TRUMP: MAKE AMERIKKKA WHITE AGAIN !!

Jeff Sessions' Other Civil Rights Problem
By THOMAS J. SUGRUENOV. 21, 2016

In 1956, as a way to sidestep Brown v. Board of Education, Alabama voters amended the state Constitution to deprive students of a right to public education. Public support for school funding collapsed in its aftermath. By the early 1990s, huge disparities in funding separated Alabama's haves and have-nots.

Judge Eugene W. Reese of the Alabama Circuit Court found the inequitable funding unconstitutional and ordered the state to come up with a system to remedy the inequity.

Alabama Attorney General Sessions led the battle against the decision. He argued that Judge Reese had overreached. It was a familiar war cry on the segregationist right: An activist court was usurping the power of the state's duly elected officials to solve the problem on their own. Mr. Sessions was lauded by fellow Republicans for his efforts. They saw funding inequities as part of the natural order of things, not as a problem to be remedied.

Advocates of school equity cried foul. "They're asking for the last 50 years to disappear, as far as improving public education," complained C. C. Torbert, the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court and the lawyer for the poor districts, about Mr. Sessions and his allies. Special-education and disability organizations were especially outraged: the poorest districts could not provide even basic services to students in need. If Mr. Sessions won, he would "consign an ever-growing number of Alabama schoolchildren to an unconstitutionally inadequate and inequitable education."

Finally, in 1997, the Alabama Supreme Court upheld Judge Reese's finding that the state's educational inequity was unconstitutional. But, as Mr. Sessions (by then a senator) had hoped, the court left the remedy to the state's increasingly conservative Legislature, which made only modest changes in the state's school funding structure.

Alabama's public schools, still underfunded, still separate and unequal, ranked near the bottom nationally, stand as one of Jeff Sessions' most enduring legacies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/opinion/jeff-sessions-other-civil-rights-problem.html