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 I chose to do how segregation is  coming back to  American schools .  some of it it s about choice and some of it is about  location.

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 I chose to do how segregation is  coming back to  American schools .  some of it it s about choice and some of it is about  location.

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America's school-age population is more diverse than ever before, reflecting the demographic shift rapidly taking place in our country. America's schools, however, are more segregated than they have been for decades.

During the two decades between 1970 and 1990, the nation made steady progress toward school desegregation, particularly in the South. At peak, 40% of black southern students attended a formerly all-white school, while less than a third of all black students attended black schools.

Since the 1990s, that progress has been reversing in Southern public schools, while the largely intractable segregation of the Northern cities has intensified. Nationwide, nearly 75% of black students attend so-called majority-minority schools, and 38% attend schools with a white population of 10% or less. Similar statistics apply to Latino students: 80% and 40%, respectively. Both black and Latino students are much more likely than white students to attend a school where 60% or more of their classmates are living in poverty, as measured by the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch programs.

Separate remains unequal as schools with concentrated poverty and racial segregation are more likely to have less-experienced teachers, high levels of teacher turnover, inadequate facilities and fewer classroom resources.

The cost of school segregation and white racial isolation is immense.

Legal constraints have much to do with this backward momentum. Some 60 years after Brown vs. Board of Education, a series of key Supreme Court decisions have dramatically reduced the number of implementation methods available to communities engaged in school desegregation. They have eliminated strategies such as cross-district busing, dismantled local court supervision of desegregation plans, and limited use of race-based admissions to ensure diversity in magnet school programs.

According to an analysis by the UCLA Civil Rights Project, the number of intensely segregated schools with zero to 10% white enrollment has more than tripled as these options for desegregation have been curtailed. Students are, once again, predominantly assigned to public schools based on where they live - and to the extent that neighborhoods are segregated, the schools remain so. The persistence of residential segregation now ensures continuing school segregation.

Is that a national concern? Apparently not for most people.

A 2017 poll found that while 70% of parents would like to have their child in a racially diverse school, 57% prefer proximity over diversity. That is, they would rather send their child to a less diverse school in the neighborhood than a more diverse school farther away. Only 25% think diversity would be worth a trip.

The obvious solution is to diversify neighborhoods, but that's elusive. Contemporary surveys of racial attitudes among whites indicate that the larger the hypothetical black population in an area, the more likely white respondents are to express discomfort about living there. Sociologists Douglas Massey and Jonathan Tannen report that high levels of black-white segregation have remained relatively unchanged for the last 40 years. A similar pattern is visible among Latino families in the country's two largest Latino communities - New York and Los Angeles, where nearly 20% live in extremely segregated, or what researchers call "hypersegregated," neighborhoods.

Such continuing segregation helps explain the 2013 American Values Survey finding that 75% of white adults have entirely white social networks, without the presence of any people of color.

The cost of school segregation and white racial isolation is immense. As long as children of color remain trapped in under-resourced schools, many won't have the opportunity to develop their talents - a loss not just for those children and their families, but the whole country. Meanwhile, white children won't have sufficient opportunities to develop the skills needed to engage effectively in a multiracial society. Racial isolation means that experience of "the other" is too often rooted in well-worn stereotypes, rather than in knowledge nuanced by ongoing engagement. Fear and anxiety about the unfamiliar are the common result.

Colleges and universities have a role to play in changing course. More and more young people are making the choice to pursue higher education; even Harvard University has reported that for the first time in its history students of color make up more than 50% of the entering class. For many students, regardless of racial background, the higher education environment will be the most racially diverse learning environment they have experienced in their lives. It is incumbent upon educators to provide the scaffolding needed to help students engage effectively across lines of difference.

Proximity alone will not be sufficient. Because of both lack of direct contact and repeated exposure to cultural stereotypes while growing up, cross-group interactions can be uncomfortable. Even genuine efforts at friendship can be derailed by awkward interactions and unconscious bias. But institutions that create meaningful opportunities for structured interactions such as cooperative learning and intergroup dialogue have a chance to change our social trajectory.

Students who had the most diversity experiences during college continued that pattern of cross-racial interaction - in their neighborhoods and at work - several years after their college graduations. These young people have the potential to finally interrupt our well-established patterns of residential segregation and can perhaps begin to make the ideal of the Brown ruling a reality in this century.
Beverly Daniel Tatum, president emerita of Spelman College, is a psychologist and author of "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? and Other Conversations About Race." Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion or Facebook

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America is more diverse than ever before, but its schools are growing more segregated

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America's school-age population is more diverse than ever before, reflecting the demographic shift rapidly taking place in our country. America's schools, however, are more segregated than they have been for decades. During the two decades between 1970 and 1990, the nation made steady progress toward school desegregation, particularly in the South.

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Alabama just brought back racial segregation in schools.

A judge ruled that a mostly white Alabama city could secede from a more racially diverse school district if they met certain conditions.

WHAT'S FALSE

The judge ordered the district to submit a desegregation plan and appoint at least one African-American to their board of education.

In late April 2017, multiple web sites reported that the state of Alabama had just returned the U.S. to the racially divisive pre- Brown v. Board of Education era and once again brought upon the country the specter of legally segregated schools:

Race relations continue to deteriorate under President Trump. It's become increasingly apparent that his racist, xenophobic rhetoric is doing lasting damage to the country.

The Washington Post reports that an Alabama Judge just ruled that a white city may secede from its racially diverse school district.

The ruling by the Birmingham U.S. District Court allows the city of Gardendale, Alabama to secede from its larger, diverse school district to create its own. Gardendale is 88% white and wealthier than most neighboring cities. Its removal from the district will drastically reduce funding to the public school system.

Although U.S. District Court Judge Madeline Haikala ruled that a predominantly white city could form their own school district (despite her finding that their motivations for initiating the process were racially biased), her decision didn't actually "bring back segregation." Her ruling only allows the city of Gardendale, Alabama, to separate from the Jefferson County Schools district if over the course of three years they meet requirements laid out by the court, submit a desegregation plan, and appoint at least one African-American board member. Furthermore, the ruling is being challenged and may not withstand scrutiny from higher courts.

Federal law prohibits institutional segregation in schools, and Haikala is presiding over a 1971 desegregation order resulting from the Stout vs. Jefferson County Board of Education ruling, which requires federal oversight of all Jefferson County Schools to ensure compliance with that order:

Since a 1971 order in that case, federal judges have continued oversight - including approval of attendance zones - over county schools to make sure racial balances are maintained and no discrimination occurs.

Cities splitting off from the Jefferson County system since the 1971 order have been required to remain under the desegregation order until their system has reached "unitary status" - achieving the goals of becoming a non-discriminatory, desegregated system.

Gardendale, like six cities have done before it, wants to form its own school system. Residents voted in November 2013 to form a school system, named a school board, and hired a superintendent.

The Jefferson County system, DOJ, and private plaintiffs in the lawsuit argued against Gardendale forming its own system. Those groups said that Gardendale's system could prevent the Jefferson County system from achieving unitary status and getting out from under federal oversight.

On 24 April 2017, Judge Haikala (an appointee of President Trump's predecessor, Barack Obama) ruled that she found racial motives for efforts by residents of the predominantly white city of Gardendale to take over four schools within their municipal boundaries and separate from Jefferson County, a diverse public school district. Residents and newly formed Gardendale school district officials actively recruited students from neighboring Mount Olive, which is also predominantly white, and complained about children from racially mixed or majority African-American communities such as Center Point and North Smithfield being bused into schools in Gardendale:

During Gardendale's separation effort, both words and deeds have communicated messages of inferiority and exclusion. The message cannot be lost on children who live in North Smithfield. Words on a public Facebook page that say to North Smithfield students zoned to Bragg and Gardendale High for nearly 50 years that these are "OUR schools" and you should have been removed from them years ago (Doc. 1132-2, p. 183) communicate plainly to black students from North Smithfield the message that these schools are not yours, and you are not welcome here. The assertion by a separation organizer on the Gardendale Schools Facebook page that given that the Gardendale Board "still is answering to Washington and federal judges," he could assure Gardendale residents that the Gardendale Board "didn't just decide to gift a perpetual attendance zone to an area" that would not be paying the Gardendale ad valorem tax "on a whim" and that inclusion of North Smithfield students in the Gardendale system "has the hallmarks" of "a specific, technical, tactical decision" communicates to black middle and high school students from North Smithfield the clear message that Gardendale has required them to be part of the city's school system only to serve the city's purposes. The organizer described the inclusion of the children from North Smithfield as "the price" that Gardendale had "to pay to gain approval for separation." (Doc. 1132-2, p. 8, Dec. 16, 2015, 4:21 a.m.). Under the original separation plan, Gardendale would have eliminated those students from the Gardendale municipal system.

The message is magnified for black children from Center Point. After Center Point's neighbor to the east, Trussville, separated from the Jefferson County school system, eliminating the most convenient receiving schools for M-to-M [majority-to-minority transfers between schools for racial desegregation purposes] transfer students from Center Point, Jefferson County redirected those children to schools in Gardendale, Center Point's neighbor to the west. Gardendale citizens' public rejection of transfer students, particularly those from Center Point (Doc. 1132-2), surely leaves a strong message in the minds of children from Center Point. They must feel that they are unwelcome in predominantly white communities.

And if pictures speak louder than words, then a flyer bearing a photograph of a white student that asks Gardendale voters if they would rather live in an affluent white city or a formerly white city that now is well-integrated or predominantly black communicates an unambiguous message of inferiority. There is no way to downplay or sidestep the harm that such a message conveys. Any arguable ambiguity in the flyer is resolved by blatant public statements from separation organizers that "we don't want to become" what Center Point has become, and we need separation to provide "better control of the geographic composition of the student body."

The Gardendale education board wanted to take four schools, Gardendale Elementary, Snow Rogers Elementary, Bragg Middle School and Gardendale High School, which are all predominantly white and would become more so over time, because the Gardendale education board would eventually stop allowing students from outside the newly formed district to attend without paying tuition. The students' families would also be required to find their own transportation if they wanted to attend a Gardendale school.

According to court documents, Gardendale High is a state-of-the-art school that was built with Jefferson County tax dollars. Although Gardendale planned to fold the high school into their new system at no cost to itself, Jefferson County would have had to pay $55 million to construct a replacement facility. Haikala's ruling prevents Gardendale from taking the high school without compensating the county or relinquishing the school to the county, under which it would operate with a new name.

Haikala's ruling initially provides the new district with only two elementary schools and allows secession from Jefferson County only if conditions overseen by the court are met over the course of three years. She held that although their efforts to secede were motivated by race, the rights of parents who simply wanted greater and more local control of their children's education must be considered, citing concerns that African-American children currently attending school in Gardendale would bear the brunt of resentment from their white peers if they were seen as the cause of a failed separation effort.

Judge Haikala ordered nine conditions be met in order for Gardendale to separate:

1. The Court grants in part and denies in part Gardendale's motion for separation. For the 2017-2018 school year and until this Court orders otherwise, the Gardendale Board of Education may operate Gardendale Elementary School and Snow Rogers Elementary School. The Jefferson County Board of Education shall take the steps necessary to convey these school facilities to the Gardendale Board of Education so that the Gardendale Board may operate those schools for the 2017-18 academic year. Gardendale Elementary and Snow Rogers Elementary shall be zoned for students residing within the municipal boundaries of the City of Gardendale.

2. Counsel for the private plaintiffs and for the United States shall confer with counsel for the Gardendale Board of Education and develop and submit to the Court within 60 days a proposed desegregation order tailored to the specific circumstances of the Gardendale City Schools System. The proposed order shall contain provisions relating to interdistrict transfers, and the proposed order shall redraw the lines for Snow Rogers and Gardendale Elementary to address capacity issues at Gardendale Elementary.

3. Should the Gardendale Board of Education operate Gardendale Elementary and Snow Rogers in good faith compliance with the anticipated desegregation order, then in three years, the Court shall consider a renewed motion for operation of a Gardendale municipal system for grades Kindergarten through 12. During the first 12 months of the three-year period of supervision, the private plaintiffs, the United States, the Jefferson County Board of Education, and the Gardendale Board of Education shall develop a proposed facilities plan for all of the students who currently are zoned for Bragg Middle School and Gardendale High School. That facilities plan must either place the Gardendale High School facility in the Jefferson County system under a new name, or it shall place the high school facility in an anticipated K-12 Gardendale district with an appropriate payment to the Jefferson County Board of Education or the Jefferson County Commission to help fund an alternative high school facility for Jefferson County. The facilities plan shall include provisions for facilities for middle school students, either by reconfiguring existing facilities or building new ones.

4. Elementary students from the community of North Smithfield shall be zoned for Fultondale Elementary for the 2017-18 academic year. The Jefferson County Board of Education shall allow middle and high school students who reside in North Smithfield to attend a school of their choice for the 2017-18 academic year. Jefferson County shall develop an election form that allows middle and high students from North Smithfield to list their first and second choice for placement, and Jefferson County shall accommodate, to the extent practical, as many first choices as possible. Every middle and high school student shall be given either his/her first or second choice for placement. Jefferson County shall provide transportation for students who reside in North Smithfield. The private plaintiffs, the United States, and the Jefferson County Board of Education shall confer and submit a joint proposal for permanent zoning for students who reside in North Smithfield.

