WEBVTT - Segregation Forever 0:00:07.590 --> 0:00:13.470 On January 14, 1963, newly elected Alabama Governor George Wallace 0:00:13.550 --> 0:00:16.160 stood on the steps of the state capitol building in Montgomery, 0:00:16.920 --> 0:00:19.940 and he pledged to make good on his most important 0:00:20.300 --> 0:00:21.160 campaign promise. 0:00:23.570 --> 0:00:26.640 I draw the line in the dust and toss the 0:00:26.700 --> 0:00:31.500 gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, 0:00:31.940 --> 0:00:39.080 segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever. 0:00:42.570 --> 0:00:47.670 The tyranny in question here was the federal government's insistence 0:00:47.830 --> 0:00:53.770 on enforcing federal desegregation mandates. On the day he was 0:00:53.810 --> 0:00:58.610 sworn in as governor in January of 1963, Alabama remained 0:00:58.670 --> 0:01:03.690 entirely segregated, by law and by practice. And he swore 0:01:03.710 --> 0:01:06.130 to the good, God-fearing white folks of Alabama that he 0:01:06.170 --> 0:01:10.900 would keep it that way. He was wrong, of course. 0:01:12.459 --> 0:01:14.560 Just a few months later, as he stood in the 0:01:14.580 --> 0:01:18.560 doorway of the University of Alabama, intending to physically block 0:01:19.120 --> 0:01:24.000 the entry of the school's first two black students... He blinked. 0:01:26.920 --> 0:01:30.640 President Kennedy federalized the National Guard. And when a general 0:01:31.040 --> 0:01:35.759 asked George Wallace to move, he did. He stood down. 0:01:37.220 --> 0:01:43.600 He'd said, segregation forever. But he was wrong. Wasn't he? 0:01:45.880 --> 0:01:49.080 Last week, the United States Department of Justice announced they 0:01:49.100 --> 0:01:53.690 were dismissing more than 50 desegregation cases. involving school districts 0:01:53.710 --> 0:01:58.690 all over the country. Last week, as in a week ago. 0:01:59.650 --> 0:02:02.050 A week ago today, if you're listening to this on 0:02:02.070 --> 0:02:05.280 the day it showed up on your podcast feed. Last week, 0:02:06.020 --> 0:02:11.700 as in the week before this one, here in 2026. 0:02:13.200 --> 0:02:16.870 Harmeet Dhillon, the current Assistant Attorney General at the DOJ's 0:02:16.889 --> 0:02:21.030 Civil Rights Division and former personal attorney for right-wing provocateur 0:02:21.090 --> 0:02:24.330 Andy Ngo, announced the decision in a press release on 0:02:24.389 --> 0:02:31.139 September 24, 2026. The Department of Justice proudly declared that 0:02:31.160 --> 0:02:36.000 the administration is, quote, ending prolonged federal oversight of these 0:02:36.080 --> 0:02:39.840 school districts because the effort does not reflect the reality 0:02:39.870 --> 0:02:45.930 of those classrooms today. This bulk dismissal of desegregation cases 0:02:46.470 --> 0:02:50.109 is part of the administration's ongoing efforts to undermine justice 0:02:50.740 --> 0:02:54.360 Anything they feel falls under the banner of diversity, equity, 0:02:54.380 --> 0:03:00.040 and inclusion. I guess there's nothing more DEI than a 0:03:00.100 --> 0:03:06.220 court order saying you can't keep doing school segregation. So 0:03:06.260 --> 0:03:09.350 before we finish our story about the secret plans of 0:03:09.389 --> 0:03:13.730 a reclusive segregationist millionaire to undermine civil rights, before we 0:03:13.750 --> 0:03:17.210 get back to talking about the eugenicist pioneer fund's involvement 0:03:17.250 --> 0:03:20.430 in the legal fight against desegregation, before we pick up 0:03:20.830 --> 0:03:25.790 where we left off last week in 1963. Come with 0:03:25.840 --> 0:03:29.480 me on a brief detour through current events, here in 0:03:29.500 --> 0:03:33.680 the endless 1963 we all seem to have gotten trapped in. 0:03:37.900 --> 0:03:59.760 I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys. School 0:03:59.800 --> 0:04:05.340 segregation still exists. It doesn't look exactly like it did 0:04:05.380 --> 0:04:09.190 in 1950. It's not exactly the same kind of segregation 0:04:09.270 --> 0:04:13.590 schools had in the 50s. But in the year 2026, 0:04:13.590 --> 0:04:17.510 in the United States of America, there are still school 0:04:17.550 --> 0:04:22.840 districts where school boards have repeatedly, for decades... failed to 0:04:22.940 --> 0:04:26.320 prove that they are making a