Judge tells Mississippi schools to stop segregating

Judge tells Mississippi schools to stop segregating The Justice Department accused decorative fruitthe Walthall County School District in rural Mississippi of annually permitting more than 300 students, most of them white, to transfer to a school outside of their residential area, shifting its racial makeup.

Further, administrators at three other schools grouped most of the white students into their own classrooms "resulting in significant numbers of segregated all-black classrooms at each grade level," the U.S. government said in a court filing.

The case comes in a state that was at the heart of the U.S. civil rights movement in the 1960s. In 1964, three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi, an incident that helped prompt Congress to pass a law banning racial segregation in schools, work and public places.

The school district was ordered in 1970 to stop segregating its schools. But in the late 1980s officials were confronted by the Justice Department with concerns about student transfers to other schools that undermined the desegregation efforts.

While the district made some changes in the early 1990s, the Justice Department said the practices continued and the schools became "significantly more segregated." The district did not respond to the government's lawsuit seeking reforms.

In fact, the county school board in 2009 rejected a tentative settlement with the government that would have overhauled the district's transfer policy and prevented students being assigned to classrooms based on race.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Tom Lee, in Jackson, Mississippi, ordered the school district to significantly limit transfers. Lee also ordered the district to stop assigning students to classrooms that resulted in segregation, demanding that it use a software program to randomly assign them.