BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Nearly six decades after a federal court ordered Alabama to dismantle its racially segregated public school system, almost four dozen local school systems are still subject to federal desegregation cases, orders or injunctions.
Those cases are receiving renewed attention as Republican attorney general nominee Katherine Robertson campaigns on ending them and the Trump administration moves to close long-running school desegregation cases in other Southern states.
Alabama Daily News identified approximately 44 Alabama school systems that remain subject to open federal desegregation cases, orders or injunctions. A May 2024 list produced by the U.S. Department of Justice identified 39 Alabama districts in cases involving the department, more than any other state listed.
Asked in early July to confirm how many desegregation cases the Justice Department currently has open in Alabama, the department said it was unable to comment because of “pending matters.” The response did not specify what matters were pending.
The argument for ending them
Robertson, who currently works as chief counsel to Attorney General Steve Marshall, has argued that Alabama’s remaining orders have outlived their purpose.
In a March 30 Washington Post opinion column, Robertson said the orders require some Alabama districts to make decisions based on race when hiring teachers, placing students in gifted programs and administering discipline.
She described those requirements as racial mandates with no expiration date and said districts can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to attain unitary status.
“To successfully end these court orders, the state government will need the affected school districts to cooperate so that Attorney General Steve Marshall can negotiate on their behalf,” Robertson wrote.
She said the state could then work with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division “to untie the hands of school districts and end the prioritization of race over merit.”
Robertson on Tuesday reaffirmed her arguments from the column to Alabama Daily News and said her interest in school desegregation cases is part of a broader concern about long-running federal consent decrees.
R. Shep Melnick, a Boston College political scientist who authored a book on the history and effectiveness of school desegregation litigation, said the strongest evidence of benefits to Black students came from the first major wave of desegregation in the South.
“The best studies that I have seen have indicated that there were clear benefits for Black children in the South, but not in the North, and most of those benefits came from the first wave of desegregation from say ’67 through 1980,” Melnick said.
He said there is much less evidence that later generations of court supervision have produced comparable gains, adding, “I don’t see a lot of evidence that that makes a big difference.”
Melnick said the continuing debate reflects two different understandings of what desegregation orders were intended to accomplish.
One holds that courts should eliminate the remnants of the government-created dual school system and then return control to local school districts. The other places greater emphasis on continuing to reduce racial isolation and racial imbalance in schools.
Melnick said U.S. Supreme Court decisions since the 1990s have moved increasingly toward the first view. At the same time, he said the Trump administration has pushed further.
“I think the Trump administration has gone far beyond the court decisions on this,” Melnick said.
He also said many orders were written for school systems whose demographics looked fundamentally different from those of today.
“When these things were put into place, it was Black versus white, and now it’s Black, white, Hispanic, maybe Asian,” Melnick said. “The demographics have changed so fundamentally, and I think that has made a lot of these understandings of what racial balance means much more difficult.”
Why some cases remain active
Most of Alabama’s remaining cases grew out of Lee v. Macon County Board of Education, a statewide class-action lawsuit brought by Black families and their attorneys, including civil rights lawyer Fred Gray and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, now commonly known as the Legal Defense Fund, or LDF.
The Justice Department later joined the case, but it was not the original plaintiff and is not the only party representing Black families. LDF and Gray’s law firm continue to represent the plaintiffs in the Lee v. Macon cases.
LDF’s continued involvement could complicate efforts to dismiss Alabama’s remaining desegregation cases.
“There’s not a clear way for Alabama to sort of try to clear its docket of all these cases,” said Deuel Ross, LDF’s director of litigation.
Ross disputes Robertson’s characterization of the orders as racial mandates.
“It’s not about setting racial quotas or requiring certain numbers of students being in certain places,” he said. “It is primarily about addressing unexplained discrimination and disparities, and trying to create processes and systems that are fair.”
Joe Bagley, a Georgia State University professor who has studied Alabama school desegregation extensively, said the legal foundation of the cases also matters because they are rooted in the Constitution, not simply federal policy.
“These cases are based on the Constitution, which last I checked, the Fourteenth Amendment wasn’t going away,” he said. “These are Fourteenth Amendment claims.”
Bagley said the status of Alabama’s roughly four dozen open cases varies widely.
Bagley said some cases, particularly in parts of the Black Belt, have become largely dormant as white families left public school systems that now enroll few or no white students. Many others, however, remain active.
Some districts remain under routine court monitoring and are required to periodically report data and progress on the parts of their desegregation orders that remain unresolved. Some orders require those reports twice a year.
Other cases become active when new disputes arise.
That happened in Leeds in 2020, when LDF invoked the district’s existing desegregation order after the school system stopped providing meals during the COVID-19 pandemic. LDF argued that ending meal service disproportionately affected Black students and violated the district’s obligations. The district resumed providing meals.
Ross said LDF has entered recent agreements in Madison and Lawrence Counties addressing issues including continued segregation between schools, racial disparities in student discipline and employment opportunities for Black teachers and principals.
He also pointed to the legal fight over Gardendale’s effort to create a school system separate from Jefferson County, which a federal appeals court ultimately blocked in 2018 after a judge found race was a motivating factor in the effort.