good-faith effort to comply 0:04:26.339 --> 0:04:29.589 with the desegregation plan a judge gave them in the 1960s. 0:04:32.089 --> 0:04:36.690 On this show, we deal mostly with the past. It's easier, 0:04:37.230 --> 0:04:41.460 I think. There are more stories to tell, more source material, 0:04:42.300 --> 0:04:44.560 fewer guys who are still alive to send me a 0:04:44.580 --> 0:04:48.599 nasty email because they heard their own actions described accurately, etc. 0:04:50.660 --> 0:04:54.790 And I thought, It's easier because those stories are over. 0:04:54.810 --> 0:04:59.169 I don't write a lot of happy endings, but the 0:04:59.190 --> 0:05:04.859 stories end. It turns out they don't. History doesn't really 0:05:04.890 --> 0:05:09.539 work that way. Because over and over again, I find 0:05:09.600 --> 0:05:14.460 myself weaving in and out of the past. I'm happy 0:05:14.500 --> 0:05:17.520 enough rolling around in the ugly muck of our collective past, 0:05:17.560 --> 0:05:21.310 but then suddenly I'm dragged against my will, into some 0:05:21.589 --> 0:05:27.430 unavoidably relevant current event. Remember last year, when I was 0:05:27.670 --> 0:05:30.729 buried in my research about white supremacist terror in South 0:05:30.810 --> 0:05:34.130 Africa under apartheid, when I had to interrupt the series 0:05:34.810 --> 0:05:39.860 to talk about how, unfortunately, that history was deeply intertwined 0:05:40.339 --> 0:05:43.780 with the Trump administration's announcement that they would only be 0:05:44.260 --> 0:05:51.000 admitting white South Africans for refugee resettlement. I didn't plan that. 0:05:51.500 --> 0:05:57.000 It literally just happened while I was writing. Or two 0:05:57.040 --> 0:06:00.040 years ago, when I was chugging along writing that long 0:06:00.120 --> 0:06:04.420 series about a strange little Klansman with some questionable connections 0:06:04.460 --> 0:06:07.160 to the Oklahoma City bombing and he finally landed himself 0:06:07.200 --> 0:06:09.659 in federal prison when he mailed a bomb to the 0:06:09.680 --> 0:06:14.800 diversity office in Scottsdale, Arizona. I hadn't planned on updating 0:06:14.820 --> 0:06:17.670 that story just a few weeks after I finished it. 0:06:19.100 --> 0:06:22.270 But I had to because the same diversity office that 0:06:22.370 --> 0:06:26.180 Klansman mailed a bomb to in 2012 was forced to 0:06:26.240 --> 0:06:30.400 close in 2025, after the city council bowed to pressure 0:06:30.420 --> 0:06:37.880 from the Trump administration to end DEI initiatives. These things 0:06:38.000 --> 0:06:42.020 keep happening not because God is punishing me personally by 0:06:42.100 --> 0:06:46.260 complicating my writing process, but because the stories I write 0:06:47.060 --> 0:06:52.659 aren't ever over. And they aren't ever just about some strange, 0:06:52.860 --> 0:06:58.200 isolated incident of a man behaving badly. It's all one long, 0:06:58.960 --> 0:07:02.840 messy story. It's a many-headed hydra that refuses to die. 0:07:04.800 --> 0:07:07.630 So I shouldn't have been surprised when the present intruded 0:07:07.670 --> 0:07:11.710 on my story from the past again. I was gathering 0:07:11.750 --> 0:07:15.750 background material for the episode you'll hear next week when 0:07:15.790 --> 0:07:19.830 I saw this story. If you've been keeping up We've 0:07:19.850 --> 0:07:22.650 been exploring the history of the Pioneer Fund, that private 0:07:22.730 --> 0:07:26.830 charitable foundation started in the 1930s by an amateur eugenicist 0:07:26.870 --> 0:07:29.240 who wanted to obscure his involvement in the dissemination of 0:07:29.300 --> 0:07:33.880 Nazi propaganda. And through the mid-20th century, it grew to 0:07:33.920 --> 0:07:37.300 be the most significant financial backer of a wide variety 0:07:37.320 --> 0:07:40.640 of pseudoscience that's still used today by racists who want 0:07:40.680 --> 0:07:44.160 their bigotry to have a respectable veneer of intellectual objectivity. 0:07:46.140 --> 0:07:49.840 And we entered that story via current events, too. because 0:07:49.860 --> 0:07:53.310 there's been a recent outbreak of public discourse about race science, 0:07:54.410 --> 0:07:58.550 almost all of which traces back to this one dead 0:07:58.670 --> 0:08:02.970 racist's money. And the portion of that story we've been 0:08:03.010 --> 0:08:06.820 living in lately is the Fund's investment in segregation during 0:08:06.840 --> 0:08:09.980 the 1960s. We're about to get to the part of 0:08:10.000 --> 0:08:12.540 the story where the race scientists actually go to court. 