DOJ Says It’s Moving to End More than 50 Decades-Old School Desegregation Cases

The Justice Department said Thursday it was seeking to end more than 50 long-standing consent decrees dating back decades that sought to curb unlawful racial segregation that was prevalent during the Jim Crow era.

Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said her office was “ending prolonged federal oversight of these school districts” because the effort “does not reflect the reality of those classrooms today.”

Dhillon described the consent decrees as “onerous and outdated.”

A Justice Department spokesperson shared a list of dozens of desegregation cases with local school districts that have been dismissed, including cases in Tennessee, Florida, Mississippi, Georgia and Connecticut.

In some other cases, the Justice Department has sought dismissal but a judge has not yet ruled, the spokesperson told CBS News. A federal judge must agree to dismiss a consent decree.

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For decades since that decision, the Educational Opportunities Section of the Civil Rights Division has brought legal actions to protect students from unlawful racial discrimination, often through court-monitored consent decrees with those schools. Some of those consent decrees have remained in effect for decades, dating back to the 1960s and 1970s.

In some cases, the agreements struck by the Justice Department required school districts to change how students are assigned to different schools or modify other policies to prevent students from being segregated by race.

As of May 2022, the Justice Department still represented the federal government in some 140 school desegregation cases, according to an archived press release.

Since last year, the Justice Department has filed court papers seeking to dismiss desegregation cases in several school districts. Federal officials said the districts had achieved “unitary status,” meaning they had eliminated the vestiges of Jim Crow-era racial desegregation and no longer needed further federal monitoring.

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Regan Rush, director of the Red Line for Civil Rights project at Democracy Forward, argued the Civil Rights Division “has walked away from enforcement work it spent decades building.”

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