Home > Some U.S. States Are Slow to Drop Segregation Laws
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Louisiana, which like many Southern states still has racial-separation laws on its books, moved this week to repeal measures enshrining segregated schools 50 years after the U.S. Supreme Court (news - web sites) outlawed them.
The state legislature gave final passage to a repeal bill on Monday and sent it to Gov. Kathleen Blanco, who is expected to sign it.
"I thought it was important that we tried to get past that and for our state to move forward," said Rep. Cheryl Gray, a New Orleans Democrat and sponsor of the bill.
The first-term legislator said she had had no idea these laws were still in place and took up the issue after learning of it from a law professor.
In all, Louisiana found more than 20 "Jim Crow" laws still on its books, mostly relating to schools, Gray said. Jim Crow was a term used for legally enforced discrimination against blacks.
Louisiana, however, is not alone. Many southern U.S. states still have segregation laws in place, despite the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that "separate but equal" schools for black and white students were unconstitutional.
The unanimous decision set a precedent for numerous other court rulings and national legislation to dismantle segregation. But some states passed laws to help their schools resist national mandates, and legislatures have since been slow to eliminate those laws from the books.
In Alabama, for example, the state constitution still allows parents to choose whether they want their children to attend segregated schools, "to avoid confusion and disorder."
Such provisions are not enforced now, but their lingering presence means someone could try, said Gabriel Chin, the University of Arizona professor who contacted Gray.
"These are laws and in some instances provisions of the state constitution that represent the official policy of the state. Many of these seem to say that segregation is good," he said.
"But there’s a larger reason" to repeal the old laws, Chin said. "It has to do with the idea that symbols matter."
One Louisiana provision that lawmakers voted to repeal, called "Operation of Separate Schools for White and Colored," guarantees a salary to a teacher who is "away from his normal duties as a consequence of federal action relating to integration of the races in the public schools."
It applies if a school is closed or if a teacher is imprisoned under federal court order, and could give teachers the comfort to defy federal desegregation orders, a report from the Jim Crow Study Group at the University of Arizona said.
Other segregation laws linger in Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia, according to the Jim Crow Study Group.
Lawmakers in Missouri this year passed a bill to remove a reference to the "State Training School For Negro Girls."