Filed Date: July 9, 1970
Case Ongoing
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Fifteen years after Brown v. Board of Education (1954), 88% of Mississippi’s black students still attended all-black schools. Ubiquitous “freedom of choice” plans let white children transfer to predominantly white schools. Individual lawsuits and threats of funding cuts from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare proved unable to effect wholesale desegregation. But in 1969, the Supreme Court ruled that the freedom of choice plan in Holmes County, Mississippi, was unconstitutional and ordered districts to “begin immediately to operate as unitary school systems.” Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, 396 U.S. 19 (1969). This case is one part of a larger effort that desegregated 146 of Mississippi’s 148 districts within a year of Alexander.
On July 9, 1970, the United States filed this lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi. It sued the State of Mississippi under 42 U.S.C. § 2000c-6, alleging that Mississippi’s use of racially segregated schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Thirteen Mississippi public school districts immediately intervened as defendants; three more would join them later. The United States sought injunctions ordering the districts to operate “unitary” (integrated) schools.
The next day, the court ordered the districts to submit plans for “immediate conversion” to unitary systems. It set a deadline of one week, and the districts quickly drew up desegregation plans. Over the next two months, the court issued a series of injunctions requiring districts to implement their desegregation plans, and several districts entered into consent decrees. The orders typically required districts to:
Several individual students also intervened as plaintiffs to obtain injunctions allowing them to attend specific schools during the 1970-71 school year.
Since 1970, and continuing into 2019, the court has monitored the districts’ compliance. The following sections illustrate what kinds of disputes that have arisen.
Unwillingness to Desegregate Schools
The Laurel Municipal School District had been ordered to desegregate in 1970. In 1977, it operated seven elementary schools. Three were all black. Two were all white, except for twelve students. The other two were at least 70% white. The district court’s response arrived in July: it directed the school board to “again consider pairing or clustering the elementary schools” and determined that a “transportation study should be made.” The court cited “rather extreme physical difficulties” that integration might cause to justify its delay.
The Fifth Circuit reversed in a brief per curiam opinion issued on February 1, 1978. It directed the school district to desegregate by the start of the 1978 school year and ordered the district court to adopt a new plan by May 1st. 567 F.2d 1276 (5th Cir. 1978). In response, the district court directed the school district to close two elementaries entirely, teach grades four through six at two of the existing schools, and teach grades one through three at the remaining three.
State Support for Segregation Academies
In 1963-64, Mississippi was home to only sixteen private, non-Catholic schools. By 1969-70, it had 124. Many of the new private schools opened during this time were “segregation academies” designed to allow whites to avoid integration by withdrawing from public education entirely. Some segregation academies sought implicit or explicit state financial support. Therefore, courts closely scrutinized efforts by Mississippi's state or local governments to evade desegregation orders by providing aid to segregation academies.
Here, the United States alleged that Smith County provided unlawful subsidies to the Sylvarena Baptist Academy, a private school in Smith County open only to whites. In particular, five months after the court ordered Smith County's public schools to desegregate, the County allowed the Academy to lease a vacant public school for $5.00 per year.
The United States moved for relief from the court, arguing that the lease constituted “state financial assistance” for segregated schools designed to “reestablish a dual school system.” The district court, a panel of the Fifth Circuit, and the Fifth Circuit en banc all agreed. Circuit Judge Gewin held that “‘white flight’ academies will not be sanctioned” and voided the Academy’s lease. Judge Gewin's opinion relied on the Supreme Court's holding in Norwood v. Harrison that states could not provide aid to private schools that discriminated based on race. 476 F.2d 941 (5th Cir. 1973); 499 F.2d 425 (5th Cir. 1974).
Efforts to Limit Integration to Prevent White Flight
The Hattiesburg Municipal Separate School District entered into a consent decree in 1970 to desegregate its schools. But by 1985, eight of the eleven elementary schools remained at least 80% white or 80% black. The court weighed several possible desegregation plans. One used a “mandatory reassignment pairing and clustering” approach to ensure that no school would have a student body that had more than 80% students of one race. Another modestly adjusted existing boundaries but called for the creation and promotion of two magnet schools to attract children of both races. The District agreed with the United States to adopt the magnet school approach, but children intervened as plaintiffs to challenge it. The intervenors objected to the District's plan on several grounds: its lack of specificity about the magnet school programs, the greater burden it placed on black children who would be transferred farther from home, and its lack of potential to effect substantial integration. Nevertheless, Judge Tom S. Lee rejected the clustering plan, which he found would “cause much more white flight” and “continue to do so at a faster rate” than the magnet school plan. 622 F. Supp. 662 (S.D. Miss. 1985).