0:08:14.420 --> 0:08:16.780 In last week's episode, I talked a little bit about 0:08:16.820 --> 0:08:20.600 the legal landscape after the 1954 Supreme Court decision in 0:08:20.620 --> 0:08:24.210 Brown v. Board of Education. Black families had to take 0:08:24.250 --> 0:08:27.230 their local school districts to court to get enforcement on 0:08:27.270 --> 0:08:31.570 the court's decision. And the end result in somewhere between 0:08:31.570 --> 0:08:36.780 700 and 1,000 of those individual lawsuits were federal court 0:08:36.880 --> 0:08:42.260 orders requiring those districts to follow a court-approved desegregation plan. 0:08:43.440 --> 0:08:46.790 And that almost always came with federal supervision from the 0:08:46.809 --> 0:08:51.860 Department of Justice to ensure the plan was followed. That's 0:08:52.640 --> 0:08:54.240 as much as I thought we'd need in the way 0:08:54.280 --> 0:08:58.939 of legal background. And then the DOJ intruded on my process. 0:09:01.110 --> 0:09:03.670 It's not the first time Parmeet Dhillon has ruined my day, 0:09:03.690 --> 0:09:06.130 and I'm sure it won't be the last. And honestly, 0:09:06.150 --> 0:09:08.850 at the rate things are going, God willing, it only 0:09:08.910 --> 0:09:11.790 ever happens through my computer screen because things seem to 0:09:11.809 --> 0:09:15.750 be getting a lot worse. But there she was, in 0:09:15.790 --> 0:09:20.970 the present day, unraveling the civil rights victories I'm about 0:09:21.010 --> 0:09:27.160 to tell you about. The DOJ press release last week 0:09:27.480 --> 0:09:30.560 announced that they'd closed out more than 50 of the 0:09:30.600 --> 0:09:33.680 civil rights era cases where school districts were still under 0:09:33.760 --> 0:09:38.830 federal supervision. And all of the remaining cases are currently 0:09:38.890 --> 0:09:42.890 under review. with the heavy implication that they'll all be 0:09:42.929 --> 0:09:48.000 dismissed as soon as they can finish the paperwork. They 0:09:48.040 --> 0:09:51.380 make it sound like it's truly absurd that those cases 0:09:51.440 --> 0:09:54.360 would even still be open at all, that it's wasteful 0:09:54.440 --> 0:09:58.200 at best for anyone to commit resources to asking or 0:09:58.320 --> 0:10:02.700 answering questions. about whether a school district is upholding its 0:10:02.790 --> 0:10:06.959 obligation to provide children of all races with equal access 0:10:07.280 --> 0:10:11.660 to a public school education. Dillon calls these court orders 0:10:11.700 --> 0:10:16.840 that she's wiping off the books outdated and onerous. And 0:10:16.880 --> 0:10:22.030 she uses the language of federal control rather than supervision, 0:10:23.030 --> 0:10:25.689 which is very reminiscent of the way white supremacists in 0:10:25.710 --> 0:10:30.510 the South gnashed their teeth about federal intervention in the 1960s. 0:10:31.950 --> 0:10:35.460 And come to think of it, in the 1860s, it's 0:10:35.500 --> 0:10:39.880 sort of a recurring theme. But that's all you really 0:10:39.920 --> 0:10:44.719 get from the press release. These cases are very old, 0:10:45.240 --> 0:10:47.260 and there are a lot of them, and we made 0:10:47.309 --> 0:10:51.859 them go away. When Dillon announced the dismissal of the 0:10:51.900 --> 0:10:57.230 desegregation case against Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana last year, that press 0:10:57.250 --> 0:11:03.810 release called it the writing of a historical wrong. And 0:11:04.429 --> 0:11:07.670 I'm not talking about segregation, to be clear, because that 0:11:08.429 --> 0:11:12.670 was a historical wrong that was being righted by the 0:11:12.730 --> 0:11:17.569 desegregation order. She's calling the order itself the historical wrong. 0:11:19.020 --> 0:11:22.400 And Dillon is quoted as saying, no longer will the 0:11:22.420 --> 0:11:25.970 Plaquemines Parish School Board have to devote precious local resources 0:11:26.150 --> 0:11:30.370 over an integration issue that ended two generations ago. This 0:11:30.429 --> 0:11:34.770 is a prime example of neglect by past administrations. And 0:11:34.809 --> 0:11:41.709 now we're getting America refocused on our bright future. There 0:11:41.730 --> 0:11:48.260 it is. This administration is obsessed with sanitizing our nation's past. 0:11:49.860 --> 0:11:52.960 Remember earlier this summer, we talked about the president's obsession 0:11:53.000 --> 0:11:57.280 with removing unpleasant history from national park signs and brochures. 