5. For the 2017-2018 school year and until this Court orders otherwise, the Jefferson County Board of Education shall operate Bragg Middle and Gardendale High School. Students who reside within the municipal limits of the City of Gardendale shall continue to attend Bragg Middle School and Gardendale High School until the Court orders otherwise. Tax proceeds shall follow students from the City of Gardendale who attend Bragg Middle School and Gardendale High School per the terms of the 1971 Stout desegregation order.

6. Within 60 days, the Gardendale City Council shall appoint at least one African-American resident of the City of Gardendale to the Gardendale Board of Education.

7. Elementary school children who reside in the community of Mount Olive, the town of Brookside, and the City of Graysville shall remain in their current elementary school zones and shall attend Bragg Middle School and Gardendale High School until the Court orders otherwise. As the parties negotiate the terms for a possible K-12 separation for the Gardendale City School system for the 2020-21 academic year, the parties shall confer with parents from all affected communities.

8. Within 30 days, the Jefferson County Board, the private plaintiffs, and the United States shall submit a proposed timeline for the discovery necessary for an evaluation of the Jefferson County school district under each of the Green factors.

9. The Court shall enter all other orders necessary for the implementation of these orders after consulting with the parties.

U.W. Clemon, a retired federal judge who represents African-American plaintiffs in the 52-year-old Stout case filed a motion on 1 May 2017 asking Haikala to reconsider her ruling, arguing that it runs contrary to long-standing efforts bring schools into alignment with the desegregation order. Clemon has also sought an injunction blocking Gardendale from moving forward on the ruling and taking steps to establish a separate school district while the motion is being considered by the court:

The Court's Order will have the unintended effect of prolonging the litigation, rather than terminating it. Under the terms of the Order, the Parties are now faced with the awesome duty and administrative headache of negotiating two separate interdependent school desegregation decrees, rather than one comprehensive plan designed for stable and long-term desegregation. Further, the Order, should it stand, permits a splinter district under the most inappropriate of circumstances: where there has been a finding of intentional racial discrimination.

For these reasons, the Stout Plaintiffs are constrained to respectfully request, pursuant to Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 59(e), that this Court reconsider its decision to partially approve the formation of a separate Gardendale school system. Specifically, we urge the Court to amend its April 24th order to enjoin the formation of a separate municipal Gardendale School system until a comprehensive and constitutional desegregation plan for the Jefferson County Board of Education has been adopted, approved, and implemented.

We reached out to the Department of Justice, but a spokesman there said the department had no comment on the matter.
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Linda Stout, et al and the United States of America v. Jefferson County Board of Education and Gardendale City Board of Education. Memorandum Opinion and Order.
24 April 2017.

Brown, Emma. "Judge: Mostly White Southern City May Secede from School District Despite Racial Motive."
The Washington Post. 27 April 2017.

Faulk, Kent. "Gardendale Will Get to Form Its Own School System If It Abides by Federal Judge's Three-Year Plan."
AL.com. 24 April 2017.

Linda Stout, et al and the United States of America v. Jefferson County Board of Education and Gardendale City Board of Education. Motion to Alter or Amend Judgement and Memorandum in Support Thereof.
1 May 2017.

Haffey, Robert. "Alabama Just Brought Back School Segregation."
OccupyDemocrats.com. 28 April 2017.

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FACT CHECK: Did Alabama 'Just Bring Back' School Segregation?

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Alabama just brought back racial segregation in schools. A judge ruled that a mostly white Alabama city could secede from a more racially diverse school district if they met certain conditions. The judge ordered the district to submit a desegregation plan and appoint at least one African-American to their board of education.

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Segregation was outlawed half a century ago, but some want to bring it back, at least on college campuses. And those seeking to bring segregation back are African-Americans - the very group hurt most by it in the early part of the 20th century.

Across the country last fall, college students began protesting alleged oppression and discrimination by white administrators and students. Most of the grievances centered around a lack of black professors or the names of certain buildings, but some protesters are asking for "safe spaces" where whites aren't allowed.

A website called TheDemands.org details the 76 demand lists from protesters across the country. The College Fix has noted that many of the lists call for segregated sections of campus.

For instance, protesters at the University of California, Los Angeles, demanded a new housing center, called the "Afro-House" for black students only. They also insisted this house have cheaper rent than the surrounding area, claiming that "many black students cannot afford to live in Westwood with the high prices of rent."

At New York University, students requested an entire floor of a multi-use building be designated solely for student of color. In other words: "No whites allowed."

At least one college is fighting back against such demands. A spokesman for Claremont McKenna College told the Fix: "No student or group on our campus should live and learn in isolation."

"Indeed, both law and explicit College policy forbid social or spatial exclusion based on any specifically defined identities of race, ethnicity, or other protected classification," he added.

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Segregation is making a comeback -- on college campuses

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Segregation was outlawed half a century ago, but some want to bring it back, at least on college campuses. And those seeking to bring segregation back are African-Americans - the very group hurt most by it in the early part of the 20th century.

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Fronted by tall, proud columns, Goldsboro High in North Carolina was once a flourishing school reflecting the city's 50-50 black-white mix. But the nearly 100-year-old school has verged on academic failure in recent years.

Particularly troubling to civil rights advocates, the student population has become racially and economically isolated - to the point that the high school is now a symbol of " resegregation" in America's classrooms.

In the central attendance zone for Wayne County's schools - a zone that includes Goldsboro High - 93 percent of the students are African-American, and 90 percent are low-income, according to county statistics. By contrast, another attendance zone in the county is 69 percent white, 41 percent low-income.

This past December, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) filed a civil rights complaint against the Wayne County Board of Education. Now, a federal investigation is under way to assess charges that the school board has maintained a segregated, high-poverty attendance area rife with educational inequities.

Earlier this month North Carolina Governor Beverly Purdue told members of the North Carolina Legislative Black Caucus that the state was "in a war" against school resegregation.

School-system officials blame both white and black flight for Goldsboro High School's educational slide.

Yet Wayne County is not an obvious setting for concerns about resegregation. Amid the pines and hog farms of eastern North Carolina, it's home to the racially diverse Seymour Johnson Air Force Base. Black and white residents of Goldsboro mingle easily as they pick up tomatoes and collards at a small farmers' market.

The lack of integration at the high school surprised the Rev. William Barber II when he moved here in the early 1990s.

"If you can't get it right in Goldsboro ... you can't get it right anywhere in the country," says Dr. Barber, president of the state chapter of the NAACP.

The case is a test of how aggressively the Obama administration will pursue such complaints. As such, it could resonate well beyond Goldsboro.

"I'm hopeful that ... other school [districts] in the state and potentially around the country would see that it's no longer acceptable to allow the students in these high-poverty, racially identifiable schools to get a lesser-quality education [than] their white, middle- or upper-class peers," says Mark Dorosin, an adjunct law professor at the Center for Civil Rights at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Nationally, 39 percent of African-American students attend intensely segregated schools, where at least 90 percent are students of color, according to an analysis of 2007 data by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. And it's no longer simply a black-white issue: Forty percent of Latinos are in such schools as well.

In North Carolina, 18 percent of black students and 13 percent of Latino students attended these intensely segregated schools in 2008.

"Resegregation is a national trend [that has been building] for over a decade," says John C. Brittain, a law professor at the University of the District of Columbia.

Among the reasons: white families moving out of central cities or removing their children from the public schools there; school districts being released from court-ordered plans, or abandoning voluntary plans, to promote integration after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision; and a series of Supreme Court decisions since the early 1990s that have limited the tools districts can use for integration.

The most recent Supreme Court case came in 2007 and struck down integration plans in Seattle and Jefferson County, Ky. The court ruled 5 to 4 that districts could not assign students to schools solely on the basis of race, but it held that diversity was a compelling interest that could be pursued in other ways. While some districts have come up with alternatives using a variety of demographic factors, including family income, many have dropped their integration plans.

In Wake County, N.C., less than an hour's drive from Goldsboro, the school board recently voted to end an assignment plan based on socioeconomics, once seen as a national model.

As for the Wayne County case, investigators from the civil rights divisions of the US Education and Justice Departments visited Goldsboro last month for a compliance review related to Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination by entities that receive federal funds. Officials won't comment on the investigation.

Typically, school districts cooperate to come up with a remedy if there's a finding of discrimination. Absent such cooperation, the government could sue the district and ultimately withhold federal funds.

Broadly speaking, "we wouldn't want to see schools become increasingly segregated again," says Russlynn Ali, assistant secretary for civil rights in the US Department of Education. "Diversity is important for lots of reasons. There's evidence that it improves achievement. Certainly [it helps students] to be prepared for this new and interconnected global marketplace.... Damage [is] caused ... when those tools for desegregation are taken away."

The issue of segregation doesn't necessarily resonate strongly with the public, however. Nearly 8 out of 10 Americans said they favor letting students go to their local school, even if it means most of the students would be the same race, according to an Associated Press/ Ipsos Public Affairs poll in 2004.

Fletcher Cobb is a Goldsboro High alumnus who is now a janitor there. When he asked his niece, a current student, why she wasn't doing homework, she told him there aren't enough books for students to bring home. Other schools in the county have books that students can take home, a teacher told a local newspaper.

Other disparities, according to the complaint, include lower test scores; lower participation in advanced classes; higher suspension rates; and lower graduation rates (50 percent of Goldsboro High students graduated within four years in 2009, compared with 72 percent for the county schools as a whole).

"It should be mixed," says Goldsboro High junior Kaban Costello. A parent waiting to pick up a student after school says, "The kids need to be together, or else they're going to be always stuck in this framework of black and white."

School-system officials say they fund the Goldsboro High attendance zone just as well as the county's other schools, and there's nothing intentional about the racial makeup.

Wayne County is a low-wealth region trying to deal with a population drain from Goldsboro's 1940s-era downtown, says Ken Derksen, spokesman for the Wayne County Public Schools.

"The city of Goldsboro is comparable to a lot of cities around the nation looking at issues of black and white flight," Mr. Derksen says. "To turn around 30 years of flight overnight is not going to happen, and it's going to take a lot of effort on everybody's part."

One part of the civil rights complaint is that a waiver policy allows some families in the central attendance area to drive their children to schools in other zones. Out of 197 white students, 152 are shuttled to other schools. Among black students, 419 families have waivers, while about 2,000 stay in the central zone.

To improve opportunities for kids in the central attendance zone, officials three years ago started the Wayne School of Engineering on the Goldsboro High campus. Students from various zones attend the school through a lottery system. Thirty-seven percent of the pupils are from the central attendance area.

About 40 percent of the students at the engineering school are white. Students from the two schools mix on sports teams, but not in classes or at lunch. Many parents are scared away by rumors of weapons and violence at Goldsboro High, says Phylicia Nelson, a student at the engineering school.
Related: Resegregation of U.S. schools deepening Busing to end in Wake County, N.C. Goodbye, school diversity? Economic segregation rising in US public schools

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Are American schools returning to segregation?

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Fronted by tall, proud columns, Goldsboro High in North Carolina was once a flourishing school reflecting the city's 50-50 black-white mix. But the nearly 100-year-old school has verged on academic failure in recent years.

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Chang focused on the Jefferson County School District in Alabama as a representative of this trend. Eight smaller communities within the district have already seceded, forming their own heavily white districts that are separate from the more racially diverse Jefferson County district. Now a ninth, Gardendale, is trying to do the same.

"A look around at our community sporting events, our churches are great snapshots of our community," Chang reports one Gardendale resident wrote on Facebook. "A look into our schools, and you'll see something totally different."

Race is not mentioned overtly, but in the social context of that community, language like that makes it clear what's going on.

While Macartney and Singleton's research shows that more liberal school board members can counter this tide, they also found evidence that white resistance to desegregation is not easy to overcome.

"We do see evidence of ... white families moving out of the district altogether, or moving out of the public school system altogether" after a school board takes measures to desegregate the schools, Macartney explained.

All this can make the task of desegregation seem Sisyphean. School boards can draw district or zone boundaries to maximize racially diversity, but if they do so, they risk seeing white families move away, pull their kids out of school, or, as Chang's reporting shows, even create smaller, separate districts that serve predominantly white neighborhoods.

Macartney agreed that the process is challenging, but emphasized that the main takeaway from his and Singleton's research is that school boards matter.

"To the extent you care about school quality and you have preferences as a voter, you can exercise your rights by voting for school boards," he added. He pointed out that the more desegregated districts there are, the harder it will become for white-flight-oriented families to find segregated school districts to move into. So working on the local level isn't hopeless.

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School segregation is back, big time - but the solution is close to home

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Chang focused on the Jefferson County School District in Alabama as a representative of this trend. Eight smaller communities within the district have already seceded, forming their own heavily white districts that are separate from the more racially diverse Jefferson County district. Now a ninth, Gardendale, is trying to do the same.

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The fight for equality in education is not yet over. Ron Cogswell

As the United States approaches the 60th anniversary of the landmark 1954 Brown vs the Board of Education Supreme Court judgement that helped outlaw racial segregation in American schools, the mainstream media has begun to confront the fact that segregated schools are not just remnants of history.

In 1957, when the governor of Arkansas refused to comply with the Brown vs Board ruling, nine African-American students became the symbol of racial integration when they were admitted to Little Rock Central High School. Paratroopers were called in to help them enter the school gates. It was a turning point in US history for de-segregating public schools.

