TALLAHASSEE — A federal judge last week approved ending a Hendry County school-desegregation lawsuit that started in 1970, after the U.S. Department of Justice and the district agreed that “vestiges of the prior de jure segregation” had been eliminated.
U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno ordered the dismissal of the case. The Department of Justice said in an announcement Friday that another school-desegregation case filed in 1970 in Copiah County, Miss., also had been dismissed.
“In this administration, we are ending prolonged court oversight that does not reflect the reality in classrooms today,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division said in a prepared statement. “After 55 years of federal control, these local school districts can use taxpayer dollars that were spent on monitoring for past vestiges of racism, and can redirect those funds instead for the direct benefit of students.”
The federal government filed the Hendry County lawsuit in 1970, long after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling but as desegregation legal battles continued in the South and other parts of the country.
The Hendry County lawsuit led to a series of orders, including a 1975 order that permanently enjoined the district from “operating a dual system of racially identifiable schools,” according to court documents. The order directed the district to take steps to prevent segregation in areas such as assignment of students and teachers to schools, bus transportation and school construction.
In 2017, Moreno issued an order that said the district “eliminated the vestiges of past de jure discrimination to the extent practicable with respect to student assignment between schools, transportation, facilities and extracurricular activities,” but the court retained oversight of issues related to faculty and staff recruiting and student discipline, court documents show. “De jure” discrimination involves practices that had been allowed by law in the past.
Moreno in 2021 issued another order that said the Southwest Florida district had met its obligations related to faculty and staff recruiting, but he wrote the district could “take further steps to fully meet its desegregation obligations” involving student discipline.
“A disproportionate number of Black students at several schools continue to receive exclusionary disciplinary consequences compared to their white peers,” the 2021 order said. “Moreover, the United States’ review of the district’s discipline data revealed several instances in which similarly situated students in the district received racially disparate treatment.”
But in an agreement last month, known as a stipulation, the Justice Department and the Hendry County district said the 2021 requirements about student discipline had been met and the lawsuit should be dismissed. The stipulation led to Moreno’s order last week.
“The parties stipulate the district has eliminated the vestiges of the prior de jure segregation to the extent practicable and achieved unitary status in the area of within-school segregation related to student discipline,” the July 23 stipulation said.