0:11:58.600 --> 0:12:01.680 He signed an executive order calling any historical fact that 0:12:01.750 --> 0:12:07.090 casts America in a negative light divisive, revisionist, and said 0:12:07.170 --> 0:12:10.810 any mention of the historical existence of bigotry or wrongdoing 0:12:10.830 --> 0:12:16.510 of any kind is a distorted narrative driven by harmful ideology. 0:12:18.790 --> 0:12:22.459 So if we just stop talking about the reality of segregation, 0:12:22.500 --> 0:12:26.020 if you take slavery off the infographics of the National Park, well, 0:12:26.520 --> 0:12:29.620 it's like it never happened. That's all it takes to 0:12:29.640 --> 0:12:33.260 make America great again. Just imagine it always was. As 0:12:33.300 --> 0:12:35.970 you bulldoze your way through decades of progress in order 0:12:36.000 --> 0:12:39.250 to reinstate the very same system of racial discrimination, those 0:12:39.330 --> 0:12:44.910 court orders were put in place to correct. But in 0:12:44.950 --> 0:12:48.309 the interest of fairness, let's give the DOJ the benefit 0:12:48.350 --> 0:12:52.490 of the doubt for a second They said they reviewed 0:12:52.530 --> 0:12:57.370 these cases before closing them out. Those desegregation orders were 0:12:57.429 --> 0:13:00.610 not actually intended to be in place permanently. The goal 0:13:00.670 --> 0:13:05.150 is not to punish these school districts forever. They're supposed 0:13:05.190 --> 0:13:08.630 to correct a problem. The goal has always been for 0:13:08.650 --> 0:13:13.120 the problem to be corrected, to ensure full compliance with 0:13:13.150 --> 0:13:17.940 the order, and then the case can be resolved. So 0:13:17.960 --> 0:13:22.490 if that's what happened here, that's good news. It would 0:13:22.510 --> 0:13:25.990 mean all those school districts finally made really great progress 0:13:26.070 --> 0:13:29.370 on racial equity and they finally got caught up to 0:13:29.410 --> 0:13:31.840 where the Supreme Court said they were supposed to be 0:13:31.840 --> 0:13:34.160 70 years ago. Right? 0:13:36.059 --> 0:13:37.000 Maybe. Maybe. 0:13:51.230 --> 0:13:55.330 For school districts operating under these desegregation orders, there is 0:13:55.370 --> 0:14:00.859 a finish line. It's called unitary status, meaning they've proven 0:14:00.890 --> 0:14:03.939 to the court that they have fully transitioned to a unitary, 0:14:04.380 --> 0:14:10.740 non-racial school system, rather than separating things by race. Once 0:14:10.800 --> 0:14:13.970 the court-ordered plan is in place, districts have to come 0:14:14.020 --> 0:14:17.349 back to the court to show they're making progress. There's 0:14:17.370 --> 0:14:21.220 a lot of paperwork involved. and in school districts where 0:14:21.440 --> 0:14:25.900 discrimination continues to run rampant, the existing court order provides 0:14:25.940 --> 0:14:28.540 a more straightforward path for students and their families who 0:14:28.570 --> 0:14:31.350 are being harmed to bring their issues before the court. 0:14:32.750 --> 0:14:36.970 If a district feels they've truly achieved unitary status, they 0:14:36.990 --> 0:14:39.210 can file a motion to be released from the order 0:14:39.790 --> 0:14:43.600 and end the federal supervision. There's a lot more to 0:14:43.630 --> 0:14:45.780 it than that, but that is the gist of it. 0:14:47.940 --> 0:14:51.240 I wish I could tell you exactly how many times 0:14:51.270 --> 0:14:57.859 this has happened. We don't totally know. It's shocking how 0:14:57.980 --> 0:15:02.540 squishy the numbers are on this. A study published in 0:15:02.580 --> 0:15:06.200 the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management in 2012 claims 0:15:06.240 --> 0:15:11.000 to have conducted the first and perhaps only truly comprehensive 0:15:11.020 --> 0:15:14.400 accounting of the number of districts placed under these orders. 