In a HBO documentary to mark the 50th anniversary in 2007, Minnijean Brown-Trickey - one of the original Little Rock Nine - visited the school.

But the documentary captured her facing a disturbing reality, with black students and white students living in a self-segregated classroom, separated by educational opportunities and achievement.

The US Army, CC BY

Segregation lives on

Similar reports have appeared in the lead-up to the Brown vs Board of education anniversary on May 17. In a recent report researcher John Kucsera from UCLA's The Civil Rights Project details:

New York has the most segregated schools in the country: in 2009, black and Latino students in the state had the highest concentration in intensely-segregated public schools (less than 10% white enrollment), the lowest exposure to white students, and the most uneven distribution with white students across schools. Heavily impacting these state rankings is New York City, home to the largest and one of the most segregated public school systems in the nation.

The US is experiencing a simultaneous rise in the percentages of racial minorities as well as an increase in multi- and bi-racial children. There has also been a return to segregated schools that reflect and perpetuate racially and socioeconomically segregated communities.

"The schools black children attend today, in North and South, East and West, are segregated mostly because their schools are located in segregated neighbourhoods," explains Richard Rothstein, a researcher at the Economic Policy Institute.

Two reports in 2012, "Housing Costs, Zoning, and Access to High-Scoring Schools" from the Brookings think-tank and A Rotting Apple from the Schott Foundation for Public Education, revealed that both in New York and across the country children are experiencing social and educational inequity in their home communities and schools.

Another 2012 study in a journal published by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development concluded that young people may be "doubly disadvantaged" by growing up in poor neighbourhoods and in low-income households.

Current research confirms that race, class, home communities, and schools constitute a matrix of conditions that perpetuate both privilege and disadvantage in the US. This is despite political, public, and media claims, echoed by US secretary of education Arne Duncan, that "education is the one true path out of poverty - no matter your race, ethnicity, or zip code."

But as political blogger Matt Bruenig concludes, data from Pew's Economic Mobility Project shows that birth circumstances remain powerful. Bruenig says: "You are 2.5x more likely to be a rich adult if you were born rich and never bothered to go to college than if you were born poor and, against all odds, went to college and graduated."

Charters don't help

Along with the political failure to address racial and socioeconomic inequity directly and the lingering social inequities in access to housing in the US, another source of the return of segregated schools is a commitment to market forces as central to education reform, notably the rise of charter schools.

Analysis by the not-for-profit Albert Shanker Institute shows there is nothing about "charterness" that suggests charter schools outperform public schools. In fact, public, charter, and private schools in the US have similar outcomes when demographics of students are controlled.

But charter schools have been strongly associated with segregating students. One 2011 study looking at research done into charter school admissions across the country concluded that charter schools "currently isolate students by race and class".

Despite the promise offered by Brown vs the Board of Education 60 years ago, public schools appear unable to create the integrated ideal many claim to embrace in the US.

Back in Little Rock, segregation remains, although the contexts are different:

"Central is still pretty segregated," says Brandon Love, the affluent student body president who is the only black person in his Advanced Placement classes, says in the HBO documentary. "It is just that we do not have to have the National Guard here to get in the school and to go to school."

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Racial segregation returns to US schools, 60 years after the Supreme Court banned it

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As the United States approaches the 60th anniversary of the landmark 1954 Brown vs the Board of Education Supreme Court judgement that helped outlaw racial segregation in American schools, the mainstream media has begun to confront the fact that segregated schools are not just remnants of history.

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Fifty years ago today, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, a landmark piece of legislation that guaranteed all Americans equal protection under the law. That meant that the nation's public schools, still largely segregated despite a Supreme Court order banning the practice in 1954, would have to allow black children to attend school alongside white children.

Under Johnson, the federal government began an aggressive push to integrate schools, threatening recalcitrant districts with federal funding cuts and lawsuits. By 1988, the percentage of black children in white schools in the south had risen from zero to nearly 44 percent, according to a recent report by the UCLA Project on Civil Rights, the first major national evaluation of school segregation in decades.

But, according to the report, a spate of lawsuits filed by the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, and a 1991 Supreme Court decision releasing districts from such orders helped erode that progress. By 2011, the percentage of black students in majority white schools was 23.2 percent - slightly lower than it was in 1968.

One of the longest battles over school integration was fought in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Now, a group of citizens, frustrated by their district's many low-performing schools, wants to form their own city, with separate schools. It's one of several breakaway efforts in cities around the country.

If the plan succeeds in Baton Rouge, the new district is expected to be more wealthy and largely white, and will likely leave behind a population of mostly black students from less affluent households. But supporters say it's about quality education, not race.

"We've had enough of failing our children," said Lionel Rainey, the group's spokesperson. We're not going to do it anymore. And we'll go to the length of creating our own city, to create our own education system to take control back from the status quo."

In Separate and Unequal, which will air on July 15, FRONTLINE goes inside the fight in Baton Rouge to understand the current tensions between race, class and education in America.

Watch the trailer below, and tune in July 15 for the full film. (Check local listings here.)

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A Return to School Segregation in America?

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Fifty years ago today, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, a landmark piece of legislation that guaranteed all Americans equal protection under the law. That meant that the nation's public schools, still largely segregated despite a Supreme Court order banning the practice in 1954, would have to allow black children to attend school alongside white children.

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Some in District 1, like Naomi Peña, 37, a parent who is a member of the district's Community Education Council, think the department has been afraid of alienating rich white parents who, as she said at a recent council meeting, might "lawyer up" if their preferences were blocked.

But as the city proposes to move forward on desegregation, conversations with dozens of District 1 parents of all races over the past few months suggest that it is not only wealthier white parents who might be disappointed by their assignments under a new system, at least in the beginning. Parents choose schools for a constellation of reasons, including the simplicity of going to a nearby school, a preference for a certain educational approach, or a desire to see faces similar to their own in classrooms and at parent-teacher association meetings.

For many, the choice comes down to feeling at home at a school. Nancy Zhang sends her two children to Public School 184, the Shuang Wen School, the district's majority-Asian elementary school. She and another Chinese-American mother said they feared their children would be bullied at other schools in the district. But more than that, Ms. Zhang said, "here I feel and also the kids feel more comfortable."

When Rita LaRosa was looking at schools for her daughter, she visited two that share a building on East Third Street. At the S.T.A.R. Academy, which takes a traditional approach, 84 percent of the students are black or Hispanic, and the same portion qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. At the Neighborhood School, which has a progressive philosophy, close to half the students are white, and just 39 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.

Ms. LaRosa, 44, chose S.T.A.R. "In S.T.A.R. Academy, I feel like my voice is heard," said Ms. LaRosa, who is Hispanic. When she interacts with Neighborhood School parents, she said, "I feel like I have to talk a certain way or express myself a certain way, because I feel like I'm being judged."

In contrast, Ella and Brett Leitner, who are both white, gravitated toward the Neighborhood School, where students call teachers by their first names and have a say in deciding whether the class will study, say, the civil rights movement or the debate over the Dakota Access pipeline.

"For us the social-emotional piece was such an important metric of what made a school good," said Ms. Leitner, 43. If they had not been able to choose a progressive school, she said, they might have tried to get a scholarship at a private school or sent their children to a traditional school and pushed for a more progressive curriculum.

The district started the progressive schools in the late 1980s and early '90s, in an effort to stanch a steady loss of students from the district, mostly to District 2. (It also allowed students from outside the district to enroll, and today 30 percent of elementary school students live elsewhere.) Hispanic, black and Asian families apply to the progressive schools at lower rates than whites, and the schools are all whiter than the district as a whole, with fewer low-income students.

Bradley Goodman, the principal of the East Village Community School, said the imbalance was "something that we've been thinking about and talking about for a long time and wanting to address." His school is 55 percent white. He and the other principals from progressive schools have been part of a diversity initiative that let them set aside a certain number of seats for students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch or who are still learning English. The four schools met their targets this year, though both Mr. Goodman's school and the Neighborhood School made offers to several families who ranked their school as a fourth, fifth or even sixth choice, while turning away other families who ranked it first. But drawing more black and Hispanic parents may be tough.

Over time, parents' choices can solidify into a school being known as a "white school" or a Hispanic one, said Amy Stuart Wells, a professor of sociology and education at the Teachers College at Columbia. That identity becomes self-perpetuating. "When you ask parents to make choices within a segregated system, they choose segregation," she said, "because they don't want to be the only family or just a handful of families that go against that."

Sade Scroggins, 29, has a son in second grade at P.S. 64, the Robert Simon School, which shares a building with the progressive Earth School. P.S. 64 is 85 percent black or Hispanic, and 93 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The Earth School is 48 percent black or Hispanic, and 46 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.

Ms. Scroggins had friends who sent their children to P.S. 64, and through them she had gotten to know some staff members. But when she came to register her son for kindergarten, she said, she walked into the building's entrance on Avenue B, which is used by the Earth School. Ms. Scroggins, who is black, recalled being charmed by the art on the walls.

"It looked kind of, like, village-y," she said. "It was like walking into a futuristic type of school, just the paintings and the art and the animals."

But when she got to the office and asked for P.S. 64, they referred her to the office next door.

Did she consider registering her child at the Earth School instead?

No, she said. "I didn't know anybody who had a child who was in the Earth School," she explained. "Everybody that I know had their children in 64."

Lilah Mejia's three younger children started in the fall at the Children's Workshop School, another progressive school, which has managed to draw a sizable number of Hispanic families.

Ms. Mejia, 39, said she loved the topics that her children were learning about, but was concerned that they were not getting much homework and that the teachers were not correcting their grammar and spelling. She said her first grader's teacher had explained that she did not correct students' grammar because she wanted them to just write. "I love the teacher, she's amazing," Ms. Mejia said. But, she added, "I was just a bit taken aback by that, because that's not how I was raised."

Ms. Peña, from the education council, said she looked at one of the progressive schools for her youngest children, who are twins. But she decided against it because she felt that her family would not fit in. "No parent wants their child to be the only black or brown child in the classroom," she said. "And parents don't want to walk in having to defend their background, their language, their culture to other parents."

Her twins now go to P.S. 20, the Anna Silver School, which is roughly half Hispanic, a little more than a third Asian, 8 percent black and 4 percent white. It has both Spanish and Mandarin dual-language programs. While it does not perfectly replicate the district's racial breakdown, its population does reflect the district's economic diversity.

"It's a really nice window of what the perfect school should look like, in my opinion," Ms. Peña said. She said her daughter had a good friend who was of Chinese descent. "That's exactly what I want for her," she said. "Some people may look like her, but she's also friends with people who don't look like her. It's really comforting."

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A Manhattan District Where School Choice Amounts to Segregation

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Some in District 1, like Naomi Peña, 37, a parent who is a member of the district's Community Education Council, think the department has been afraid of alienating rich white parents who, as she said at a recent council meeting, might "lawyer up" if their preferences were blocked.

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Rolls Press/Popperfoto/Getty

On a winter afternoon that threatened tornadoes, retired federal judge U.W. Clemon stood at a window 31 floors above Birmingham, looking south. In the foreground was the University of Alabama at Birmingham, whose medical center powers the city's economy. To the west, railroad tracks snaked between warehouses, vestiges of boom times, when Birmingham was known as "the Pittsburgh of the South." On the horizon rose Red Mountain, a slight green ridge. Clustered on the other side of its hump, outside the Birmingham city limits, are some of the wealthiest suburbs in Alabama: Mountain Brook, Vestavia Hills, Hoover and Homewood. They have the best schools in the state, and although Alabama has some of the worst schools in the nation, those suburbs frequently make it onto national best-schools lists. Many medical center faculty members live in these "over the mountain" suburbs, as do older Southern families.

Clemon did not go to school over the mountain. His grandparents were sharecroppers in Noxubee County, Mississippi. His parents left for Alabama, where his mother worked as a domestic for a white Birmingham family, while his father was a bricklayer's helper. He started at the Dolomite Colored Elementary School. "We had outside privies," he remembered over lunch at City Club Birmingham. The crowd was light. Other than the servers, he was the only black person in the room. At one point, two white men came over, and one of them greeted "the judge." The other asked if the judge was famous, and the first one said yes, he was.

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Clemon went to Miles College, right outside Birmingham, and became involved in the civil rights movement, working with Martin Luther King Jr. He jokingly recalled unfavorable coverage the movement received from Newsweek in the 1960s. When I mentioned that I hoped to do archival research at the Birmingham Public Library, Clemon chuckled. "I desegregated that," he said.

Clemon went to Columbia Law School in New York City, then returned to Birmingham to practice civil rights law. In 1971, he argued Stout v. Jefferson County Board of Education, in which a black parent sued the county school system, which she claimed was segregated by race. The federal judge agreed and ordered the schools to integrate. The schools of Jefferson County (the schools of Birmingham itself are a separate entity) remain under that decree to this day.

Clemon eventually became Alabama's first black federal judge, joining the U.S. District Court that ruled in the school desegregation case, in the Northern District of Alabama. He stayed on the bench for nearly three decades. In what must have been a surreal moment, the descendant of Southern slaves retired in early 2009 with a resignation letter to Barack Obama, the nation's first black president.

