Mississippi Sued Over Unequal Education for Black Students

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Mississippi is being hit with a lawsuit—accused of violating the federal law that allowed the state to rejoin the Union after the Civil War—due to what the lawsuit charges is the unequal education that black students receive.

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The Southern Poverty Law Center filed the lawsuit on behalf of four African-American mothers with children in public elementary schools. The lawsuit asks a federal judge to force state leaders to comply with the 1870 law that mandates that Mississippi must never deprive any citizen of “school rights and privileges” as described in its 1868 constitution, the Associated Press reports.

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The SPLC is accusing Mississippi, however, of having repeatedly diluted the education protections of that law ever since in what it calls a “white supremacist effort to prevent the education of blacks,” the AP reports.

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“I’m filing this lawsuit because the state has an obligation to make the schools that black kids attend equal to the schools that white kids attend,” Indigo Williams, the parent of a first-grade student at Raines Elementary School, said, according to the AP.

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The SPLC notes that all of the 19 Mississippi school districts rated “F” have overwhelmingly black student bodies, while the state’s five highest-performing school districts are majority white.

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The schools attended by the children of the plaintiffs “lack textbooks, literature, basic supplies, experienced teachers, sports and other extracurricular activities, tutoring programs,and even toilet paper,” according to the suit.

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