BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Three Alabama school systems have been released from decades-old federal desegregation cases as the U.S. Department of Justice moves to end more than 50 school cases nationwide, a shift that civil rights advocates say could weaken safeguards against racial inequities that have not disappeared from public education.
The dismissals involving Tuscumbia City Schools, Tarrant City Schools and St. Clair County Schools were announced Wednesday as part of the Trump administration’s broader campaign to close long-running cases that grew out of the legally enforced segregation of public schools.
The Justice Department said it had dismissed more than 50 desegregation cases nationwide, many of which had remained open for more than a half-century. The department said it is reviewing cases individually and will seek dismissal after determining that a school district has achieved unitary status, meaning it has eliminated the remaining effects of its former state-sanctioned dual school system to the extent practicable.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, who leads the department’s Civil Rights Division, said the cases no longer reflect conditions in modern classrooms and that districts should be able to redirect money from compliance with “onerous and outdated consent decrees” to students.
But the dismissals arrive as Alabama remains one of the states with the largest number of school systems still subject to federal desegregation orders, injunctions or cases rooted in the state’s resistance to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 school-desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.
About 44 Alabama school systems remained subject to open federal desegregation cases, orders or injunctions earlier this year, according to an Alabama Daily News review. A Justice Department list from May 2024 identified 39 Alabama districts in cases involving the department, more than any other state on the list.
Most of those cases trace back to Lee v. Macon County Board of Education, a statewide civil rights lawsuit brought by Black families after Black students in Macon County were denied admission to the all-white Tuskegee High School in 1963.
The case widened after then-Gov. George Wallace and other Alabama officials intervened to resist school integration. Federal courts concluded that the state exercised broad authority over local school boards and could be ordered to use that authority to dismantle segregation rather than preserve it.
In 1967, a three-judge federal panel ordered more than 100 Alabama school systems not already operating under separate federal orders to dismantle their racially segregated systems. The statewide litigation was later broken into local cases handled in federal courts around Alabama.
The orders were designed to address far more than whether Black students could attend schools once reserved for white children. Courts examined student assignment, faculty and staff assignments, transportation, facilities and extracurricular activities—areas known in desegregation law as the Green factors after a 1968 U.S. Supreme Court decision.
In some school districts, continuing orders or later agreements also address racial disparities in discipline, access to gifted or advanced coursework, school construction, employment and the assignment of Black teachers and administrators.
A district can be released from federal supervision in one category while continuing to face court oversight in others. Huntsville City Schools, for example, was released from federal transportation oversight in 2020 and received unitary status this year for faculty, staff and extracurricular activities, but it remains subject to supervision in other areas.
The Justice Department’s nationwide announcement did not identify each school system in its news release or detail the factual findings supporting every dismissal. The department said only that it is conducting a “thorough case-by-case review” of pending cases filed in the 1960s and 1970s in connection with unlawful racially segregated school systems.
The Alabama dismissals follow an earlier state political push to end the remaining cases. Katherine Robertson, the Republican nominee for Alabama attorney general and chief counsel to Attorney General Steve Marshall, has argued that continuing orders force districts to make decisions based on race and consume money and staff time that could otherwise go to classrooms.
Robertson has said some school systems spend hundreds of thousands of dollars seeking unitary status. She has characterized the longstanding orders as racial mandates without expiration dates and called for state cooperation with local districts to negotiate their end.
Civil rights attorneys and scholars argue that the cases cannot be reduced to a question of old paperwork or administrative expense.
The Legal Defense Fund and the law firm founded by civil rights attorney Fred Gray continue to represent Black families in many of the Lee v. Macon cases. Their continuing role means the Justice Department’s decision to withdraw or support dismissal does not necessarily end a case on its own.
Deuel Ross, the Legal Defense Fund’s director of litigation, told Alabama Daily News that the orders are not racial quotas. Rather, he said, they are intended to address unexplained discrimination and racial disparities and to establish fair systems for students and employees.
Joe Bagley, a Georgia State University professor who has studied Alabama school desegregation, said the cases rest on Fourteenth Amendment claims, not simply changing federal policy. He said some cases have become dormant as demographics changed, particularly in communities where white families largely left public schools, but others remain active and require school systems to report data to courts or comply with negotiated remedies.
Recent disputes have demonstrated that the cases can still have practical consequences. In Leeds, the Legal Defense Fund invoked the district’s desegregation order in 2020 after the system stopped providing student meals during the COVID-19 pandemic. The organization argued that ending meal service disproportionately affected Black students, and the district resumed the service.
The fund also has cited agreements in Madison and Lawrence counties involving continued separation between schools, racial disparities in student discipline and employment opportunities for Black teachers and principals. A federal appeals court in 2018 blocked the proposed creation of a separate Gardendale school system after a judge found that race was a motivating factor in the effort to split from Jefferson County Schools.
The national announcement comes after the Justice Department secured other recent dismissals. Courts dismissed cases involving Copiah County, Mississippi, and Hendry County, Florida, in 2025 after the department concluded those districts had eliminated vestiges of their former dual systems to the extent practicable.
The new dismissals mark a significant change in federal enforcement priorities, but they do not erase the history that made Alabama’s cases necessary. For decades, federal oversight served as the mechanism for enforcing orders against school systems that had operated separate schools for Black and white children under state law.
Whether the release of Tuscumbia, Tarrant and St. Clair County from their cases represents the completion of that work—or an early retreat from it—will likely remain central to Alabama’s continuing debate over public schools, racial equity and the unfinished legacy of segregation.