Georgia Governor Nathan Deal has finally decided how to handle a campaign by four Georgia students to hold their school’s first integrated prom: just walk away. Deal, who previously brushed off requests for him to support integration as a “silly publicity stunt,” told an Atlanta-Journal Constitution reporter yesterday that he thought the campaign was a private matter and not one that needed the state’s intervention:

DEAL: I believe that anything that’s associated with a school should not have the distinction or discrimination made based on race or gender or any other separation, but it appears to me that the parents and students have worked that out on their own, as they should.

We’ve come a long way in the state of Georgia. We don’t need things like this being divisive. We think we have put most of those issues behind us. None of us condone things that would send the wrong message about where we are with regard to race relations. But by the same token, I think that people understand that some of these are just local issues and private issues, and not something that the state government needs to have its finger involved in.

Deal’s comments that the students’ initiative was a local, private issue are in some ways similar to Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) view that the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 violates business owners’ rights to “private ownership” by requiring them to abandon employment discrimination and whites-only lunch counters. It also completely misses the point of civil rights. The reason we have civil rights law is because we understand that certain private actions, such as race and gender discrimination, wound our society so deeply that they cease to be a merely private concern.

In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education a common tactic by white segregationists was to open private academies for white students that, because they were private and not public schools, evaded the Constitution’s ban on segregation. The segregated proms at Wilcox County High School appear to be a relic of a similar tactic. Parents, rather than the school board, sponsor the proms at this school.

To their credit, several Republicans broke with Deal and endorsed an integrated prom. Over the last few weeks, a group of students have raised money locally through food sales and online through their Facebook page, and are still collecting funds. They plan to hold the integrated prom on April 27, and the Wilcox County School Board has released a statement saying they plan to consider holding an official, school-sponsored integrated prom next year. Nevertheless, the students’ progress on this front does little to change the fact that segregation remained alive and well in this school district nearly 60 years after Brown.

During the long fight to end apartheid in the American South, defenders of segregation would frequently dismiss civil rights workers as nothing more than “outside agitators” intruding on communities that did not want them. Nearly 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, little appears to have changed in the Georgia governor’s mansion. In response to a request to support students in Wilcox County, Georgia seeking to integrate their high school’s still-segregated prom, Gov. Nathan Deal (R-GA)’s office channeled the spirit of George Wallace:

Gov. Nathan Deal won’t take sides in the controversy over some Wilcox County teens’ efforts to integrate their prom.

By email, his spokesman, Brian Robinson, said Deal would have no response to a liberal group’s call for state officials, including the governor to speak out.

He wrote, “This is a leftist front group for the state Democratic party and we’re not going to lend a hand to their silly publicity stunt.”

Better Georgia asked Deal and others “to publicly support the students of Wilcox County who are fighting to end a ‘separate-but-equal’ high school prom.”

To their credit, at least three Georgia Republican lawmakers, including state House Majority Whip Ed Lindsey, do not share Deal’s nonchalance towards segregation and have all issued statements supporting integrating the prom.

In the past decade, resegregation through so-called “white flight” and relaxed integration enforcement is leading to greater inequality from an earlier age. Modern inner-city schools are often underfunded, while dropout rates are high and violence is common. Police officers routinely intervene to discipline students for minor infractions, exposing minority kids early to the criminal justice system. Greater allocation of resources may not be enough to halt the cycle of racially-skewed poverty and crime as long as racial and class segregation continues, according to an analysis by Columbia Business School professor Ray Fisman.

Over 50 years since the Supreme Court desegregated schools in Brown v. Board of Education, integration has helped keep black students from dropping out, while improving their earnings, health and decreasing incarceration rates. But resegregation of schools since 2001, when poor black students stopped getting bused to integrated schools, is fast undoing the progress made since the civil rights era.

Fisman highlights a recent study of Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools in North Carolina, a civil rights battleground used in a 1971 Supreme Court decision to allow busing of minority students into white schools. Before 2001, school populations were racially mixed through the inclusion of some minority neighborhoods not immediately around the school. After busing was halted, the district redrew its school boundaries to re-sort students into mostly black and mostly white schools. The study found that even with increased funding to minority schools, young black students placed in resegregated schools were suddenly tangling with law enforcement more frequently:

Despite cushioning minority students from academic decline, the resegregation of Charlotte schools nonetheless led to a jump in arrests and incarcerations of minority students—particularly among poor black males, who are most at risk for crime. According to the authors’ calculations, a poor black male was 15 percent more likely to get arrested if assigned to a school that had 60 percent minority students rather than 40 percent minority.

The study’s findings suggest that clustering those already most vulnerable to turning to crime—poor black males—in certain schools may lead to their acting as negative influences on one another. These findings also underscore the fact that desegregation isn’t the zero-sum game that it’s often portrayed to be, with benefits to black students coming at the expense of whites. White students didn’t commit fewer crimes with the end of busing, while black students committed significantly more.