The Fifth Circuit reversed in an opinion written by Judge John Minor Wisdom. Judge Wisdom was one of the “Fifth Circuit Four,” a group of progressive judges who aggressively enforced civil rights laws. He characterized the magnet school plan as “too little and too late” and the district court’s opinion as “a voice from the past crying for ‘gradualism.’” Primarily objecting to the fact that magnet schools would serve only a small number of students while leaving many more in overwhelmingly segregated schools, Judge Wisdom reversed and remanded the case. He instructed the district court to consider “mandatory reassignment” and “pairing and clustering” so that no schools remained entirely black. 808 F.2d 385 (5th Cir. 1987). The district court adopted a new consent decree on April 29, 1987.
Consolidation of City and County Schools
The City of Laurel is located in Jones County. The Laurel School District serves students who live in Laurel, and the Jones County School District serves students in Jones County who live outside of Laurel. Tensions between the City and County led to an unusual dispute in which the NAACP and State of Mississippi worked together to defeat an effort by the United States to integrate the City and County schools.
Both the Laurel and Jones County School Districts had agreed to desegregation plans in 1970. At the time, the Laurel schools were split roughly equally between black and white students, whereas the County schools were about 80% white. By 1988, the City’s schools were 75% black, but the County’s racial composition remained about the same. During the intervening years, Mississippi did not consolidate the districts despite the potential for significant efficiency gains, and the state had made it easier for students to transfer between districts.
In December, 1987, Laurel tried to absorb some Jones County students by modifying the boundary between the Laurel School District and the Jones County School District. The action was removed to federal court and merged with this case because both the City and County desegregation plans contained Singleton provisions, which:
District Judge Tom S. Lee held that consolidation would only be an appropriate remedy if the County had violated the Singleton provisions of its desegregation plan. He then found that no violations occurred and vacated the consolidation order. 719 F. Supp. 1364 (S.D. Miss. 1989). The Fifth Circuit affirmed. Circuit Judge Thomas G. Gee recognized that Mississippi officially encouraged white flight by preventing city-county school consolidations and promoting interdistrict transfers. But he found that no white flight actually occurred in Jones County because its racial composition remained constant. 921 F.2d 604 (5th Cir. 1991).
Transition to Unitary Status
The Simpson County School District was placed under court supervision on August 10, 1970. After three decades, the District had tired of the oversight. On November 13, 2001, it moved for a declaration of unitary status to terminate the injunction to which it was subject. The Fifth Circuit affirmed the district court’s approval of unitary status in student body composition, transportation, extracurricular activities, and facilities and denial of unitary status in faculty and staff assignment on December 22, 2006. 211 Fed. App’x 296. Over the next decade, the District, federal government, and intervenors exhaustively litigated the District’s efforts to obtain a declaration of unitary status in faculty and staff assignments that would end all remaining supervision over the District.
The government and District entered into a new consent decree relating to faculty and staff assignments in 2011 requiring nondiscrimination and merit based hiring along with:
The District moved for a declaration of unitary status on January 30, 2013 on the grounds that it had complied with the consent decree.
In 1982, a group had intervened on behalf of the class of “present and future black children” in the District to enforce the original desegregation orders. The same group returned to court in 2013 to challenge the District’s motion. District Judge William H. Barbour, Jr., first cousin and former law partner of Haley Barbour, Mississippi’s governor from 2004 to 2012, questioned whether the Intervenors still had standing in the case. In a September 26, 2013 opinion, Judge Barbour held that they did have standing because the Intervenors had obtained class certification when they originally intervened. He rejected the Intervenors’ argument that the district discriminated by hiring more white teachers than black teachers because the consent decree required hiring the most qualified candidates regardless of race and scheduled a fairness hearing on the District’s motion for unitary status. 2013 WL 12176996.
