FERRIDAY, La. (AP) — Even at a glance, the differences are obvious. The walls of Ferriday High School are old and worn, surrounded by barbed wire. Just a few miles away, Vidalia High School is clean and bright, with a new library and a crisp blue “V” painted on orange brick.
Ferriday High is 90% Black. Vidalia High is 62% white.
For Black families, the contrast between the schools suggests “we’re not supposed to have the finer things,” said Brian Davis, a father in Ferriday. “It’s almost like our kids don’t deserve it,” he said.
The schools are part of Concordia Parish, which was ordered to desegregate 60 years ago and remains under a court-ordered plan to this day. Yet there’s growing momentum to release the district — and dozens of others — from decades-old orders that some call obsolete.
In a remarkable reversal, the Justice Department said it plans to start unwinding court-ordered desegregation plans dating to the Civil Rights Movement. Officials started in April, when they lifted a 1960s order in Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish. Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the department’s civil rights division, has said others will “bite the dust.”
It comes amid pressure from Republican Gov. Jeff Landry and his attorney general, who have called for all the state’s remaining orders to be lifted. They describe the orders as burdens on districts and relics of a time when Black students were still forbidden from some schools.
The orders were always meant to be temporary — school systems can be released if they demonstrate they fully eradicated segregation. Decades later, that goal remains elusive, with stark racial imbalances persisting in many districts.
Civil rights groups say the orders are important to keep as tools to address the legacy of forced segregation — including disparities in student discipline, academic programs and teacher hiring. They point to cases like Concordia, where the decades-old order was used to stop a charter school from favoring white students in admissions.
“Concordia is one where it’s old, but a lot is happening there,” said Deuel Ross, deputy director of litigation for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “That’s true for a lot of these cases. They’re not just sitting silently.”
Debates over integration are far from settled
Last year, before President Donald Trump took office, Concordia Parish rejected a Justice Department plan that would have ended its case if the district combined several majority white and majority Black elementary and middle schools.
At a town hall meeting, Vidalia residents vigorously opposed the plan, saying it would disrupt students’ lives and expose their children to drugs and violence. An official from the Louisiana attorney general’s office spoke against the proposal and said the Trump administration likely would change course on older orders.
Accepting the plan would have been a “death sentence” for the district, said Paul Nelson, a former Concordia superintendent. White families would have fled to private schools or other districts, said Nelson, who wants the court order removed.
“It’s time to move on,” said Nelson, who left the district in 2016. “Let’s start looking to build for the future, not looking back to what our grandparents may have gone through.”
At Ferriday High, athletic coach Derrick Davis supported combining schools in Ferriday and Vidalia. He said the district’s disparities come into focus whenever his teams visit schools with newer sports facilities.
“It seems to me, if we’d all combine, we can all get what we need,” he said.
Others oppose merging schools if it’s done solely for the sake of achieving racial balance. “Redistricting and going to different places they’re not used to … it would be a culture shock to some people,” said Ferriday’s school resource officer, Marcus Martin, who like Derrick Davis is Black.
The district’s current superintendent and school board did not respond to requests for comment.
Federal orders offer leverage for racial discrimination cases
Concordia is among more than 120 districts across the South that remain under desegregation orders from the 1960s and ’70s, including about a dozen in Louisiana.
Calling the orders historical relics is “unequivocally false,” said Shaheena Simons, who until April led the Justice Department section that oversees school desegregation cases.
“Segregation and inequality persist in our schools, and they persist in districts that are still under desegregation orders,” she said.
With court orders in place, families facing discrimination can reach out directly to the Justice Department or seek relief from the court. Otherwise, the only recourse is a lawsuit, which many families can’t afford, Simons said.
In Concordia, the order played into a battle over a charter school that opened in 2013 on the former campus of an all-white private school. To protect the area’s progress on racial integration, a judge ordered Delta Charter School to build a student body that reflected the district’s racial demographics. But in its first year, the school was just 15% Black.
After a court challenge, Delta was ordered to give priority to Black students. Today, about 40% of its students are Black.
Desegregation orders have been invoked recently in other cases around the state. One led to an order to address disproportionately high rates of discipline for Black students, and in another a predominantly Black elementary school was relocated from a site close to a chemical plant.
The Justice Department could easily end some desegregation orders
The Trump administration was able to close the Plaquemines case with little resistance because the original plaintiffs are no longer involved — the Justice Department was litigating the case alone. Concordia and an unknown number of other districts are in the same situation, making them vulnerable to quick dismissals.
Concordia’s case dates to 1965, when the area was strictly segregated and home to a violent offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan. When Black families in Ferriday sued for access to all-white schools, the federal government intervened.
As the district integrated its schools, white families fled Ferriday. The district’s schools came to reflect the demographics of their surrounding areas. Ferriday is mostly Black and low-income, while Vidalia is mostly white and takes in tax revenue from a hydroelectric plant. A third town in the district, Monterey, has a high school that’s 95% white.
At the December town hall, Vidalia resident Ronnie Blackwell said the area “feels like a Mayberry, which is great,” referring to the fictional Southern town from “The Andy Griffith Show.” The federal government, he said, has “probably destroyed more communities and school systems than it ever helped.”
Under its court order, Concordia must allow students in majority Black schools to transfer to majority white schools. It also files reports on teacher demographics and student discipline.
After failing to negotiate a resolution with the Justice Department, Concordia is scheduled to make its case that the judge should dismiss the order, according to court documents. Meanwhile, amid a wave of resignations in the federal government, all but two of the Justice Department lawyers assigned to the case have left.
Without court supervision, Brian Davis sees little hope for improvement.
“A lot of parents over here in Ferriday, they’re stuck here because here they don’t have the resources to move their kids from A to B,” he said. “You’ll find schools like Ferriday — the term is, to me, slipping into darkness.”
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