Court-ordered integration led to more equitable resources and spending per student regardless of race, allowing poor minority students to access, to an extent, the same kinds of opportunities as white children. In the Charlotte study, increased resources for resegregated minority schools kept the dropout rate level. But active integration policies are necessary to help students change their socioeconomic fates. The study links the racial crime gap directly to segregation, concluding, “Policies that allocate additional resources to segregated schools can improve classroom instruction and course offerings, but only deliberately integrative student assignment policies can change the racial or socioeconomic backgrounds of students who walk in the doors of the school.”

Jess Bravin has a must-read piece about the town of Cleveland, Mississppi, where most of the African-American children still attend an all-black public high school , East Side High School, on one side of the town’s old railroad tracks. On the other side sits one of the few public high schools in the Mississippi Delta where significant numbers of black students and white students sit in class together — but at a price. The white children dominate school activities at Cleveland High, and much of the white minority in the town is fighting hard to keep it that way. As Cleveland High’s homecoming queen expresses the white community’s anxieties, “[w]hen you have all the black kids come in, we’re going to have a majority black football team, our whole basketball team is going to be black, I mean, everything—our homecoming court, our beauty review, our student council, all of our activities.”

The most gut-wrenching aspect of the story isn’t the white community’s opposition to full integration, however, it is the fact that many African-Americans within Cleveland oppose a Justice Department lawsuit seeking to desegregate both of the town’s high schools — including one of Cleveland’s highest ranking black officials:

Local officials said a merger would throw white students into the minority and chase away white families.

In nearby communities that complied with court-ordered integration, “the high school now is damn near all black,” said Cleveland’s school board president, Maurice Lucas, who is black. “There ain’t enough white folks to go around.” . . .

Emily Jones, the archivist at Cleveland’s Delta State University, is firmly opposed. “We like our traditions, to sit down in our own culture,” said Ms. Jones, 36, who is white.

If the government prevails, Ms. Jones said, Cleveland could become like nearby Greenville, where white enrollment at public schools is 3%. “My sister and her husband moved to Cleveland from Greenville because of the schools,” she said. “They would move again if the schools changed.”

Lucas’s concerns are not idle fears. When I was a teacher in the Mississippi Delta, I taught in a de facto segregated public middle school where well over 90 percent of the students were black. Although the town had a substantial white minority, nearly all the white children attended a nearby private academy, and this is a common story in many Delta towns.

The most hopeful part of Bravin’s piece comes close to the end, when he describes a Louisiana community that broke out of this trap. The white academy system was one of the techniques pioneered by segregationist Sen. Harry Byrd’s “massive resistance” campaign against public school integration. Most of the academies that grew up in the wake of white opposition to integration were founded forty decades or more ago. So the children who attend them today attend an institution that is firmly established within their towns and is often the same school their parents attended.

Last May, however, Lincoln Parrish, Louisiana agreed to merge its segregated school system into an integrated student body in response to a Justice Department lawsuit, and this agreement so far appears successful. As Bravin explains, “[b]lack enrollment at schools in the district—which had ranged from 26% to 92%—is now between 52% and 60%.” This is only one example, and there is still time for a white academy system to form in Lincoln Parrish, but it is also a hopeful sign that integration can succeed in towns that do not already have an alternative school system where white families can flee.

Mark Traina, a school psychologist in Louisiana, has been using his twitter account to spew racially-charged accusations about “young black thugs,” and now the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is highlighting his comments in a civil rights complaint against the Jefferson Parish School Board. The complaint alleges that black students and disabled students are sent to “alternative” schools at a significantly higher rate than white students.

Below are Traina’s most damning tweets about black people and Trayvon Martin:

We are faced with a young Black Army of Thugs who have declared War on the American Way of Life-Holding America Hostage as we speak!

— Mark A. Traina (@MarkATraina) January 14, 2012

Young Black Thugs have created an atmosphere of Fear throughout America. The Real Terrorist live among us! Not over seas! Right here and now

— Mark A. Traina (@MarkATraina) January 14, 2012

Protesters march in Florida town where Trayvon Martin was shot: Black people need to STOP shooting one another! mark a. traina

— Mark A. Traina (@MarkATraina) April 1, 2012

But Traina’s opinions go even further than personal hatred for black youth. On his Twitter account, he goes into his politics, wondering, “Can President Obama win re-election if almost two-thirds of whites are opposed to him?” He has also voiced strong support for Alabama’s segregationist Governor George Wallace, Colorlines reports:

In another tweet about the Republican presidential primaries in March, Traina wrote, “I grew up in Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana – I am a Wallace Man at Heart!”

“It’s particularly alarming to have someone who works for the school system in a position of authority be pro-segregation,” Eden Heilman, a lawyer with the Southern Poverty Law Center told NOLA.com, referring to Traina’s remark about George Wallace, segregationist governor of Alabama.