More recently, Clemon has found himself in another surreal situation. This past winter, he was in court to argue Stout v. Jefferson County once again, this time because a middle-class Birmingham suburb called Gardendale wants to leave the Jefferson County school system. Gardendale, which is mostly white, says race has nothing to do with its push for secession: It simply wants to control its schools.

Clemon is skeptical. "The intent is to create a local school system where they will have control over who comes in and that they will minimize the number of blacks who come in," he told me in his raspy, slightly mischievous baritone. Local control has become a popular rallying cry in municipalities across the nation-including liberal states like New York and California-that want to form their own school districts. They all have their reasons, and the reasons all sound reasonable, but Clemon believes he knows what motivates Gardendale and at least some of its counterparts around the country, which is schools that share a single feature that mild suburbanites, with their secret yearnings, will not name. But Clemon, who faced off against Bull Connor and his water cannons and his dogs, will: "No blacks."

The Mason-Dixon Line in South Boston

The most remarkable thing about school integration in the United States is how rare it is, and has always been. The Supreme Court struck down separate but equal schooling with 1954's Brown v. Board of Education ruling, but it fell to federal judges of the 1960s and early '70s to enforce that decision with orders like Stout v. Jefferson.

Such court orders were frequently unpopular; when the opponents of integration lost in the courts, they took to the streets. The resistance reached its apex in 1974, when the blue-collar Irish of South Boston resisted the yellow school buses that had come to symbolize integration; they were as feared and loathed by the populace as the tanks of an invading army. Yet the buses came and went, in Boston and elsewhere. By 1988, widely acknowledged to be the high point of school integration in the U.S., nearly half of all black children attended a majority-white school. An achievement gap that once appeared to be intractable suddenly seemed like something that could be closed in a generation or two.

Since then, however, the gains of Brown v. Board have been almost entirely reversed. Last year, a report by the Government Accountability Office found "a large increase in schools that are the most isolated by poverty and race." Between 2000 and 2014, the number of schools the report deemed H/PBH-that is, "high poverty and comprised of mostly Black or Hispanic students"-more than doubled, from 7,009 to 15,089.

An even more astonishing statistic appeared in a Century Foundation report, published three months earlier, about schools that used socioeconomic status, or class, instead of race as a means to integrate schools. (There are fewer legal and social barriers to socioeconomic integration, but the result is effectively the same.) The Century Foundation concluded that only about "8 percent of all public school students currently attend school districts or charter schools that use socioeconomic status as a factor in student assignment." The report's tone was hopeful, because while the number of districts around country that consciously practiced class integration was a paltry 91 out of more than 13,000, that's more than double what it was in 2007.

Conscious attempts at integration are rare today because the same court that struck down separate-but-equal promptly struck down the best remedy for it. In 1974, 20 years after Brown v. Board , the Supreme Court ruled in Milliken v. Bradley that integration could not take place across district lines, so that Detroit, where the case was brought, was prevented from integrating by exchanging its kids with white and wealthy Bloomfield Hills. In 1986, in 1991 and again in 1992, an increasingly conservative Supreme Court said it wanted desegregation orders lifted once certain conditions were met. The Supreme Court's most severe blow since Milliken came in 2007, in the Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 case, in which it prohibited the use of "explicit racial classifications" in school admissions. Wrote Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." By conflating integration with discrimination, Roberts effectively reversed Brown v. Board.

The breaking away of school districts is a related phenomenon, one that has frustrated the work of integration by appealing to smaller local concerns over grander public ones. More and more, parents see a school in the context of what it can achieve for their child: Education for all has lost out to Princeton for mine.

Resegregation is not restricted to the South. In the San Francisco Bay Area, a wealthy suburb that feeds into Northgate High School is trying to separate from the Mount Diablo Unified School District. Northgate's median income is $126,000, about $50,000 higher than that of the Mount Diablo district. Were Northgate to break away, it would be 65 percent white and only 8 percent Latino.

Proponents of separation in Northgate use exactly the same coded language as those in Gardendale. It is the language being used by secession-seeking districts like East Baton Rouge, in Louisiana, and Malibu, in California, which wants to leave the Santa Monica system. The latter fight is especially bizarre because it is taking place in one of the most privileged enclaves of Los Angeles. "Parents say they are eager to detach themselves from overly bureaucratic school administrations," NBC News reported in late 2014 of Malibu's efforts, which continue to this day, thousands of miles from the hills of Alabama but virtually identical in its social contours. "Others worry that their association with schools that serve at-risk students hurts property values."

The Best Places to Live

Gardendale is not one of the "over the mountain" Birmingham suburbs. It is in north Jefferson County, less hilly and less wealthy than southern suburbs like Mountain Brook. In the 19th century, the settlement was called Jugtown because there was a jug factory there. There were coal mines nearby too, and the city has retained the vestiges of its blue-collar past. People live comfortably there, but not easily. Gardendale's median household income is $56,967, whereas Mountain Brook's is $126,534. Gardendale is 83 percent white. Mountain Brook is 96.5 percent.

There had long been a small group of powerful men in Gardendale-many of them parishioners at the Gardendale First Baptist Church, the town's most prominent civic institution-who decided it was going to become more like Mountain Brook by attracting the well-to-do young families that were, by then, moving farther south, to the exurbs of Shelby County. They wanted Gardendale to do what six other towns in Jefferson County had done: split from the county school system. The centerpiece of the new, independent Gardendale Board of Education would be a $55 million high school Jefferson County had just built in the middle of town for its own system.

By 2013, there finally seemed to be sufficient public will to break away from Jefferson County. That year, Gardendale decided to hold a vote on a new property tax to fund its four schools, which would serve as a referendum on secession. Right before the tax vote, an advertisement appeared in The North Jefferson News. It pictured a white girl. Above her was a question: "Which path will Gardendale choose?" The ad listed "Places that chose NOT to form and support their own school system," including Center Point, Pleasant Grove and Hueytown, all of which are majority black. It also lists districts that seceded from Jefferson County and "are listed as some of the best places to live in the country": Homewood, Hoover, Vestavia and Trussville. All those school systems are very good. They are also very white.

The property tax passed. The following spring, Gardendale formed its own board of education. For the position of superintendent, the city hired Patrick Martin, a young administrator who'd run a school district in central Illinois.

The Gardendale school system prepared to open in the fall of 2014. The city's leaders seemed either unaware or uninterested in the inconvenient fact that Gardendale was bound by Stout v. Jefferson County, which forced Jefferson County to integrate its facilities, students and teachers. Yet other Alabama municipalities had successfully navigated Stout , most recently in 2005, when Trussville pulled its schools out of the county system. Gardendale was justified in thinking that it too could leave the Jefferson County school system.

Jefferson County, however, proved less willing to divorce. There was that $55 million school, and there was the Stout desegregation order, which the county argued would be hurt by Gardendale pulling away so many white students. Gardendale, for its part, has tried to avoid arguments about race, which it must know it cannot win. It claims instead a basic American right, which is the right to be left alone.

Poorer and Blacker

Gardendale High School looms over Gardendale the way the Eiffel Tower looms over Paris. Two enormous wings meet at a colonnaded atrium that looks out at the town's modest center. The red brick and white cornices are both Federal touches, but the building's size and youth are less suggestive of history, with all its varieties of darkness and decay, than of a present-day suburban optimism and health. This continues inside. The hallways are clean, and the children who pass through them seem happy. The array of playing fields, all neatly groomed, seems to stretch into Mississippi.

I drove around Gardendale with Stan Hogeland, who entered politics after 35 years of employment in the town's parks and recreation department. Today, he is the mayor, but much of our tour involved the handsome playgrounds and manicured parks he helped create and manage. "I'm actually prouder to have retired as parks and rec director than I am to be mayor," Hogeland says.

This surely had to do with the nasty secession fight he inherited. In the spring of 2014, as the separation seemed to be moving forward, Jefferson County asked Gardendale for $33.1 million to compensate for the loss of that new high school. Gardendale appealed to Thomas Bice, then the state superintendent of education, who said in February 2015 that Gardendale owed only $8 million. The following month, Jefferson County filed a motion to U.S. District Judge Madeline Haikala, who oversees the Stout integration order.

The county argued that every secession left its district poorer and blacker. "In Jefferson County, splinter districts have historically been predominantly Caucasian and comparatively affluent," wrote the lead Jefferson County attorney. "They are widely perceived as offering a superior public education experience and are magnets for families who can afford to pay the 'tuition' represented by comparatively high property values."

Gardendale's argument was simple: us too. "This Court has exercised jurisdiction over newly formed separate school systems such as Hoover, Leeds and Trussville. Granting intervention for the Gardendale Board would be consistent with previous decisions of the Court." Its case was based firmly on precedent.

Hogeland believes Gardendale needs its own schools-with the new high school as the linchpin-to thrive. As part of the county system, the secessionists say, Gardendale will remain mired in mediocrity, and they cite the example of a "black gentleman" who was an executive at Regents Bank. He was relocating his family to Homewood, which now has the best schools in Alabama.

"People will not move here," Hogeland told me with grim certainty, "to be a part of the Jefferson County school system."

'Empty the Clip'

"I don't see racism in this community," says Jeff Dennis, who owns a jewelry store in a downtown strip mall. "I really don't." He recognizes that if Gardendale breaks away, it would lose some minority students, but this is, in his mind, an unfortunate but unintended consequence. "I don't think anybody has come down and said, This is going to be a predominantly white school."

But Clemon, the former judge now working on Jefferson County's behalf, insists that making Gardendale predominantly white is precisely the point. One of the earliest supporters of this secession was Scott Beason, a former state legislator and radio host. Once, while wearing a wire for state investigators, Beason referred to African-Americans as "aborigines." A staunch nativist, Beason has promised to "empty the clip" on undocumented immigrants. (Beason did not respond to a request for comment; the Gardendale Board of Education declined, through Martin, to speak on the record. Gardendale's lawyers did not answer queries either.)

Another early proponent was Christopher Lucas, a local attorney who now sits on the city's board of education. As he and others were organizing the secession movement on Facebook, Lucas explained in an October 2012 posting what appears to have been a chief concern: "Would Gardendale be required to bring in minorities from outside of the municipal boundaries to achieve some sort of quota? No. The school system is for residents of Gardendale."

Although Gardendale High is under an integration order, it is only about 22.6 percent black, while the county is 43 percent black. Still, students can transfer within the county, and Gardendale is one of the few that afford minority students the opportunity to attend a majority-white high school. There are 26 of these "racial desegregation transfer" students at Gardendale High, accounting for 10 percent of its black population. About another 150 black students from across the county now take classes in Gardendale High's impressive vocational facilities.

The most profoundly whitening feature of the new system would be the exclusion of North Smithfield from Gardendale's schools. A small, unincorporated community 10 miles south of town, North Smithfield sends about 130 black students to Gardendale schools. When it first proposed secession, Gardendale excluded North Smithfield while including two other unincorporated areas, Mount Olive and Brookside, which are overwhelmingly white.

As the fight with Jefferson County intensified through late 2015 and into 2016, the newly formed Gardendale Board of Education decided to allow North Smithfield students to attend Gardendale schools. But the decision was made without consulting North Smithfield residents. North Smithfield students would attend Gardendale schools indefinitely, but North Smithfield would have no seats on Gardendale's board of education.

During the trial, a mother from North Smithfield testified it was plain to her that Gardendale would accept North Smithfield students only to satisfy the Stout order. The black students would be a token, discarded once no longer necessary. "They don't want black children there," she said.

Fiefdoms Funded by Public Dollars

Regardless of what happens in Gardendale, Birmingham and its suburbs are an example of what happens when communities diminish the scope of public education, creating their own fiefdoms, funded by public dollars but effectively functioning as private institutions that guard against intruders.

To cross from Jefferson County into Birmingham is to plunge into an educational ravine. Last year, a nonprofit called EdBuild released a report called "Fault Lines," about the most segregating municipal borders in America. Those borders are frequently created by suburbs that want to use their property taxes to fund their own schools, without having to share with poorer inner-city neighbors. In many ways, the explicit tethering of taxation to education is a major motivational factor for school secession movements, allowing citizens to act like dissatisfied customers and take their tax dollars elsewhere.

EdBuild called Jefferson County, with its 13 school districts, "a case study in gerrymandering" and branded the borders around Birmingham as the second-most segregating in the nation, after Detroit's. The Birmingham City system is 95 percent black and, according to one ranking, isn't even one of the 100 best school districts in Alabama, which has only 173 districts. Mountain Brook and Vestavia Hills, by contrast, are almost entirely white and the pride of the state. The borders that separate those two suburbs from Birmingham are, according to EdBuild, "among the nation's worst." Homewood and Hoover aren't much better.

Try to see this from the point of view of a Gardendale parent. If racial equality is so important, then why are those wealthy over-the-mountain suburbs exempt from it? Is integration only the job of working-class whites? Shouldn't the suburbs that have the most-Mountain Brook, Vestavia Hills-be the ones required to share before those that have less? Thinking this way, a white parent in Gardendale is likely to reach a conclusion very similar to one reached by a black parent: The system is overwhelmingly, crushingly unfair.