In Chambers County, Ross said, a more recent dispute involved a school assignment plan that would have required Black children to travel across the county to attend school, placing a greater burden on them.
Those cases show that the issues addressed through desegregation litigation are “not relegated to the 1960s,” Ross said.
“I think a lot of these cases, people think that they’re old cases and that nothing’s happening in them,” he said. “A lot of the cases are very active.”
Why Alabama has so many orders
The statewide litigation in Lee v. Macon is also a major reason Alabama still has so many open school desegregation cases.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that laws requiring separate public schools for Black and white children violated the Constitution. But Alabama officials continued resisting efforts to integrate the state’s schools.
The Alabama case began in 1963 after Black students in Macon County were denied admission to the all-white Tuskegee High School. Former Gov. George Wallace and other state officials intervened to resist integration, broadening what began as a local dispute into a challenge to the state’s role in maintaining segregated schools.
Bagley said that Wallace “overplaying his hand” helped make a statewide court order possible.
The Justice Department was able to show that state government exercised substantial authority over local school boards, Bagley said. If Alabama could use that authority to keep schools segregated, a federal court could require the state to use that same power to integrate them.
In 1967, a three-judge federal panel ordered more than 100 Alabama school systems that were not already operating under separate federal orders to dismantle their racially segregated school systems. The statewide litigation was later divided among individual school districts and federal courts.
What a desegregation order does
The orders were intended to do more than allow Black children to enroll in schools that previously had been reserved for white students.
Federal courts required school systems to dismantle the broader structures that had maintained separate systems for Black and white children, including student assignments, teaching staffs, transportation, school buildings and extracurricular activities.
Bagley described the orders as structural injunctions intended to address the effects of the former segregated system, rather than simply prohibit new acts of intentional discrimination.
“The reason these orders are still active in a lot of these cases is they haven’t done that,” Bagley said.
The areas courts traditionally examine became known as “Green factors,” after the 1968 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County. They include student assignments, faculty, staff, transportation, extracurricular activities and facilities.
Depending on the district and later court agreements, cases may also address student discipline, access to advanced and gifted courses and other educational opportunities.
The requirements have also been fluid, not frozen in place, over the past 60 years.
Federal judges can release districts from supervision one area at a time after finding they have met their obligations there. A district released from oversight in transportation, for example, would no longer have to report to the court on transportation while continuing to work on unresolved areas.
“To act like this is the same burden that it’s been for 60 years is ignoring the fact that … they allowed them to get out from under the Green factors, one by one by one or two by two,” Bagley said.
Huntsville City Schools, which is governed by a case separate from Lee v. Macon, provides a recent example. The district was released from federal oversight in transportation in 2020 and received unitary status this year in faculty and staff and extracurricular activities. It remains under supervision in other areas.
Unitary status means a court has found that a district has sufficiently addressed the remnants of its former dual school system in a particular area and can be released from federal supervision there.
Bagley said districts often resolve some of the more straightforward operational issues first, while more difficult questions can remain around discipline or access to higher-level academic programs.
“If you’ve got a three-to-one ratio of Black kids being reported to a police officer versus white kids, that’s obviously a problem,” he said. “Classes tracking students into quote-unquote honors and non-honors, that’s a problem too. So that’s the reason that a lot of these cases are still active.”
What is happening elsewhere
The Alabama debate comes as the Justice Department under Trump has moved to bring long-running desegregation litigation to an end in several other states.
Louisiana has been at the center of that effort. Its attorney general, Liz Murrill, has pushed to end the state’s remaining desegregation cases and has also appeared with Robertson politically, introducing her at a May primary election watch party in Vestavia Hills.
In Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, for example, the DOJ said a federal court had found the district properly integrated in 1975, but the case remained on the docket until a judge dismissed it in April 2025.
Other recent dismissals followed reviews of whether districts had met their obligations. Courts dismissed cases involving Copiah County, Mississippi, and Hendry County, Florida, in August 2025 after the Justice Department concluded the systems had eliminated the remaining effects of their former dual systems.
A federal judge declared Dyersburg schools in Tennessee unitary in February and dismissed its case with prejudice the following day.
The Justice Department has said districts that have complied with their constitutional obligations should no longer have to devote money and staff time to federal monitoring.
Because LDF and Gray’s firm continue to represent plaintiffs in most of the state’s Lee v. Macon cases, they would remain parties to any effort to end them even if the Justice Department no longer wanted federal involvement.
“LDF has been, along with the Gray firm, partners with Black families in Alabama for 60, 70 years,” Ross said. “We continue to litigate these cases to provide opportunity.”
Melnick said the debate over how long desegregation orders should remain in place also reflects broader expectations about what schools can realistically accomplish.
“I think there’s an American tendency to think that we can achieve equality of opportunity if we just have our schools operating correctly,” Melnick said.
But many of the forces affecting student outcomes lie outside schools, he said, including family and neighborhood conditions, crime and safety and popular culture.
“We could do everything possible, or some of the best things for school systems, and still many of these problems continue to be present,” Melnick said. “I think that’s really the situation where we are at now.”