Asson & Frankenberg (2022) <em>South Carolina Law Review</em>

White families' resistance to school desegregation in Mobile County, Alabama, has existed since Brown v. Board of Education and has adapted since the era of court-ordered desegregation. That resistance remains present to this day. Mobile County Public School System (MCPSS), once a countywide school district, was under court order from the time Birdie Mae Davis v. Board of School Commissioners of Mobile County was filed in 1963 until the district was declared unitary in 1997. Beginning in 1963, when one MCPSS school was among the first in the state to be desegregated, there was staunch resistance to school desegregation by both White families and school leaders largely permitted by the district court judges overseeing the case which persisted through the duration of the case. Levels of racial and economic segregation in the county's schools remained high even as the district was released from court oversight, as the district court judge responded to changing federal jurisprudence. Within the post-unitary context, school district secession has emerged in Mobile County as a new, seemingly race neutral but essentially race-evasive mechanism to maintain segregation. Since 2006, three municipalities within the county have formed their own independent school systems. Though stakeholders relied on largely race-evasive language to argue in favor of secession, their arguments mirror those arguments historically used to resist court-ordered desegregation, and the effects of the splits are clearly racialized and perpetuate patterns of segregation. The maintenance of segregation over the past several decades undermines goals of integration and social cohesion necessary for a functioning multiracial democracy.