Last winter, when community members were afforded the unusual privilege to comment before the court, one of those who spoke was Ralph "Skip" Lindsey III, who lives in Gardendale and has two children in the public schools. This is how he explained his support of Gardendale's secession: "I won't be satisfied unless I hear that all of the other schools that have come out of the county and out of every county system in the state are unwound.... You've got to unwind Trussville, you've got to unwind Hoover, you've got to unwind Leeds. You've got to do it all, or you can't do one."

A $55 Million School for Free

Craig Pouncey has the quiet solidity of late middle age, though there is a slightly elfin quality to his features, some last remnant of youth. His voice has the twang of the Deep South, but he grew up in Los Angeles. His family eventually moved back to Alabama, and he has lived there ever since, on the farm started in the 1940s by his grandparents. He has taught middle school and served as the chief of staff to Bice, the state school superintendent. Today, Pouncey is the superintendent of the Jefferson County school system, a position he has held since 2014. He gets back to the farm, outside of Montgomery, as often as he can.

He says the issue is fairness. The county built a new school to serve as a regional hub. Now, Gardendale wants to claim that school as its own. "I don't think [race] was a real driving force," he says. "The real driving force was the perception that they could get a $55 million high school for free."

Most schools in Jefferson County do not have facilities worth $55 million, or even $5 million. After lunch, Pouncey and I visited Fultondale High School, about 3 miles east of Gardendale High. At the entrance to the school, the principal peeled back a large gray doormat to reveal the letter N laid into the travertine. The symbol is a vestige of New Castle High School, an all-black school when it opened in 1965. The whole building is a vestige of that time, a structure of red brick and tan paneling that looks like a decommissioned bus station. Pouncey had hoped to combine Fultondale and Gardendale at the new Gardendale High School, but the secession movement has placed that plan in jeopardy.

During the trial, a lawyer for Gardendale, Stephen Rowe, questioned Pouncey about this proposal: "Have you considered that, if this plan is carried out, that now the Fultondale class president won't be a class president-they'll have to go to Gardendale, where they're a minority in a bigger school?"

Much of the hearing had a faintly surreal quality, like the exchange above, especially when Gardendale was forced to justify its desire for local control. Jefferson County was on stronger footing, since most statistical findings bolster its argument. The court heard testimony from Michigan State University scholar John Yun, who noted that black children who attended Gardendale Elementary showed "a very large jump" in both math and reading scores. If those students continued on to Gardendale High, they could presumably choose from the school's 12 Advanced Placement courses. Fultondale offers only three AP courses.

Yun argued that if Gardendale were to leave, Jefferson County would become poorer and blacker. It would have fewer resources, and its schools would be more crowded.

The hearing's most dramatic moment was when Haikala asked Martin, the Gardendale superintendent, if he'd ever read the Brown v. Board ruling of 1954. The question clearly caught Martin by surprise. He admitted that he had not read the Supreme Court decision "in its entirety," although he correctly identified the school district in question as being in Topeka, Kansas.

"I can't remember if it was Thurgood Marshall, or who, that argued that case," Martin said.

"I told you it's not meant to be a test," Haikala responded. The point was not to make Martin seem ignorant of the South's racial history, even though he also admitted, during his cross-examination, that he'd never hired an African-American, nor had he ever worked with African-American children.

Haikala asked about Brown v. Board to underscore the significance of the case before her, which was not about a single high school, nor a single town. It was about a thing we said we would do because we were a nation of free and equal persons. She wanted to know if we still aspired to that ideal, in Alabama, in Illinois, in California.

Impervious to Facts

There is another Jefferson County, in another Southern state, that has done things very differently than Jefferson County, Alabama. The one in Kentucky includes the city of Louisville and its proximal suburbs, and a school district that educates 100,000 children.

It does so in a rare big-city system that considers racial integration a crucial goal. And it has done so even after the U.S. Supreme Court's 2007 decision in the Parents Involved case, which forbade Jefferson County from using race as the determining factor for school assignments. The system's administrators came up with a formula that used socioeconomic status instead. While some students travel long distances on buses, the result is that the schools have remained racially balanced.

Donna Hargens, the system's superintendent, told me the push for diversity has to be combined with choice, so that parents don't feel as if they're being railroaded into integration. Magnet schools are "absolutely essential," she says, presumably because they signal a commitment to excellence; Hartford, Connecticut, also relies on magnet schools in its much-praised integration plan, which pulls in students from the wealthy white suburbs that surround the impoverished urban core. As a sign of enthusiasm for integration, Hargens cited the finding that 42 percent of parents do not choose the closest school for their children.

An equivalent system in Birmingham would combine the city system with Jefferson County, while dissolving long-standing islands of privilege like Mountain Brook and Vestavia Hills. But there is no political will for that, nor the political capital. The will is flowing the other way, in the direction of self-assertion. A less kind word for the trend is selfishness.

Last year, investigative reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote for The New York Times Magazine about choosing a public school in Brooklyn for her daughter, Najya. Hannah-Jones, who'd reported on school segregation for ProPublica, was relatively new to New York City. The city, which has never been under court order, has "the most segregated schools in the country," a study by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, found in 2014. That partly has to do with housing segregation, as well as the yawning disparity of resources to which that disparity inevitably leads.

Nor is there any more will to integrate in Manhattan than there is in Gardendale. Bill de Blasio, New York's progressive mayor, entered City Hall promising to redress the inequality, which he argued had been foisted on New Yorkers by his predecessor, billionaire Michael Bloomberg. But his schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, said in February 2016, "I want to see diversity in schools organically. I don't want to see mandates." That means City Hall is too afraid of affluent white voters to wean them off their local schools.

Hannah-Jones had a choice between the highly desired P.S. 8, which is mostly white, and P.S. 307, which educates mostly children of color. White parents generally shun P.S. 307, but that was where Hannah-Jones sent Najya, because she felt it was her duty.

When I called Hannah-Jones, I wanted very much to know how Najya was doing at P.S. 307, whose test scores are notably lower than those at P.S. 8. "My daughter is doing wonderfully," she says. She notes that while she remains "very pessimistic" about the prospects for integration, the reaction to her article has given her "a tiny bit of hope."

Economist Tyler Cowen, who is a conservative, writes about P.S. 8 and P.S. 307 in his new book, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream, calling white parents' visceral fear of a mostly black school "discouraging." He deems the fleeting integration in Brooklyn "a kind of temporary experiment in white lives, to be reversed once the next generation comes along." Hannah-Jones agrees. "You're gonna have to force and cajole people" into integration, she says, which is why the court orders of the 1960s and '70s proved effective. "We're not going to do this voluntarily." Integration has been shown to help both black and white children, but fears of racial mixing override fact. "There is still a deep-seated racial prejudice that white Americans feel towards black children," Hannah-Jones tells me. It pains me to agree with her.

Even Louisville's success is imperiled. A bill sponsored by a Republican state representative would effectively end cross-county busing, keeping kids in their neighborhood schools. But neighborhoods are segregated in Louisville, as they are pretty much everywhere in America. Without busing, there can be no integration.

Earlier this spring, the anti-integration bill passed in one of the state's legislative chambers but did not come to a vote in the other before the session's close. For now, the schools in Louisville remain integrated.

A Sturdy Barrier

Gardendale learned its fate in the middle of April, in a surprising ruling by Haikala. During the hearing that took place over the winter, she seemed consistently skeptical about Gardendale's claims that it can improve its schools only through local control.

She remained skeptical in the decision handed down last month, pointing out that many in Gardendale "prefer a predominantly white city." At the same time, Haikala acceded to Gardendale's wishes by allowing for a separation that would begin at the elementary level and take place over three years. She will supposedly monitor the process to make sure Gardendale commits to desegregation efforts. Among other provisions, she wants the Gardendale Board of Education to appoint a black member. Should the secession process continue apace, she will have Gardendale compensate Jefferson County for the $55 million high school.

"The Court is giving the Gardendale Board of Education an opportunity to demonstrate good faith," Haikala wrote, despite having demonstrated her own suspicion of Gardendale's motives from the bench.

"It's hard to square that the decision directly acknowledges race played a factor, but it still allows the district to move forward with its plans," says Monique Lin-Luse, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund who represented some of the Jefferson County families that opposed the split.

Clemon, who argued the original Stout case, said he was "disappointed" by Haikala's findings. "Hope never dies, and the struggle continues," he told AL.com, echoing Ted Kennedy's famous dream-shall-never-die speech at the 1980 Democratic National Convention.

Shortly after returning from Alabama, I reached out to an old friend. About 10 years ago, Steve and I drove across the country together: He had just graduated from an Ivy League college and was on his way to a top-ranked law school on the West Coast. Steve, who is Jewish, grew up in Mountain Brook. We stopped there on our first night on the road. It seemed like a nice place. In the morning, we ate eggs and headed for Mississippi.

Today, Steve lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and works in finance. (He asked me not to use his real name because he doesn't think his employer would want him commenting for this story.) He is conflicted about Mountain Brook. The education was excellent, but it was still an Alabama education. In middle school, he was called a "nigger lover" by other students for refusing to participate in the taunting of black classmates. His family was liberal, from elsewhere. While his classmates spent the weekends hunting, Steve and his family would go to museums. "It's a great lifestyle if your family has been in Mountain Brook forever," he told me.

Today, Steve and his wife live in a part of Oakland called Rockridge. Although Oakland has traditionally had problems with crime, the city is so segregated that-as in Chicago or Brooklyn-you can easily occupy a comfortable reality in which gunfire will never intrude. A house in Rockridge sells for $1.3 million, double the median home price in Mountain Brook.

Schools, though, are a problem. Rockridge feeds into the Oakland Unified School District, which many white parents fear, particularly those with kids in the upper grades. I asked Steve what he will do when he has a child old enough to enroll in school. Will he and his wife stay in Oakland, or will they move "through the tunnel," to the vastly superior districts of Orinda or Walnut Creek?

Steve had to think about this. "I want them to be part of a diverse community," he said of the children he plans to have, then paused. What Steve said next we have all said, or thought, all of us who believe that sending a child to Stanford or Brown is proof of parenting done right. It is a small word, but a sturdy barrier between our ideals and our realities, the lives we should live and the lives we do.

"But..."

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From Alabama to California, rich communities are bringing back school segregation.

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Rolls Press/Popperfoto/Getty On a winter afternoon that threatened tornadoes, retired federal judge U.W. Clemon stood at a window 31 floors above Birmingham, looking south. In the foreground was the University of Alabama at Birmingham, whose medical center powers the city's economy.

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Sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education, the schools in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, show how separate and unequal education is coming back.

Though James Dent could watch Central High School's homecoming parade from the porch of his faded-white bungalow, it had been years since he'd bothered. But last fall, Dent's oldest granddaughter, D'Leisha, was vying for homecoming queen, and he knew she'd be poking up through the sunroof of her mother's car, hand cupped in a beauty-pageant wave, looking for him.

So, at about 4:30 in the afternoon on October 18, Dent, age 64, made his way off the porch and to the curb along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in the West End of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Soon he could hear the first rumblings of the band.

There was a time, little more than a decade ago, when the Central High School homecoming parade brought out the city. The parade started in the former state capital's lively downtown and seemed to go on for miles. The horns of one of the state's largest marching bands, some 150 members strong, would bounce off the antebellum mansions along the streets. Revelers-young and old, black and white, old money and no money-crowded the sidewalks to watch the elaborate floats and cheer a football team feared across the region.

Reader Responses
Excerpts from comments posted to this story:
"The differences in my suburban elementary school and the first city-wide 6th grade school were stark, mainly razor wire fencing, armed police officers, drugs, weapons, cursing, disrespect for authorities, etc."
-t uscaloosated

"Pretending that just mixing some white kids in there will solve all these issues is stupid. It's a liberal, feel-good quick-fix that fixes nothing."
- PW

"As an Asian-American who grew up in Los Angeles and went to college in the SF Bay Area, I can safely say that this problem also exists in the liberal bastion of California."
- Lou

"Whatever. My kinds go to an over 90% black school that was #1 in the city last year in math and #3 in the state. And now other whites are starting to send their kids too because they see how great of a school it is."
-i rene adler
Read all comments
Central was not just a renowned local high school. It was one of the South's signature integration success stories. In 1979, a federal judge had ordered the merger of the city's two largely segregated high schools into one. The move was clumsy and unpopular, but its consequences were profound. Within a few years, Central emerged as a powerhouse that snatched up National Merit Scholarships and math-competition victories just as readily as it won trophies in football, track, golf. James Dent's daughter Melissa graduated from Central in 1988, during its heyday, and went on to become the first in her family to graduate from college.

But on that sunlit day last October, as Dent searched for Melissa's daughter in the procession coming into view, he saw little to remind him of that era. More caravan than parade, Central's homecoming pageant consisted of a wobbly group of about 30 band members, some marching children from the nearby elementary schools, and a dozen or so cars with handwritten signs attached to their sides. The route began in the predominantly black West End and ended a few blocks later, just short of the railroad tracks that divide that community from the rest of the city.

The reason for the decline of Central's homecoming parade is no secret. In 2000, another federal judge released Tuscaloosa City Schools from the court-ordered desegregation mandate that had governed it for a single generation. Central had successfully achieved integration, the district had argued-it could be trusted to manage that success going forward.

