Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV

These dirty, scum-sucking, bottom-feeding fuckers just never give up. On the 71^st anniversary of the ground-breaking, earth-shaking Brown v. Board of Education, which overturned the despicable Plessy v. Ferguson and outlawed so-called “separate but equal” segregation in the nation’s schools, the New York Times informed us that down in Louisiana, which fought integration until the bitter end and beyond, Republican “leaders” are pushing to end federal desegregation orders that have been on the books for more than 50 years.

The first call for impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren, who delivered the unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. It was taped to a bulletin board in the 7th and Mission post office in San Francisco, California, United States, and reported to the FBI.

They’re not going to go after Brown in the Supreme Court. That would leave fingerprints of the Republican Party way too visible on the racist push to overturn the court’s landmark desegregation case. So, they’ve decided to go after desegregation school by school, district by district, and sure to come, state by state. In Louisiana, the state’s attorney general, working with the support of the governor, is making the predictable argument—reminiscent of Justice John Roberts in his decision overturning Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act—that racism and segregation is “in the past” and the court orders that were necessary in Louisiana and every other state in the Deep South to force school districts to desegregate, are no longer necessary.

The head of the newly-defenestrated Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, Harmeet Dhillon, is right there with them. “It is 2025,” Ms. Dhillon imperiously told the Times. “I haven’t heard a recent claim that there is government mandated segregation happening in 2025 in a school district.”

Segregation doesn’t have to be mandated anymore, because states and local school districts have come up with so many scams to make de facto segregation a reality. The rise of charter schools has led to increasing segregation in states which have allowed them. And of course there is the legacy of the fight against integration in the south which continues to infect school systems. After court orders—yes, the ones they want overturned today—mandated that school districts integrate in southern states, they came up with a system of all-white “academies.” White parents sent their kids to the academies, which could be segregated by race because they were private, while black families were left to send their children to the public schools, which, shedding white students, became either entirely segregated or nearly so.

Let’s take a moment to have a look at the system Brown v. Board of Education sought to end. In the south, white children were sent to all-white schools with new sets of textbooks every two or three years. The school buildings were new, and if they were older, pre-war buildings, they were well maintained and well-supplied with music rooms, labs for chemistry and biology classes, auditoriums where school plays could be presented and graduations held, well-equipped playgrounds, music rooms, and all the facilities normally associated with K-12 education. In all-Black schools, children used the cast-off schoolbooks of the white children who had been given new ones. Many Black schools had no auditorium, no recreational facilities, no playgrounds, no labs, and were located in rundown buildings with leaking roofs and unrepaired bathrooms.

In some school districts in states such as Virginia and Mississippi, where opposition to integration was strongest, white children were taken to school on publicly funded school buses. Black children walked or were driven by parents, if the parents even had cars.

The only thing accurate about “separate but equal” was the “separate” part. Southern states made no effort to educate their Black populations in the same manner they educated whites.

That’s what Brown v. Board of Education sought to end when it was passed in 1954. Ten years later, when I went to high school in Northern Virginia, we could look out the windows of our well-supplied and well-equipped school on Route 1 in Alexandria, Virginia, and watch buses filled with Black children go past our high school on their way to an all-Black high school that was more than 10 miles away down Route 1. The school I went to, Mount Vernon, was integrated only because the children of military families from Fort Belvoir went there and the federal government had forced the Fairfax County school district to take the children of Black soldiers. In fact, throughout the years I was educated largely in southern states, the schools I went to were integrated, but only because they were located on federal property on Army posts after President Truman had integrated the U.S. military in 1948.

It wasn’t until 1971 that schools in Northern Virginia were sufficiently integrated that they gained the approval of the federal courts which had ordered their desegregation and had been overseeing its enforcement.

School districts in the deep South and in cities in the north continued to resist integration, using housing patterns, which were still largely segregated by race—often by banks “red-lining” neighborhoods—to justify the placement of overwhelming numbers of Black children in schools located in all-Black or nearly all-Black neighborhoods. For a time, court orders mandated busing children between neighborhoods, and sometimes between school districts, in an attempt to better integrate schools that were de facto segregated by housing patterns, but opposition to busing and mass-protests ended that attempt during the 1970’s and 1980’s.

The attorney general of Louisiana justifies the attempt to lift court-ordered supervision of school districts that had been segregated because of the cost of “reams” of paperwork that had to be submitted to the courts reporting on “the number of Advanced Placement classes at each school to the racial makeup of athletic clubs,” according to the Times.

The reason those reports have been and are necessary is because the school districts which have to file them had engaged in discriminatory practices affecting school clubs and the placement of AP classes, which tended not to be in schools that were largely Black. The solution to the paperwork is to abide by the court orders.

But that is not what the state of Louisiana wants. The governor and the attorney general want the court orders lifted, and once they are gone, if schools continue to discriminate between the races, “you file a new lawsuit for a new problem.” If that sounds familiar, it is because we heard it just this past week. The Trump administration took its campaign to weaken the ability of judges to issue court orders to the Supreme Court last week when they attempted to convince the court that judges should not be permitted to issue court orders that affect wide parts of the country or the country as a whole. The solution, Trump’s solicitor general told the Supreme Court, is if there is a continuing problem affecting new people outside of the jurisdiction of limited court orders, they can file new lawsuits.

So, it’s all of a piece: the Trump administration wants to load up the federal court system by forcing people to file individual lawsuits if and when their rights are violated, instead of having a class action or a general stay or restraining order protect them. To top it off, they want to hamstring the system of federal mandates from the courts that have overseen desegregation by doing away with court orders and forcing a situation where new problems have to be addressed one at a time, lawsuit by lawsuit.

See how easy it is to deal with Supreme Court cases you don’t like? You weaken the hand of federal judges, you allow states to lift federal mandates they oppose, and then you force people to go to the expense and trouble to file new lawsuits to correct the problems which had been solved by the court’s decisions conservatives didn’t like to begin with.

Neat system, isn’t it? Brown v. Board of Education doesn’t get overturned and remains in the history books as one of this nation’s great accomplishments. Meanwhile, the little rats and suck-asses from the Heritage Foundation and Trump’s Department of Justice run around undercutting every federal program and court decision they don’t agree with.

One day, our children and their children will look back at this time and ask this simple question: Why did they abandon so much that worked and was good for everyone, in exchange for so much that was destructive and worked only for the few?

I hope history will eventually have a better answer for them than I do.