0:15:15.760 --> 0:15:18.900 They arrived at their data set by combining prior smaller 0:15:18.950 --> 0:15:22.490 studies Data from the DOJ, data from reports by the U.S. 0:15:22.510 --> 0:15:25.870 Commission on Civil Rights, reports by various state-level civil rights 0:15:25.970 --> 0:15:29.320 oversight bodies, data compiled by civil rights researchers at UCLA 0:15:29.360 --> 0:15:34.320 and Harvard, and primary source material from the courts. No 0:15:34.780 --> 0:15:38.610 single source of information contained all of the data points 0:15:38.640 --> 0:15:42.350 they collected. And a lot of these sources contained information 0:15:42.390 --> 0:15:46.690 that turned out not to be correct. It's hard to 0:15:46.810 --> 0:15:51.630 understand how or why the Department of Justice itself didn't 0:15:51.670 --> 0:15:55.460 have some kind of central repository of the cases they 0:15:55.520 --> 0:16:00.360 were involved in and allegedly keeping track of, but it 0:16:00.560 --> 0:16:04.240 seems like they did not. Even in my own search 0:16:04.340 --> 0:16:07.840 for some other source for these numbers, I found a 0:16:07.880 --> 0:16:13.500 variety of conflicting assertions across different DOJ publications. So, for 0:16:13.540 --> 0:16:16.920 simplicity's sake, and because they're probably the only correct ones, 0:16:17.870 --> 0:16:21.090 we'll use the numbers from this 2012 paper by sociologist 0:16:21.150 --> 0:16:28.710 Sean Reardon. Reardon's research found that 1,071 school districts listed 0:16:28.770 --> 0:16:32.210 across the source material as having been, at some time, 0:16:33.030 --> 0:16:37.400 under a desegregation order. But of those, he was only 0:16:37.480 --> 0:16:40.740 able to confirm the existence of such an order for 0:16:40.740 --> 0:16:46.830 755 districts. The paper's analysis is focused primarily on the 0:16:46.870 --> 0:16:52.310 school districts where, as of 1990, enrollment exceeded 2,000 students 0:16:52.830 --> 0:16:57.910 and the court order was still active. So in 1990, 0:16:57.910 --> 0:17:02.490 there were 483 school districts in the United States still 0:17:02.590 --> 0:17:09.170 under federal supervision for their desegregation plan. By 2009, that 0:17:09.230 --> 0:17:14.310 number had dropped to 268. And This study leaves off there, 0:17:14.869 --> 0:17:17.540 but a now-deleted page on the website for the DOJ's 0:17:17.580 --> 0:17:23.580 Civil Rights Division listed active cases in 132 school districts 0:17:23.640 --> 0:17:28.820 in 2024. And those districts were mostly in Georgia, Alabama, 0:17:29.160 --> 0:17:35.830 and Mississippi. And since his inauguration in January of 2025, 0:17:35.830 --> 0:17:39.810 the Trump administration has been very vocal about their complete 0:17:39.950 --> 0:17:44.320 abandonment of any enforcement on the issue. And in the 0:17:44.420 --> 0:17:48.400 disastrous haphazard attack on publicly funded programs that was Doge, 0:17:49.100 --> 0:17:51.980 they managed to eliminate millions of dollars in grant funding 0:17:52.180 --> 0:17:56.110 to the equity assistance centers that provided the technical help 0:17:56.200 --> 0:18:00.310 to school districts who were actually still trying to comply 0:18:00.369 --> 0:18:05.949 with those orders. Those federally funded organizations were originally called 0:18:06.710 --> 0:18:10.699 integration assistance centers, and they were established by the 1964 0:18:10.700 --> 0:18:16.350 Civil Rights Act. Earlier this year, the Department of Education 0:18:16.470 --> 0:18:22.760 announced their intention to completely eliminate equity assistance centers. But 0:18:22.780 --> 0:18:25.480 look at those numbers. 483 in 1990, down to 268 0:18:25.480 --> 0:18:26.860 in 2009, down to 132 in 2024. Long before Trump 0:18:26.880 --> 0:18:29.600 was trying to outlaw public memory of America's racist past, 0:18:41.590 --> 0:18:48.410 school districts were successfully achieving unitary status. And again, we 0:18:48.470 --> 0:18:52.790 want them to. The goal is for these cases to resolve. 