Freed from court oversight, Tuscaloosa's schools have seemed to move backwards in time. The citywide integrated high school is gone, replaced by three smaller schools. Central retains the name of the old powerhouse, but nothing more. A struggling school serving the city's poorest part of town, it is 99 percent black. D'Leisha, an honors student since middle school, has only marginal college prospects. Predominantly white neighborhoods adjacent to Central have been gerrymandered into the attendance zones of other, whiter schools.

Tuscaloosa's schools today are not as starkly segregated as they were in 1954, the year the Supreme Court declared an end to separate and unequal education in America. No all-white schools exist anymore-the city's white students generally attend schools with significant numbers of black students. But while segregation as it is practiced today may be different than it was 60 years ago, it is no less pernicious: in Tuscaloosa and elsewhere, it involves the removal and isolation of poor black and Latino students, in particular, from everyone else. In Tuscaloosa today, nearly one in three black students attends a school that looks as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened.

Tuscaloosa's school resegregation-among the most extensive in the country-is a story of city financial interests, secret meetings, and angry public votes. It is a story shaped by racial politics and a consuming fear of white flight. It was facilitated, to some extent, by the city's black elites. And it was blessed by a U.S. Department of Justice no longer committed to fighting for the civil-rights aims it had once championed.

Certainly what happened in Tuscaloosa was no accident. Nor was it isolated. Schools in the South, once the most segregated in the country, had by the 1970s become the most integrated, typically as a result of federal court orders. But since 2000, judges have released hundreds of school districts, from Mississippi to Virginia, from court-enforced integration, and many of these districts have followed the same path as Tuscaloosa's-back toward segregation. Black children across the South now attend majority-black schools at levels not seen in four decades. Nationally, the achievement gap between black and white students, which greatly narrowed during the era in which schools grew more integrated, widened as they became less so.

In recent years, a new term, apartheid schools -meaning schools whose white population is 1 percent or less, schools like Central-has entered the scholarly lexicon. While most of these schools are in the Northeast and Midwest, some 12 percent of black students in the South now attend such schools-a figure likely to rise as court oversight continues to wane. In 1972, due to strong federal enforcement, only about 25 percent of black students in the South attended schools in which at least nine out of 10 students were racial minorities. In districts released from desegregation orders between 1990 and 2011, 53 percent of black students now attend such schools, according to an analysis by ProPublica.

The Dent family, from grandfather to granddaughter, has lived out integration's fleeting wonder, a fact that hardened James Dent's face as he stood on that Tuscaloosa curb last October. The parade-just 15 minutes old, and yet almost over-quickly brought D'Leisha before him. Nene, as her family calls her, beamed and waved. Dent waved back and looked around to share the moment. But besides his wife and his stepson, no one else was there.

In the hours after the parade, James Dent sat back in a worn wingback chair in the cramped but tidy house he and his wife rent in the West End. As dusk brought out the whirring of cicadas, he quietly flipped through a photo album devoted to D'Leisha's many accomplishments. She's the class president, a member of the mayor's youth council, a state champion in track and field. Later that night, she would be named homecoming queen as well.

Dent never went to college. One of 13 children born into the waning days of Jim Crow, he took his place in the earliest of integrated American institutions: the military. He served four years in the Air Force, including a year in Vietnam, before returning to the West End to spend the next 40 mixing cement for a living. The work was steady, but the pay meager.

Thin, with chestnut skin, and seldom seen without a Vietnam-vet cap, Dent is a reserved man, not prone to soapboxes. But after a long silence, he gently suggested that maybe his granddaughter deserved a little more than a 12-car salute at a brief and sparsely attended parade. When D'Leisha graduates this spring, she will have spent her entire public education in segregated schools. Just like he had.

"I think about it all the time, and ain't nothing I can do about it," he said. "It ain't going to get no better." He said he just hoped she was learning as much as the city's white students were, then grew quiet again. If integration was going to prove so brief, what, he wondered, had all the fighting been for?

Tucked along the Black Warrior River some 60 miles southwest of Birmingham, Tuscaloosa has a racial history marked by contradictions. The city is home to three colleges, the University of Alabama among them, and a pioneering psychiatric hospital. Its civic leaders have, at times, been called progressive. A New York Times reporter covering civil rights in the 1950s described Tuscaloosa as a "clean, prosperous city that has long been proud of its good race relations."

And yet, of course, the phrase good race relations was misleading: the city operated under the dictates of Jim Crow until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Black people took their first breaths in segregated hospital rooms, worshipped in segregated churches, and, when they died, were buried in segregated graveyards. The imperial wizard of the United Klans of America called Tuscaloosa home during the civil-rights era. Historians and older black residents say the city avoided the ugliest violence of that time because black people mostly stayed in their place.

Unlike many other southern cities, Tuscaloosa has a long tradition of educating black children. When the city founded its public-school system in 1885, it opened both white and black schools. That year, the new school board provided maps, tables, blackboards, and crayons for 274 white children and 173 black children.

But that does not mean that Tuscaloosa's schools were equal before their integration, or that the city would accommodate integration willingly (as the infamous riots foiling the attempted integration of the University of Alabama in 1956 attested).

James Dent entered first grade at the "colored" Central Elementary not long after the Supreme Court issued its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. "We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place," Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote. "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." And yet-so ferocious and effective was the southern pushback against desegregation-Dent would never attend school with a white classmate.

The Brown ruling did not hinge on the inferior resources allotted black students under many segregated educational systems. As Warren pointed out in his decision, many southern officials, in an effort to forestall integration, had been investing heavily in bringing black schools up to white standards, so that by the time the Court agreed to hear Brown, school facilities and teacher salaries in many black public schools had "been equalized, or [were] being equalized."

"We must look instead," Warren wrote, "to the effect of segregation itself." He wrote that to separate black children "from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone." The justices noted that education was "perhaps the most important function of state and local governments" and that the integration of schools was essential to the integration of black citizens into society as a whole.

The ruling came with a heavy compromise. Warren understood the storm of resistance likely to confront the decision. He believed only a united Court could contain southern rage, but some of the justices wanted to go slow. So, instead of laying out an explicit framework for desegregation, the Court acknowledged that the "variety of local conditions" made dismantling Jim Crow schools a complicated matter, and ultimately placed the burden of enforcing its ruling on district courts. It gave the lower courts no guidance other than to say that desegregation should proceed "with all deliberate speed."

In some ways, the Court's hesitancy to mandate immediate desegregation is understandable. The racial caste system the Court suddenly deemed illegal not only predated the nation itself but had been sanctioned by that very judicial body for six decades.

Yet while the Court dragged its feet on what to do, southern officials were moving quickly. Virginia Governor Thomas B. Stanley vowed to use "every legal means" to "continue segregated schools." Alabama joined other southern states in passing laws allowing or requiring school boards to shut schools to avoid having even a handful of black children sit in classrooms with white ones. Some states helped fund the all-white academies popping up across the South. State officials encouraged white parents to remove their children from public schools, helping to set off the white flight that continues to plague school systems today. Two years after the Brown ruling, not a single black child attended school with white children in eight of the 11 former Confederate states, including Alabama.

Dent doesn't recall hearing his parents ever discuss his new right to an integrated education. His mother, a domestic who cleaned white people's houses, provided the family with its only stable income; his father worked odd jobs as he could find them. Dent and his parents and 12 siblings were often on the move, sometimes crashing with relatives.

School did not come easily to Dent, an athletic boy with a serious face, nor did he particularly like it. Mostly, it reminded him of how poor his family was. "I remember going to school barefoot" as a young child, Dent told me. "I'd be so embarrassed, I'd try to play hooky."

By the time he started his freshman year in high school, in 1964, a full decade after Brown, just 2.3 percent of the nearly 3 million school-aged black children in the old Confederate South attended school alongside white children. None of those children lived in Tuscaloosa. At Dent's school, Druid High, students learned from hand-me-down textbooks and lagged behind their white counterparts on achievement tests. The curriculum pushed students toward learning a trade instead of preparing for college.

Even so, Dent's experience at Druid reveals a truth often lost in the history of school integration. Though its resources were not as rich as those of the all-white Tuscaloosa High, Druid was a source of pride within the city's black community. Its students soaked up lessons from a committed staff of all-black teachers, many of whom were exceptionally talented, in part because teaching was among the only professional careers open to black southerners at the time. What the school lacked in racial diversity, it made up for in economic variety: the children of domestic workers walked the halls with the children of college professors. Condoleezza Rice was one of Dent's schoolmates.

McDonald Hughes, Druid's tall, stern principal, instilled a sense of discipline and of possibility in his students. "He'd grab you by the shoulders," Dent recalled with a laugh. "He wanted you to succeed."

Just before Dent's freshman year, Congress had passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The law barred school districts that discriminated against black students from receiving federal education funding, which would soon be increased by more than $1 billion. Under the law, the feds for the first time could sue defiant districts. The sweeping legislation brought about the rarest of moments in American history: all three branches of government were aligned on civil rights. Backed by the courts and Congress, the Johnson administration set the Justice Department to aggressively pursuing desegregation.

James Dent would never feel the impact of these changes: Druid High remained untouched until well after his graduation. Throughout the South, school officials, realizing they could not avoid integration altogether, sought "race neutral" means to control it. Some adopted plans for "neighborhood schools," with attendance zones carefully drawn around racially distinct parts of town. As a result, token integration replaced absolute segregation in many places. All-white schools started disappearing, but all-black schools remained common.

Still, by 1968, one out of three southern black kids was going to school with white children. That same year, the Supreme Court revealed its growing impatience when it ordered school officials to produce plans that promised "realistically to work, and realistically to work now," eliminating segregation "root and branch." Three years later, the Court emphasized that desegregation plans should be judged by their effectiveness in eliminating racially identifiable schools.

The dominoes, at last, had begun to fall.

Melissa Dent, James's first child, was born in 1969, around the time the National Education Association and the Department of Justice persuaded a federal court to force Tuscaloosa to comply with a statewide desegregation order. As she began to toddle and then run around, revealing herself to be an athlete, like her father, the South was quickly changing: by the early '70s, more than 90 percent of black children were attending desegregated schools.

Even so, Melissa Dent began her education at the same all-black elementary school that her father had attended. In 1975, the Department of Justice and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund hauled the district back into court, not long before a federal agency placed the Tuscaloosa system on its list of the nation's worst civil-rights offenders. The case landed on the docket of Judge Frank McFadden, a Yale Law-educated former Wall Street attorney born in Oxford, Mississippi.

McFadden, now 88, with a shock of white hair, still practices law in Montgomery, and he recently described the predicament he found himself in some 40 years ago. The Supreme Court had been right in striking down legal segregation, McFadden said. The details of the Jim Crow era-how the words white supremacy were written on Alabama's Democratic Party ballot, or how even which line you stood in at the liquor store depended on your race-remained vivid for the former judge. "Separate but equal was a joke, a horrible joke," he told me.

But by the time the Tuscaloosa case hit his desk, McFadden said, Brown had stood as the law of the land for two decades and the legal barriers to integration had been eliminated. "The plaintiffs were contending that the absence of integration equals the presence of segregation, and they are not necessarily the same." The Justice Department and the Legal Defense Fund were asserting that "if there was a racial imbalance in the student body, then that in and of itself established segregation, and some remedy had to happen."

McFadden disagreed. "What was being sought in the Tuscaloosa case when it came to me was a forced integration," he said. "If you read my orders in the Tuscaloosa case and what I said in the courtroom, it was simply this: Brown v. Board of Education said you cannot send a child to a specific school because of his or her race, and that is precisely what affirmative action was requiring to be done."

McFadden admitted to me that much of the segregation once required by law remained, even though the laws no longer did. He noted that segregation had its roots in slavery, and that white attitudes toward black Americans had hardened over the centuries.

But when asked how the country could have addressed the resistance to integration if the courts hadn't forced it, he turned philosophical. "You would have sunk the first slave ship, cut that all out, and not brought them in here," he said, his honeyed Oxford drawl softening the bite in his words. "How one would accomplish desegregation in an ideal world, I don't have that answer." He raised his age-speckled hands, palms up. "But before you have that ideal, human beings have to change attitudes."

The Tuscaloosa case and others like it were hard, McFadden said. He ultimately decided that Tuscaloosa's efforts, centered on the creation of neighborhood-based schools, were sufficient, because he believed the school segregation that remained resulted from housing patterns. But the Supreme Court had already made clear that disproportionately black schools in districts with a history of legal segregation were highly suspicious, and that housing-based segregation could not justify all-black schools in these districts. In overruling McFadden, the federal appeals court noted that the virtually all-black Druid High was not even two miles from the mostly white Tuscaloosa High. McFadden eventually presided over a series of changes, including the creation of Central as the city's sole public high school.

In the fall of 1979, Central High School opened to serve all public-high-school students in the district-no matter their race, no matter whether they lived in the city's public-housing projects or in one of the mansions along the meandering Black Warrior River. The mega-school, a creative solution to a complex problem, resulted from many hours of argument and negotiation in McFadden's chambers. It was spread across two campuses-ninth- and 10th-graders at the former black high school, now called Central West; 11th- and 12th-graders at the old white high school, called Central East. (The judge's order also created three single-grade middle schools.)

All traces of the segregated system, from the mascots to the school colors of the two former schools, were discarded. All of Tuscaloosa's public-high-school students would now unite under the red-and-white banner of the Falcons. As one of the biggest schools in the state, Central would offer classes in subjects ranging from Latin to forensics.

