JACKSON, Miss. — A federal appeals court has revived a lawsuit that says Mississippi allows grave disparities in funding between predominantly black and predominantly white schools.
The Thursday ruling by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reverses the 2019 decision by U.S. District Judge William H. Barbour to dismiss a lawsuit filed against state officials by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The suit was filed in 2017 on behalf of low-income black women who said their children and other black children attended schools that were in worse condition and had lower academic performance than some wealthier, predominantly white schools.
Barbour, a cousin of former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, said state officials were immune from being sued. However, the appeals court said sovereign immunity “is not limitless” and people may sue a state as long as the suit seeks changes going forward and not compensation for past practices.
The lawsuit said Mississippi was violating a federal law that allowed the state to rejoin the union after the Civil War. The 1870 law said Mississippi could not change its 1868 state constitution in a way to deprive any citizen of “school rights and privileges.”
“From 1890 until the present day, Mississippi repeatedly has amended its education clause and has used those amendments to systematically and deliberately deprive African Americans of the education rights guaranteed to all Mississippi schoolchildren by the 1868 Constitution,” the lawsuit says.
“We get what we always wanted, which is a chance to prove our case — that Mississippi is violating this federal law,” Will Bardwell, an attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said Friday.
The Mississippi attorney general’s office argued in court papers in 2018 that the plaintiffs were seeking to “refashion” the 1870 federal law “into a contorted federal mandate that would place the State of Mississippi in a straitjacket so far as the educational provisions of the State’s Constitution are concerned.”