0:18:52.830 --> 0:18:57.330 We don't want this open forever. If the cases can 0:18:57.369 --> 0:19:01.910 be closed, that's good. So between 1990 and 2009, the 0:19:01.950 --> 0:19:03.520 number dropped by about half, and 2009 to 2024, it's 0:19:03.560 --> 0:19:13.190 cut in about half again. The Trump administration is speedrunning 0:19:13.210 --> 0:19:16.500 making that number zero, but the rate of case closure 0:19:16.600 --> 0:19:20.760 has been accelerating since the 90s. And a 2007 report 0:19:20.800 --> 0:19:23.800 from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission says the DOJ has 0:19:23.840 --> 0:19:29.340 been actively pursuing resolution in these cases since 2000. So 0:19:29.380 --> 0:19:33.260 the policy of seeking to close these cases is not new. 0:19:34.280 --> 0:19:37.060 And in the first decade of the 2000s, the DOJ 0:19:37.320 --> 0:19:40.520 staffed up a department that was actively reviewing these cases. 0:19:41.430 --> 0:19:42.930 and they were able to resolve 180 of them between 0:19:42.930 --> 0:19:50.080 2000 and 2007 alone. What I'm not saying, but I 0:19:50.140 --> 0:19:53.919 am not trying to convince you of here, is that 0:19:53.960 --> 0:19:57.100 everything was good before, and it's only bad now, that 0:19:57.119 --> 0:20:01.400 the Trump administration is somehow uniquely evil, and that prior 0:20:01.440 --> 0:20:05.140 administrations always had everyone's best interests at heart, and Everyone 0:20:05.160 --> 0:20:07.280 at the Department of Justice was pure of heart in 0:20:07.300 --> 0:20:10.460 their commitments to civil rights before Harmeet Dhillon came along. 0:20:12.180 --> 0:20:15.740 I'm not telling you that every single one of those 0:20:15.830 --> 0:20:20.910 case closures prior to 2025 represents the best and highest 0:20:21.010 --> 0:20:23.510 good possible for the children in those school districts. I 0:20:23.550 --> 0:20:27.450 don't know that. And that's probably not true. But I 0:20:27.510 --> 0:20:30.730 haven't read those cases, and they are immensely complicated records 0:20:30.780 --> 0:20:36.060 spanning decades. I'm not saying it was always good before. 0:20:36.460 --> 0:20:40.659 What I'm saying is the rules changed. The policy has 0:20:40.840 --> 0:20:44.460 always been to seek case closure, but the rules for 0:20:44.619 --> 0:20:52.170 closing those cases went from extremely complex to non-existent. Prior 0:20:52.190 --> 0:20:55.619 to 2025, when a school district came before a judge 0:20:55.820 --> 0:21:00.250 asking for unitary status, they had to demonstrate not only 0:21:00.290 --> 0:21:04.290 that they fully complied with their specific court-ordered desegregation plan, 0:21:05.210 --> 0:21:09.060 but that they fulfilled their affirmative duty to take whatever 0:21:09.119 --> 0:21:16.800 steps were necessary to convert to a unitary system. A 0:21:16.800 --> 0:21:19.720 1968 Supreme Court decision in Green v. County School Board 0:21:19.740 --> 0:21:24.530 of New Kent County established some specific criteria, giving those 0:21:24.570 --> 0:21:29.540 criteria the name Green Factors. School districts have to come 0:21:29.580 --> 0:21:32.460 back before the judge and show what they've done to 0:21:32.520 --> 0:21:37.900 meet each of these green factors. Are their student populations desegregated? 0:21:38.460 --> 0:21:38.980 Obviously. 0:21:40.220 --> 0:21:43.580 But it's more than that. What does their staff look like? 0:21:44.280 --> 0:21:50.449 Their faculty? Their administration? What about extracurricular activities, transportation, facilities? 0:21:51.810 --> 0:21:56.010 It's not just having kids of all colors in the classrooms. 0:21:56.109 --> 0:22:01.580 It's the whole system. In Greene, the court was clear. 0:22:02.880 --> 0:22:07.190 Segregation affects every facet of the school system, top to bottom. 0:22:07.910 --> 0:22:11.170 Every bit of the operation of the school system. So 0:22:11.250 --> 0:22:16.830 desegregation has to, too. A trio of Supreme Court decisions 0:22:16.869 --> 0:22:19.520 in the 90s made it a lot easier to be 0:22:19.580 --> 0:22:23.400 deemed in compliance. But the Greene factors are still the standard. 0:22:24.280 --> 0:22:28.060 You have to show you've done everything within reason to comply. 0:22:30.350 --> 0:22:33.050 When the DOJ was reviewing cases in the early 2000s, 0:22:33.730 --> 0:22:38.160 they worked with districts to resolve cases that could be resolved. 0:22:38.200 --> 0:22:41.820 That 2007 report by the Civil Rights Commission said in 0:22:41.859 --> 0:22:45.600 some of these cases, the districts had already long been 0:22:45.740 --> 0:22:49.830 in compliance. They just hadn't sought closure of their cases 0:22:49.940 --> 0:22:55.129 for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they didn't know how. 0:22:55.670 --> 0:22:57.729 They didn't have the resources to do it. They didn't 0:22:57.750 --> 0:22:59.510 want to spend the money to go back to court. 