The Fifth Circuit is abandoning the Black children of Concordia Parish to the schools segregation built.
The path to that conclusion, for any working lawyer who reads the slip opinion, is doctrinally legible. The court’s reasoning: the Concordia Parish School Board has complied with the desegregation order long enough, the “vestiges of segregation” have been eliminated to the extent practicable, and continuing federal supervision serves no further purpose. The steel-man version of the argument is not frivolous. The order has been in place since 1965. The original plaintiffs are no longer involved. The Supreme Court has held since Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell, 498 U.S. 237 (1991), that desegregation decrees are not perpetual — a district that has eliminated the traces of de jure segregation is entitled to be free of federal supervision.
The problem is that Concordia Parish has not eliminated those traces, and the Fifth Circuit misapplied Dowell to declare that it has. Dowell allows dissolution only when the district has “eliminated the vestiges of segregation to the extent practicable.” The district’s schools reflect the demographics of their surrounding areas, and those demographics are the product of the segregation the lawsuit was meant to remedy. Ferriday, the town whose Black families originally sued for access to all-white schools, is still mostly Black and low-income. Neighboring Vidalia is still mostly white, drawing tax revenue from a hydroelectric plant the Black families of Ferriday do not benefit from equally. A district in which the racial and economic segregation of the 1960s is preserved in the geography of its school buildings has not eliminated vestiges to the extent practicable — it has preserved them in place.
The order was still doing work. As recently as 2013, it forced a mostly white charter school to prioritize Black students and create a more integrated student body. With the order lifted, that obligation is void — the charter school is free to return to whatever enrollment patterns the market produces, and the federal court that once ensured Black children were not excluded will not be watching. Civil rights groups and some parents in the district have argued that the order remained important precisely because “vestiges of segregation” still show up in measurable ways — racial disparities in student discipline, academic programs, and teacher hiring. The Fifth Circuit accepted that the work was finished. The evidence from the district’s own demographics says otherwise.
The Justice Department spent decades on the side of the plaintiffs in this case. It switched sides under Donald Trump, joining the school board in asking the court to end the supervision. The department’s change of position is not explained by any change in the facts on the ground in Concordia Parish. It is explained by a change in the political priorities of the executive branch. The Fifth Circuit accepted the department’s new position as dispositive.
What makes this ruling significant beyond Concordia Parish is the regime it belongs to. The Trump administration has spent months building a list of civil rights-era consent decrees and court orders it wants to terminate, and the Fifth Circuit has shown itself willing to do the work. The administration’s framing — that these orders are “federal intrusion into local school systems” — is the same framing it uses to justify dismantling pattern-or-practice consent decrees in police departments, rolling back disparate-impact enforcement in housing, blocking a federal judge’s order on college race data collection, and narrowing the scope of the Voting Rights Act. The regime is the systematic withdrawal of federal civil rights enforcement; the Concordia Parish order is one instance of the regime in operation.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said the ruling puts authority over the schools “back where it belongs” — with the locally elected school board. The school board that the good people of Concordia Parish elected includes members who did not respond to requests for comment on the ruling. The same school board that will now set policy for a district in which Ferriday’s children attend schools that are still segregated by race and class, without a federal court watching whether that segregation is the product of choice or of the same forces that produced the original lawsuit.
The Fifth Circuit has declared the work of Brown v. Board of Education finished in Concordia Parish. The children of Ferriday will have to live with the consequences of that declaration.