“Perfection is not the standard” when it comes to desegregation, the attorney for Rankin County School District told a federal judge this week as he sought to end a four-times-amended desegregation order the system has been under for 55 years.

The district is “practically unrecognizable,” John Hooks said Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Jackson. There aren’t “Black” and “white” schools in the district with mostly Black and white staff and students.

But plaintiffs who sued the district in 1967 for maintaining a segregated school system weren’t convinced. And their attorneys through the Legal Defense Fund had experts in tow along with student and faculty data to provide evidence for what they long experienced: vestiges of a dual school system that treated Black students and staff differen

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