0:23:00.420 --> 0:23:03.859 Or maybe they thought achieving unitary status would result in 0:23:03.880 --> 0:23:08.660 bad publicity or hurt feelings in the community. In some cases, 0:23:09.200 --> 0:23:12.340 districts feared losing certain types of funding they were eligible 0:23:12.400 --> 0:23:16.850 for as part of their compliance plan. And in a 0:23:16.880 --> 0:23:23.810 lot of cases, it was just inertia. What Trump's DOJ 0:23:23.869 --> 0:23:28.449 is doing is just closing them. They are filing motions 0:23:28.490 --> 0:23:32.980 for dismissal with the courts. Without a hearing. They aren't 0:23:33.300 --> 0:23:37.030 asking the districts to produce anything. No evidence is entered 0:23:37.090 --> 0:23:40.310 onto the record. There's no conversation about it. They're just 0:23:40.790 --> 0:23:44.770 closing the file folder and sliding it off the desk 0:23:44.850 --> 0:23:49.050 into the trash can. For this most recent batch of 0:23:49.109 --> 0:23:52.930 requests for dismissal, it's too early to say what was 0:23:52.950 --> 0:23:57.169 going to happen in those 50 or 60 cases. We 0:23:57.190 --> 0:24:00.740 don't know yet. I mean, the press released doesn't even 0:24:00.800 --> 0:24:05.020 name the districts involved. They've put their request for dismissal 0:24:05.060 --> 0:24:08.000 on the record, but there's probably no response from a 0:24:08.040 --> 0:24:12.900 judge in most of these cases yet. But they have 0:24:12.920 --> 0:24:16.000 done this before, so we have some data points to 0:24:16.040 --> 0:24:21.280 look at. In late 2025, the DOJ joined in a 0:24:21.320 --> 0:24:24.740 motion by the Louisiana Attorney General's office to dismiss the 0:24:24.780 --> 0:24:30.210 desegregation case in Concordia Parish. Several, including cases in Louisiana 0:24:30.250 --> 0:24:33.710 have been closed in this manner. The Louisiana Attorney General 0:24:33.790 --> 0:24:36.209 asked the court to dismiss the case and the DOJ 0:24:36.250 --> 0:24:39.790 joins in. As a party in the case, they're saying, yeah, 0:24:40.230 --> 0:24:42.930 we talked about it. We agree. Go ahead and close this. 0:24:43.130 --> 0:24:47.320 We don't need to argue about it anymore. After this 0:24:47.380 --> 0:24:51.080 motion was filed, the NAACP filed a motion to intervene, 0:24:52.200 --> 0:24:54.879 but they were denied. And the Fifth Circuit Court of 0:24:54.940 --> 0:24:58.530 Appeals wrote that there was no need for the NAACP 0:24:58.550 --> 0:25:01.350 to intervene on behalf of Black children in Concordia Parish 0:25:01.390 --> 0:25:06.730 because those children's interests were already represented. Their interests are 0:25:06.770 --> 0:25:10.310 represented by the United States government because the United States 0:25:10.330 --> 0:25:15.859 government has an interest in enforcing federal rules and regulations 0:25:16.020 --> 0:25:21.100 and their own desegregation orders. And as such, the interests 0:25:21.119 --> 0:25:25.939 of those children are already adequately represented. Any interest the 0:25:25.980 --> 0:25:28.880 NAACP would be trying to protect in their intervention, well, 0:25:29.700 --> 0:25:36.290 the government's got it. Ordinarily, that would be true. The 0:25:36.350 --> 0:25:41.070 DOJ's Civil Rights Division is supposed to be on the 0:25:41.150 --> 0:25:45.889 side of civil rights. And for the first 60 years 0:25:45.950 --> 0:25:51.890 of litigation in this case, that was true. But now 0:25:51.950 --> 0:25:55.680 everything is upside down. And the federal government has switched teams, 0:25:55.800 --> 0:25:58.540 but the court is still treating these parties as adversaries, 0:25:58.640 --> 0:26:03.180 even though they have teamed up to destroy the desegregation order. 