The Jefferson Parish School Board is already investigating Traina’s tweets.

In 2004, presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) voted against a resolution praising the 1964 law banning whites-only lunch counters and employment discrimination because he claimed that “the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not improve race relations or enhance freedom. Instead, the forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty.” Ron Paul’s views were recently echoed by his son, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who claimed that opposing the ban on whites-only lunch counters is the “hard part about believing in freedom.”

In an interview this morning on CNN, the younger Paul was asked to defend his father’s disregard for one of the most important legislative accomplishments in American history. His answer? Allowing private businesses to maintain a culture of virulent racism is the price we must pay in order to have cigar bars:

RAND PAUL: There are things that people were concerned about that were unintended consequences [of the Civil Rights Act], for example, people who believe very fervently in people having equal protection under the law, and are against segregation and all that, still worried about the loss of property rights…for example, I can’t have a cigar bar any more, and you say, “well, that has nothing to do with race” — the idea of whether or not you control your property, it also tells you, come in here I want to know the calorie count on that, and the calorie Nazis come in here and tell me. [...] The point is that its not all about that. It’s not all about race relations, it’s about controlling property, ultimately.

Watch it:

Later in the same interview, Paul attacks the interviewers for “dwelling on an obscure issue” by questioning his father’s opposition to desegregation. Simply put, there are not very many victims of the apartheid state that the Civil Rights Act helped end who would describe desegregation as an “obscure issue.”

The following is the third in a multi-part series on former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s speech to the Values Voter Summit. Part I of this series is available here. Part II is here.

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich began his speech to the Values Voter Summit by attacking a landmark Supreme Court decision desegregating a Little Rock high school. He then belittled slavery by comparing the greatest evil in American history to an inconsequential-by-comparison lower court decision that would have removed the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance if the Supreme Court had not unanimously reversed it on appeal.

Having thus demonstrated his agreement with some of the worst and most harmful legal doctrines in American history, he then endorses another one: massive resistance.

“Massive resistance” is the label arch-segregationist Sen. Harry Byrd (D-VA) gave to his state’s plan to openly defy Brown v. Board of Education and maintain Virginia’s segregated schools. Although Gingrich’s speech gives no indication that he supports segregation, the former speaker proudly embraces Byrd’s tactic of simply refusing to comply with court decisions that he disagrees with:

I would instruct the national security officials in a Gingrich administration to ignore the recent decisions of the Supreme Court on national security matters, and I would interpose the presidency in saying, as the commander in chief, we will not enforce this. And by the way, for our liberal friends, the source of that is Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In 1942 a group of German saboteurs were landed in Florida and Long Island. They were all picked up within two weeks. Roosevelt brought in his attorney general and said: They will be tried in a military court, they will be executed, it should happen within three weeks, and tell the Supreme Court if they issue a writ of habeas corpus, I will not honor, and therefore they should not issue it. I am the commander in chief in wartime. They aren’t.

Watch it:

President Roosevelt lifted America out of the Great Depression. He laid the foundation of a modern social safety net and ushered in three generations of American dominance and prosperity — and he defeated the most horrific dictator the world has even known to boot. Roosevelt rightfully is remembered as one of America’s greatest presidents, but anyone with even a passing understanding of FDR’s record on civil liberties in wartime knows that it stands as a shameful stain on an otherwise heroic record.

Moreover, Gingrich’s account of Roosevelt and the German saboteurs leaves out several very important details. Most notably, the Supreme Court upheld Roosevelt’s decision to use a military tribunal to try, convict and sentence the Nazi agents in a case known as Ex parte Quirin. Accordingly, Roosevelt never did what Gingrich suggests — openly defying a decision of the Supreme Court.

If presidents have the power to simply ignore court decisions they disapprove of, then literally no law is safe. If Gingrich can defy national security decisions, than he can defy court orders requiring his administration to pay Medicare benefits despite Republican opposition to that program. His Department of Justice can refuse to enforce voting rights or even actively come to the aide of efforts to disenfranchise poor and minority voters, no matter how many times he is ordered to obey the law.

And he can also do things that are far, far worse.

Elsewhere in the speech, Gingrich praises President Andrew Jackson’s contempt for a Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of a national bank, but Jackson is also infamous for a much more significant conflict with the justices. After the Supreme Court determined in Worcester v. Georgia that Native Americans retain their rights to their tribal lands, Jackson probably never actually uttered the words “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” But he did forcibly relocate tens of thousands of Natives in open defiance of the Supreme Court. Thousands died during Jackson’s Trail of Tears.

Obedience to the rule of law is what separates American presidents from dictators and what ensures that our most fundamental freedoms are not vulnerable to a powerful official’s mere whim. If a president can defy one court decision, he can defy any court decision, and the Constitution and the law itself are the ultimate casualties.