The New York Times Magazine, September 6, 2017
When a new succession of heavily white towns sought to break off from Jefferson County, beginning in the late 1980s, they went unchallenged, even though each secession siphoned large numbers of white students from the district, which had yet to comply fully with the court’s mandate to desegregate. By 2005, Jefferson County was divided into 12 distinct and vastly disparate school systems, many of them either heavily black or heavily white, making the school-district boundaries there among the most segregated in the nation. “State law required separate schools before Brown,” says Erica Frankenberg, an Alabama native and education policy professor at Penn State University who has studied Jefferson County secessions extensively. “Now it is district lines that maintain segregation.”