The court received more than 500 objections to the District’s motion for declaration of unitary status from the public as part of its fairness hearing. Judge Barbour determined they were due “little weight” because most were short and generic. He then analyzed the District’s recent employment practices and found that the District had “eliminated the vestiges of prior de jure segregation to the extent practicable.” Nevertheless, he denied the District’s motion because it had failed to use court-approved forms in its hiring decisions. He extended the consent decree until 2015. 2014 BL 456699.
Both the District and Intervenors moved for reconsideration, which Judge Barbour denied. The Intervenors then appealed to the Fifth Circuit, which determined that the Intervenors lacked standing to appeal because they had prevailed at the district court. Circuit Judge Stewart rejected the Intervenors’ argument that they should be able to challenge the district court’s finding that the District had eliminated de jure segregation because “appellate courts review judgments, not opinions.” 805 F.3d 596 (2015).
The District moved promptly for unitary status once the extension of the consent decree expired in 2015. Judge Barbour determined that a school system “need not employ a faculty having a racial composition substantially equivalent to that of its student body” to fully desegregate. And he described the court’s fairness hearings as “forums for disgruntled applicants to present race-based employment grievances” rather than relevant inquiries into the District’s general policies and suggested that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission would be a better forum to hear such complaints. Concluding that Simpson County’s schools were “fully integrated both as to students, and as to teachers,” he granted the District’s motion for unitary status on September 30, 2016. 2016 WL 7971190.
The Intervenors appealed. On February 6, 2018, the Fifth Circuit held that the district court’s ruling was “plausible in light of the record.” It acknowledged that many employees the district hired had “some connection” to those who hired them, but concluded that these connections were “not surprising” in such a small school district. And it accepted the district court’s finding that the District had “genuine” non-racial reasons for preferring certain candidates over others. 882 F.3d 151.
Current Status
The case is ongoing, and districts still under consent decrees continue to be monitored by the court. It appears likely that more school districts will move for declarations of unitary status in the coming years. Some already have: on September 11, 2018, the court declared the Poplarville Municipal Separate School District unitary; the court granted Jones County's motion for a declaration of unitary status on May 1, 2019; and on August 6, 2025, the court declared Copiah County to be fully unitary, dissolved the injunction as to the Copiah County School District and dismissed the case with prejudice as to the county.
476 F.2d 941
499 F.2d 425
567 F.2d 1276
808 F.2d 385
921 F.2d 604
805 F.3d 596
882 F.3d 151
622 F. Supp. 662
719 F. Supp. 1364
2014 BL 456699
2013 WL 12176996
2016 WL 7971190
Summary Authors
Timothy Leake (3/1/2019)
For PACER's information on parties and their attorneys, see: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/7420980/parties/united-states-v-state-of-mississippi/
Jordan, Daniel Porter (Mississippi)
Gov, Mitzi Dease (Mississippi)
Keys, Suzanne Griggins (Mississippi)
Adams, Holmes S. (Mississippi)
Hooks, John Simeon (Mississippi)
See docket on RECAP: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/7420980/united-states-v-state-of-mississippi/
Last updated Sept. 8, 2025, 5:36 p.m.
State / Territory: Mississippi
Case Type(s):
Key Dates
Filing Date: July 9, 1970
Case Ongoing: Yes
Plaintiffs
Plaintiff Description:
United States of America Department of Justice Civil Rights Division
Plaintiff Type(s):
U.S. Dept of Justice plaintiff
Attorney Organizations:
U.S. Dept. of Justice Civil Rights Division
Public Interest Lawyer: Yes
Filed Pro Se: No
Class Action Sought: No
Class Action Outcome: Not sought
Defendants
Mississippi State Board of Education, State
Defendant Type(s):
Facility Type(s):
Case Details
Causes of Action:
Title IV, Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000c et seq.
Constitutional Clause(s):
Available Documents:
Injunctive (or Injunctive-like) Relief
Outcome
Prevailing Party: Plaintiff
Nature of Relief:
Injunction / Injunctive-like Settlement
Preliminary injunction / Temp. restraining order
Source of Relief:
Form of Settlement:
Court Approved Settlement or Consent Decree
Content of Injunction:
Develop anti-discrimination policy
Other requirements regarding hiring, promotion, retention
Order Duration: 1970 - None
Issues
General/Misc.:
Discrimination Basis:
Affected Race(s):