools.
"The good people of Concordia Parish elected their school board to govern their schools — not unelected federal judges," Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said in announcing the ruling. "Today's decision puts that authority back where it belongs." Members of the school board did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and the families who originally brought the suit are no longer involved.
A Case That Goes Back to 1965
To understand what is ending, it helps to know how it began. The Concordia Parish case dates to 1965, when the area was segregated and home to a violent offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan. Black families in Ferriday, a town on Louisiana's central-eastern border, sued for access to all-white schools, and the federal government intervened. As the district integrated, many white families left Ferriday.
Over time the schools came to mirror the towns around them, and those towns diverged sharply. Ferriday remains mostly Black and low-income. Neighboring Vidalia is mostly white and collects tax revenue from a hydroelectric plant. That is the kind of split a desegregation order was meant to keep an eye on, and the kind that does not disappear just because a court signs off.
What Removing the Order Changes
Supporters of ending the mandate see a locally elected board finally freed to run its own schools.
But some parents and civil rights groups argue the orders are still doing work. They point to the lingering effects of segregation that show up in the data long after the schools themselves are technically integrated: racial disparities in how students are disciplined, who gets into advanced academic programs, and who gets hired to teach. An order gives a court leverage to address those gaps. Without it, the remedy is an election and a lawsuit, both slower and less certain.
The Concordia order was not just a paper formality, either. As recently as 2013, it was used to require a mostly white charter school that had just opened to prioritize Black applicants and build a more integrated student body. That is the sort of intervention that ends now.
For families in the district, the practical question is not really about 1965. It is about what happens next in a place where one town is mostly Black and poor and the next one over is mostly white and better funded. The court has decided that gap is now Concordia Parish's own to manage. Whether it narrows or widens is, for the first time in two generations, entirely up to the people who live there.
Sources
ABC News (AP): Federal appeals court ends a decades-old school desegregation order in Louisiana
KNOE: Federal oversight of Concordia Parish Schools ends, Attorney General announces