0:26:18.330 --> 0:26:21.730 The hiccup in the Concordia case, though, is that the 0:26:21.750 --> 0:26:27.430 judge said no. Normally, if two opposing parties in a 0:26:27.490 --> 0:26:31.910 lawsuit enter into a joint stipulation of dismissal, there's nothing 0:26:31.970 --> 0:26:35.190 more for the court to do. These people aren't suing 0:26:35.230 --> 0:26:40.000 each other anymore. The case is over. But Judge D. Drell, 0:26:40.420 --> 0:26:45.960 an 80-year-old George W. Bush appointee, said, no, I don't 0:26:46.040 --> 0:26:51.899 accept this. Dismissal denied. Because the court isn't required to 0:26:51.960 --> 0:26:55.399 accept a stipulation of dismissal in cases where protection of 0:26:55.540 --> 0:27:00.159 others or public policy are at issue. Drell wrote that 0:27:00.520 --> 0:27:03.899 as much as he would love to end a 60-year-old case, 0:27:05.080 --> 0:27:07.940 Brown v. Board of Education requires the court to reach 0:27:07.960 --> 0:27:11.940 a conclusion based on facts on the record. The case 0:27:12.140 --> 0:27:14.980 cannot be closed without some kind of evidence being entered 0:27:15.020 --> 0:27:20.120 that justifies that decision. He scheduled an evidentiary hearing to 0:27:21.220 --> 0:27:25.239 make the parties put their argument on the record. They 0:27:25.260 --> 0:27:28.670 appealed his decision. And the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals 0:27:28.950 --> 0:27:32.609 vacated his ruling earlier this month, ruling that the case 0:27:32.670 --> 0:27:35.649 was dismissed as soon as the parties themselves decided that 0:27:35.690 --> 0:27:40.669 it was, thus making Judge Drell's ruling moot. There was 0:27:41.020 --> 0:27:43.399 no live case left for him to have an opinion on. 0:27:45.760 --> 0:27:48.260 I can't tell you what that might mean for any 0:27:48.300 --> 0:27:52.359 other cases, but I do hope other judges try to 0:27:52.420 --> 0:27:57.830 refuse these dismissals. According to a statement from the NAACP 0:27:57.890 --> 0:28:01.369 Legal Defense Fund, the Justice Department's withdrawal from some of 0:28:01.410 --> 0:28:06.290 these cases doesn't mean litigation stops. In cases where the 0:28:06.390 --> 0:28:10.389 NAACP is already involved, they're not backing down. 0:28:11.890 --> 0:28:12.150 In St. 0:28:12.190 --> 0:28:15.730 Mary Parish in Louisiana, for example, the NAACP is still 0:28:15.780 --> 0:28:22.500 planning to go to trial later this fall. DOJ be damned. Today, 0:28:23.100 --> 0:28:24.840 If you go to the homepage for the Civil Rights 0:28:24.859 --> 0:28:28.460 Division of the Department of Justice, you'll see a rotating 0:28:28.520 --> 0:28:32.490 carousel of fresh press releases. There'll be something different by 0:28:32.530 --> 0:28:34.970 the time you hear this, but I'm looking at it 0:28:35.010 --> 0:28:40.110 right now, and Minnesota is doing unlawful DEI. The DOJ 0:28:40.150 --> 0:28:42.970 is suing California to stop a gun law. The DOJ 0:28:43.020 --> 0:28:45.700 is suing New York to stop a law that protects 0:28:45.780 --> 0:28:51.140 the rights of transgender people in hospice care. I chose 0:28:51.180 --> 0:28:53.430 a date at random. and went to the Wayback Machine 0:28:53.470 --> 0:28:56.130 and looked at what that page looked like two and 0:28:56.150 --> 0:28:59.730 a half years ago. Back in February of 2024, the 0:28:59.900 --> 0:29:02.500 Civil Rights Division sent a warning letter to a city 0:29:02.520 --> 0:29:07.060 that was unconstitutionally jailing residents for unpaid fines. There was 0:29:07.100 --> 0:29:10.230 a press release about a report finding prison conditions in 0:29:10.250 --> 0:29:13.990 Mississippi unconstitutional. A man was convicted of a hate crime 0:29:14.830 --> 0:29:18.480 for murdering a transgender woman. And the DOJ was interested 0:29:18.500 --> 0:29:21.380 in intervening in a case that sought to reduce unnecessary 0:29:21.420 --> 0:29:26.790 law enforcement escalation in mental health emergencies. I mean, it's 0:29:26.810 --> 0:29:31.190 hard to make me feel nostalgic for the Biden administration, 0:29:31.210 --> 0:29:35.830 but God damn, what a comparison. At least the Civil 0:29:35.870 --> 0:29:41.500 Rights Division was talking about civil rights and not whatever 0:29:41.660 --> 0:29:46.940 bizarro world upside-down shit they've got going on now. On 0:29:46.980 --> 0:29:50.320 that same homepage, what used to be a single link 0:29:50.700 --> 0:29:55.770 labeled simply Report a Violation now takes up half the page. 0:29:57.010 --> 0:29:59.670 Each button still goes to the same link. It's all 0:29:59.710 --> 0:30:02.530 this same online form where you can file a complaint 0:30:02.570 --> 0:30:05.970 with the Civil Rights Division about a possible civil rights violation. 0:30:07.550 --> 0:30:11.590 But now the homepage offers you this huge menu of 0:30:11.690 --> 0:30:14.570