Over the years, Central racked up debate-team championships. Its math team dominated at state competitions. The cheerleaders tumbled their way to nationals, and the Falcons football team trounced local competitors so badly, some refused to play against it. Central students were regularly named National Merit Scholars. In 2001, the state found Central's projected dropout rate to be less than half Alabama's average.

"Central and its resources could reach any child," said Robert Coates, a former principal of the school.

The school was hardly perfect. Black students were disproportionately funneled into vocational classes, and white students into honors classes. Some parents complained that competitive opportunities were limited to just the very best students and athletes because the school, at 2,300 students, was so large. And the white flight that had begun when the courts first ordered the district to desegregate continued, slowly, after the formation of the mega-school. But despite these challenges, large numbers of black students studied the same robust curriculum as white students, and students of both races mixed peacefully and thrived.

Desegregation had been wrenching and complicated, but in Tuscaloosa and across the country, it achieved undeniable results. During the 1970s and '80s, the achievement gap between black and white 13-year-olds was cut roughly in half nationwide. Some scholars argue that desegregation had a negligible effect on overall academic achievement. But the overwhelming body of research shows that once black children were given access to advanced courses, well-trained teachers, and all the other resources that tend to follow white, middle-income children, they began to catch up.

A 2014 study conducted by Rucker Johnson, a public-policy professor at the University of California at Berkeley, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found desegregation's impact on racial equality to be deep, wide, and long-lasting. Johnson examined data on a representative sample of 8,258 American adults born between 1945 and 1968, whom he followed through 2011. He found that black Americans who attended schools integrated by court order were more likely to graduate, go on to college, and earn a degree than black Americans who attended segregated schools. They made more money: five years of integrated schooling increased the earnings of black adults by 15 percent. They were significantly less likely to spend time in jail. They were healthier.

Notably, Rucker also found that black progress did not come at the expense of white Americans-white students in integrated schools did just as well academically as those in segregated schools. Other studies have found that attending integrated schools made white students more likely to later live in integrated neighborhoods and send their own children to racially diverse schools.

Melissa Dent attended her first integrated class as a middle-schooler, in 1980, as a result of the court order. But by the time she graduated from Central eight years later, integration in the South had already reached its high-water mark. The percentage of black and white students attending school together would never be greater.

At Central, Dent quickly made a name for herself as a premier athlete. Her track team took the state title twice, and she was named Alabama's top female high-school track performer in 1987. More important, the school introduced her to people from different backgrounds. Neither her mother nor her father had gone to college, yet her classmates-some of whose fathers were attorneys or business owners-planted that seed. "All my friends were talking about college and wanting to do better," she told me. "I've always been ambitious, and I wanted to do better too."

As part of the first generation born outside the constraints of Jim Crow, Dent has not lived out a Horatio Alger Jr. fable. Much like the story of integration, her story is one of fits and starts, of grinding progress and battles to hang on to the gains. In her sophomore year of college, she got pregnant. She came back home and had her baby. But she then returned to school, walking onto the track team at the University of Alabama and graduating in 1995.

Now 45 and a single mother of four, she works on the assembly line at the Mercedes-Benz plant just outside of town. Her work is physically taxing, but she fought to get the factory gig, a coveted job in the area, because it paid more than she'd ever earned as a teaching assistant, the job she had after college. Unlike her father, she owns her West End home, a brick fixer-upper she bought eight years ago, after falling in love with its den and big backyard.

Dent called herself "average, very average," as a student, but like her own parents, she hopes that education will take her children further than it has taken her.

Her children's academic medals and certificates clutter the living-room walls in her house. It is clear in conversation that Melissa never expected to count the opportunity for a quality education among the things she would be unable to provide for her children. She said she'd assumed that she'd be the bridge between her father's Jim Crow generation and a new generation for whom integration was natural.

Dent said her high-school class had formed a lasting bond. Even now, she said, if she called on any of her white fellow alums, like the prominent lawyer she'd reconnected with during a recent class reunion, they would remember her. She believes D'Leisha, a child every bit as outgoing as her mother is reserved, would have formed a rainbow coalition of friends if she'd attended the old Central, and made connections that could have helped her in the future.

She glanced at D'Leisha. "My girls are not experiencing that."

III. D'Leisha

A few minutes before first period on a Wednesday last October, D'Leisha Dent, a 17-year-old senior, waded through Central High's halls, toes with chipped blue polish peeking out from her sandals, orange jeans hugging solid legs that had helped make her the three-time state indoor shot-put champion.

She eventually broke free from a tangle of girls to enter Tyrone Jones's Advanced Placement English class and take her seat at the front. She dropped two black bags taut with notebooks and binders beside her desk.

Jones didn't waste time setting the boisterous class to task. The AP exam was approaching. Students who didn't score high enough wouldn't get college credit for the class. Even though the 17 girls and boys gathered in front of him made up Central's brightest, their practice essay about a poem hadn't gone so well.

D'Leisha raised her hand, her brow furrowed. How many kids had made the cutoff last year? she asked. Only two students had, but the teacher dodged the question. "I really do believe all of you can make those scores," he said.

He passed out an essay question about D. H. Lawrence's novel The Rainbow. As the students began to write, a girl sitting to his left scrunched up her nose and raised her hand. She couldn't spell a word she wanted to use in her essay. Jones told her to look it up in one of the heavy red dictionaries in the baskets below their desks.

"You know what I don't understand?" the girl said, a pen poised at her lips. "You always tell us to look up the word. How are we supposed to look a word up if we don't know to spell it?"

Jones stopped. His eyes scanned each of the 17 brown faces looking expectantly back at him. Then he gave an answer that seemed to sum up their educational experience. "What do we say about struggling?" he asked. "You have to work through the struggle."

After Melissa Dent graduated, in 1988, Central continued as one of the state's standout high schools. But over time, local leaders grew more concerned about the students who didn't attend the school than those who did.

White students once accounted for a majority of the Tuscaloosa school district's students. But by the mid-1990s, they made up less than a third. Total enrollment had dropped from 13,500 in 1969 to 10,300 in 1995. Many white parents had decided to send their children to nearly all-white private schools or to move across the city line to access the heavily white Tuscaloosa County Schools.

Tuscaloosa's business leaders and elected officials had witnessed the transformation of other southern cities after their school districts had reached a tipping point-the point at which white parents become unsettled by the rising share of black students in a school, and pull their children from the school en masse. School districts in cities such as Birmingham and Richmond had seen their integration efforts largely mooted: just about all the white students had left. As white families had moved out to the suburbs, eroding the tax base, both the schools and the cities themselves had suffered. Many officials in Tuscaloosa obsessed about the rippling consequences of continued white flight. "Money follows kids, and the loss of white students was very, very critical," said Shelley Jones, who is white and served as a school-board member in the 1990s, and later as the chair.

In some ways, all-black schools today are worse than Druid High was back in the 1950s, when poor black students mixed with affluent and middle-class ones.

Tuscaloosa's residential population stagnated during the '90s, and the school situation took on special urgency in 1993: Tuscaloosa was vying for the Mercedes-Benz plant where Melissa Dent now works, which officials hoped would draw people to the city. Just a few years earlier, Tuscaloosa had lost out on a bid for a Saturn plant. In an interview early this year, Johnnie Aycock, who at the time headed the Chamber of Commerce of West Alabama, suggested the schools had scared Saturn away. "We learned that lesson. We learned that lesson completely."

Publicly, the city's movers and shakers said the lack of neighborhood schools made the district unattractive and that schools languished in disrepair because the district had to await court approval for every little decision. Behind closed doors, they argued that if they did not create some schools where white students made up the majority-or near it-they'd lose the white parents still remaining.

Districts under desegregation orders aren't supposed to take actions that increase racial separation. And so the city's leadership decided the desegregation order needed to go, and they believed the time was ripe for a court to agree.

In the early 1990s, an increasingly conservative Supreme Court had issued several crucial rulings that made it much easier for school systems to get out from under court supervision. The Court ruled that desegregation orders were never meant to be permanent, but rather were a "temporary measure to remedy past discrimination," and that school decisions should return to local control once a district had shown a "good faith" effort to eliminate segregation. Because of changing racial demographics and housing patterns, the Court also ruled that districts no longer had to prove that they'd eliminated segregation "root and branch," just that they'd done so to the "extent practicable." Once released, a school board could assign students however it chose, as long as no proof existed that it did so for discriminatory reasons.

In 1993, Tuscaloosa's school board fired a test shot. It filed papers in federal court seeking to build a new elementary school called Rock Quarry, deep in a nearly all-white part of town separated from the rest of the city by the Black Warrior River. If a judge accepted the school, that might signal a willingness to end the order altogether. The case landed in the courtroom of Judge Sharon Blackburn, a recent George H. W. Bush appointee who had gone to college in Tuscaloosa.

In 1995, Blackburn held a five-day hearing to decide the question of Rock Quarry. School officials promised that the new school's student body, though whiter than the district's overall school population, would be half black.

The roster of witnesses lined up behind the school board shocked many in the black community. It included some of the city's most influential black leaders, including a city councilman, a state senator, and Judge John England Jr., whose credentials carried force. England had been a member of the first integrated class at the University of Alabama Law School, and he'd fought discrimination his whole career as a litigator, before taking on roles as a city-council member and then as a county judge.

England testified as to how the city's racial views had changed over the years. Building a school "across the river," England told the court, was "the best thing for the community as a whole."

Rumors spread within the community that England's and others' support had been part of a secret arrangement with white leaders. Dennis Parker, an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, asked England during his testimony whether he'd said at a public meeting that a deal had been struck to improve a West End school in exchange for support for a new school in the whitest part of town. England denied that any such deal had been made, and Blackburn gave the nod to the new school. Soon thereafter, the school board voted to go back to court to seek release from federal oversight.

"You can't know how strongly I feel about our history of racial injustice," the judge said. "But I'm doing what I believe the law requires me to do."

The Legal Defense Fund had by that time started supporting the release of districts from federal court orders, settling cases in return for promises that the districts would voluntarily continue some desegregation efforts. It had seen the writing on the wall: "There seemed almost a fatigue with the cases" on the part of judges, "and a desire to get them finished," Parker told me. And beginning in the Reagan administration, the Justice Department had started to walk away from the court orders.

A negotiated agreement, supported by the Legal Defense Fund and the Justice Department, to end Tuscaloosa's federal desegregation order was brought before Judge Blackburn in 1998. School leaders publicly pledged to continue desegregation efforts, and Superintendent Bob Winter said that no new schools, which might lead to less integration, were planned.

Still, Blackburn, before making what she called the most significant ruling of her time on the bench, ordered a hearing. About 50 people showed up, and many urged her to reject the settlement. Emotions were raw. "I wouldn't be up here if I didn't think someone was trying to harm my children," Chykeitha Roshell told the local paper.

Before granting the request to free the district, Blackburn seemed to speak to Tuscaloosa's black community. "I don't know any of you all, and you don't know me," she said. "I grew up in Alabama in the '60s, in a small town in south Alabama ... You can't know my views about segregation and how strongly I feel about our state and our history of racial injustice." She acknowledged the crowd's sentiment, saying, "You don't understand why I'm doing this, and you think I'm wrong. But I'm doing what I believe the law requires me to do." And with that, Blackburn announced that the 30-year-old desegregation order had come to an end.

I n an interview last fall in his chambers at the Tuscaloosa County Courthouse, Judge England said on the record for the first time that he had privately agreed to support the Rock Quarry school during the trial-which would ultimately lead to the district's release from federal oversight-only with the assurance of investment in West End schools, though he denied having made a quid pro quo deal. (Several others confirmed that white business, school, and city officials met privately with select black leaders to gain support for the district's efforts to end the court order and free it to return to neighborhood schools, in exchange for new black schools and development in the West End.) The day of our interview, the story had broken nationally that England's step-granddaughter had been snubbed by the white sororities at the University of Alabama-among the nation's last remaining segregated Greek systems. The judge, a university trustee, was in a foul mood.

His retelling of the events leading up to the dismissal revealed none of the optimism he'd displayed on the stand all those years ago, but rather a steely pragmatism and no small measure of disillusionment. Under the court order, England said, black students had ridden buses all over the city chasing an ever-receding white population. Desegregation had not ended the stigmatization of black children, England said. It had reinforced it.

England had believed that if the school system continued to grow more black, financial support for schools within the white community would fall off and the city would struggle to attract commerce. Further, he'd thought that the school district would eventually free itself of federal oversight with or without the support of black leaders.

"There was a desire to have a school built across the river, where a number of white students were in private school," he said. "The business community wanted to be able to say Tuscaloosa City Schools would not be an inner-city school system."

At least the prospect of his cooperation, along with that of other black elites, offered leverage. So England and a handful of others made a Faustian bargain. In exchange for their support for building new schools in the whitest part of town, he said, white leaders promised to build some state-of-the-art schools in Tuscaloosa's West End, providing local development to a part of town with little more than factories and dollar stores. "They kept their word to build schools on this side, we kept ours," England said. "White folks got your schools. Black folks, you got yours."

England knew this arrangement meant consigning hundreds of black students to segregated schools. And he never disputed that integration had brought real academic benefits. But he saw few options and had also grown nostalgic about his own years in Jim Crow schools. "I would put the education I got against anyone's," he said. "The answer cannot be 'The only way to get good schools is to have white people in them.' "

The hearings opened a rift in Tuscaloosa's black community, dividing longtime friends. Many still accuse the judge and others of selling out, a charge that snapped the judge upright in his chair.

Black children in the South now attend majority-black schools at levels not seen in four decades.

"Those people had their right to their viewpoint as I had mine," he said, his voice rising. "I thought I saw the whole picture." England said he still stands behind the decision he made to support Rock Quarry. But as far as segregation was concerned, he added, "I don't know what happened the last 13 years."

What happened was rapid and continual resegregation, in particular the sequestration of poor black students in nearly hopeless schools. It is no small irony that efforts to woo the very plant that allows Melissa Dent to earn enough to support her family also played a part in ensuring that her children would attend nearly all-black schools.

In 1999, less than a year after Blackburn's public hearing, the school board voted to abandon its three single-grade, citywide middle schools in favor of more-traditional middle schools. It carved out two integrated schools to serve sixth-through-eighth-graders in the northern, central, and eastern parts of the city, and returned Westlawn Middle, in the West End, to its familiar historic state: virtually all black.

The school board commissioned a biracial committee to figure out what to do about the high school. White parents, the commission suggested in its May 2000 report, would not want their children to attend schools once they turned 70 percent black. By its reasoning, the district had already reached the tipping point. The only way to create the necessary school ratios in a district where black students outnumbered white students almost three to one was to cluster a large number of black children in schools without white students.

The commission pointed to a handful of studies showing that smaller schools benefited low-income students. It did not note that Westlawn Middle School was floundering: the state's Department of Education had already placed the school under a warning for low achievement.

After the commission issued its report, the district created a plan for two large integrated high schools-Northridge, in the whitest and most affluent part of town, and Paul W. Bryant, along the city's eastern edge-as well as a much smaller high school that would retain the name Central. School officials drew Central's proposed attendance zone compactly around the West End, saying that an all-black high school couldn't be avoided, because the district couldn't help where people lived.

While a vocal group of white parents and community leaders supported the high-school breakup, large numbers of black and white residents fought against it. A poll of a few dozen parents who'd pulled their kids from the schools showed that most of them supported a shift to neighborhood high schools. But in a wider poll of more than 200 parents in the district, and another of Central's teachers and other staff, most respondents wanted the mega-school to remain intact. Robert Coates had just been named principal of the Central East campus, and he warned the board that if it went forward with the plan to split the schools, the new Central would be "relegated as a low-performing school from day one."

Nonetheless, in August 2000, the seven-member board ordered Central's dismantling, 21 years after its creation. One black member joined the board's four white ones in voting in favor. Under the plan, some black students would continue to be bused north of the river, though many of them were from black neighborhoods filled with two-parent, two-garage homes, as Ernestine Tucker, a current school-board member, puts it. Overall, the vote ensured that nearly a third of the district's black students would spend their entire 13 years of public education in completely segregated schools.

And so the district built its new high schools-but white parents did not flock to them. By 2007, white enrollment had fallen to 22 percent, and school leaders once again insisted something had to be done. The superintendent presented a plan that would send hundreds of black children who were still being bused to high-performing, integrated schools back to failing schools closer to their homes. The idea was that this latest plan would do what the breaking-apart of Central hadn't: draw back white parents.

The redistricting plan roiled the community, still raw over the breakup of the integrated middle and high schools less than a decade earlier. A racially mixed group of local academics and parents fired off searing editorials and showed up at meetings to protest.

But some parents were unhappy with the plan for a different set of reasons. The historic district around the University of Alabama, a predominantly white and middle-class area that's home to college professors and other professionals, lies south of the river. The district's plan would reassign children in this neighborhood to their closest schools, which were heavily black.

The day before the school board voted, the president of the historic district association sent an e‑mail to his fellow association members assuring them that after "lengthy negotiations with the school board attorney" and "discussions with school board members and the superintendent," students in the district would be able to continue to attend the north-of-the-river schools. The school board's final proposal did indeed reflect that change. The final plan also allowed children from a tiny triangle conspicuously carved from the West End-encompassing a country club and its surrounding neighborhood-to attend school north of the river.

On May 3, 2007, as the school board prepared to vote on the new plan, a few members said they had been unaware of the negotiations, and fought unsuccessfully to delay the decision. The plan passed in a bitterly divided vote, 5-3. One white school-board member, Virginia Powell, who represented the historic district around the university, joined the board's two black members in voting no. Powell said that the appeasement of white parents had trumped doing what was best educationally for the district. "It was totally orchestrated. It was awful, I felt powerless," Powell told me recently. "I remember sitting in church after one of the votes. It was a Wednesday-night supper and no one would sit with me, because I voted with the black members. It made me realize where people stood."

Since the vote, the black population at Rock Quarry, one of the district's highest-performing elementary schools-the one that school officials had promised would be 50-50 in its racial composition-has fallen from 24 percent to 9 percent. The U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights has opened an investigation into allegations of racial discrimination in how the district assigns students, including the 2007 redistricting plan.

When President George W. Bush came into office, approximately 595 school districts nationwide-including dozens of non-southern districts-remained under court-ordered desegregation, according to a ProPublica analysis of data compiled by Stanford University researchers. By the end of Bush's second term, that number had plummeted to 380. Nearly 60 percent of all the districts that have been released from their desegregation orders since 1967 were released under Bush, whose administration pressed the Justice Department to close those cases wherever possible. The trend has slowed under the Obama administration, but it has continued. Today, about 340 districts remain under court order.

A 2012 Stanford study examined school districts with at least 2,000 students that had been released from court order since 1990, finding that, typically, these districts grew steadily more segregated after their release. A separate study found that within 10 years of being released, school districts on average unwound about 60 percent of the integration they had achieved under court order.

One troubling truth is that, as witnessed in Tuscaloosa, backing away from integration doesn't typically arrest or reverse the outflow of white students from diverse school districts. The Stanford researchers found that school systems' white populations slightly declined after court orders ended. Many districts nonetheless continue to embrace the type of gerrymandering at play in Tuscaloosa. After comprehensively examining attendance zones across the country, Meredith Richards at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute of Education Sciences found in a recent study that they are nearly as irregular as legislative districts.

Some districts, of course, have gerrymandered to increase integration. Kentucky's Jefferson County Public Schools, serving Louisville, are often held up as an example. The battle for desegregation had been violent there, but eventually the community came to value its integrated schools. When the superintendent began pressing to end the district's elementary-school busing program, Jefferson County's business leaders met with residents but came to a very different conclusion from the one reached in Tuscaloosa. They decided to support continued integration efforts, because they deemed integrated schools good for business. Even though its court supervision ended in 2000, Jefferson County remains one of the most integrated urban districts in the country.

But Jefferson County is the rarest of cases. Few communities seem able to summon the political will to continue integration efforts. And the Obama administration, while saying integration is important, offers almost no incentives that would entice school districts to increase it. Instead, Richards says, districts have typically gerrymandered "to segregate, particularly whites from blacks," and that gerrymandering is "getting worse over time" as federal oversight diminishes. According to an analysis by ProPublica, the number of apartheid schools nationwide has mushroomed from 2,762 in 1988-the peak of school integration-to 6,727 in 2011.

When school officials make decisions that funnel poor children of color into their own schools, they promise to make those separate schools equal. But that promise is as false today as it was in 1954. Indeed, in some ways all-black schools today are worse than Druid High was back in the 1950s, when poor black students mixed with affluent and middle-class ones, and when many of the most talented black residents of Tuscaloosa taught there.

High-poverty, segregated black and Latino schools account for the majority of the roughly 1,400 high schools nationwide labeled "dropout factories"-meaning fewer than 60 percent of the students graduate. School officials often blame poor performance on the poverty these kids grow up in. But most studies conclude that it's the concentration of poor students in the same school that hurts them the most. Low-income students placed in middle-income schools show marked academic progress.

As a school's black population increases, the odds that any given teacher there will have significant experience, full licensure, or a master's degree all decline. Teacher turnover at segregated schools is typically high. And black students, overall, are less likely than any other group of students to attend schools with Advanced Placement courses and high-level classes like calculus.

The night the Tuscaloosa school board voted to split up the old Central, board member Bryan Chandler pledged that there would be no winners and losers. Yet while Northridge offered students a dozen Advanced Placement classes, the new Central went at least five years without a single one. Journalism awards stretch wall to wall in Northridge's newspaper classroom, but for the better part of a decade, Central students didn't have a school newspaper or a yearbook. Until last year, Central didn't even offer physics.

The same superintendent who oversaw the 2007 redistricting reportedly called Tuscaloosa's all-black schools a "dumping ground" for bad teachers who'd been let go from other district schools. Teachers hired from outside Tuscaloosa were, for many years, allowed to apply to specific schools, and some would not apply to black schools.

By the time students get to Central, most have spent nine years in low-performing, virtually all-black schools. More than 80 percent of them come from families with incomes low enough to qualify them for free or reduced-price school lunches. Earlier this year, the state of Alabama designated Central and Westlawn Middle School as failing, because they'd performed in the lowest 6 percent of the state's schools for at least three of the previous six years.

D'Leisha arrived at Central in 2010, the same year as its new principal, Clarence Sutton Jr., who'd attended the integrated version of the school as Melissa Dent's classmate. A year later, the district hired a new superintendent, Paul McKendrick.

Sitting in his office, at a desk six inches deep in papers and reports, McKendrick, a bespectacled man, quiet but forceful, said the black, mostly poor kids of the West End had been separated and written off. A recent audit of Central had found that 80 percent of students were not on the college track. The low test scores that have plagued the school don't stem from "a child problem," he told me. "You may have some children that have special needs or cognitive issues, but you are not going to say a whole group of kids" has "lost intelligence in some way."

Though its students may arrive bearing more burdens, in many ways Central is like any other high school. It's got its jocks, its nerds, its mean girls and band geeks. D'Leisha herself is the all-American girl-the homecoming queen dating a football player. But students and staff say most people see only one thing about Central: it's all black. And that still bears a stigma. The school is housed in a lovely modern brick building outside of the West End, within view of the towering University of Alabama football stadium. Much of the neighborhood surrounding it is middle-class and predominantly white. Too many times, Sutton told me, his students have asked why the kids who live across the street don't attend their school. Most have never had a white classmate or neighbor, he said, leaving them unprepared to navigate a country where those in charge are usually white.

The principal struggles to explain to students how the segregation they experience is any different from the old version simply because no law requires it. "It is hard, it is a tough conversation, and it is a conversation I don't think we as adults want to have."

Standing one day last fall outside the counselor's office at Central, D'Leisha looked up at the college bulletin board. It was dominated by National Guard and Army flyers, with some brochures for small Alabama colleges tucked among them. Students with D'Leisha's grades and tough honors coursework often come home to mailboxes stuffed with glossy college brochures. But most days, nothing showed up in the mail for her, and no colleges had come calling. She had taken the ACT college-entrance exam twice already. The first time she scored a 16, the second time a 17. Her mother's alma mater, the University of Alabama, expects a 21, the national average. Many four-year colleges will not even consider students who score below an 18.

"My biggest fear right now is the ACT," D'Leisha said. "I don't have a good score. It's been on my mind a lot." She described an ACT study session she'd attended last summer at a community college. "We were with kids from Northridge, and they knew things we didn't know," she said. "They had done things we hadn't done."

Because D'Leisha excels in school and everything else she's involved in, her teachers and counselors don't worry about whether she's on the right track. They're stretched thin trying to keep in class the seniors-roughly 35 percent of them-who fail to graduate each year. But in December, at home texting with her boyfriend, D'Leisha admitted that she'd filled out only one college application. Lately, she said, she'd been looking more closely at those military brochures, just as her grandfather had, something that angers her mother. "I am kind of clueless how to get stuff done for college," D'Leisha told me, looking down and fidgeting with her phone. "They are supposed to be helping us, but they think because I am the class president I know what to do. Sometimes I don't speak up, because I know people have expectations of me."

For black students like D'Leisha-the grandchildren of the historic Brown decision-having to play catch-up with their white counterparts is supposed to be a thing of the past. The promise was that students of all colors would be educated side by side, and would advance together into a more integrated, equitable American society. Polls show Americans embracing this promise in the abstract, but that rarely translates into on-the-ground support for integration efforts.

Late last year, D'Leisha took the ACT for the third time, but her score dropped back to 16. So early on a Saturday in February, she got up quietly, forced a few bites of a muffin into her nervous stomach, and drove once again to the community college where the test is administered. A few weeks later, she got her score: 16 again. She contemplated a fifth attempt, but could see little point.

A few months earlier, D'Leisha had talked about how much she looked forward to meeting people from different cultures at college and sitting in a racially mixed classroom for the first time. But her college hopes are thinner now than she'd expected then. As of this writing, they largely hinge on the tenuous promise of a coach at a small, historically black college outside of Birmingham, who has told her that the school will have a place for her despite her score. No official offer of admission has yet arrived.
This article was produced in collaboration with ProPublica.

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Sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education, the schools in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, show how separate and unequal education is coming back. Though James Dent could watch Central High School's homecoming parade from the porch of his faded-white bungalow, it had been years since he'd bothered.