BATON ROUGE — The U.S. Justice Department has moved to dismiss 57 school desegregation cases nationwide, including 11 in Louisiana and 13 in Mississippi.

Some of those Louisiana cases have remained under federal court supervision for decades.

The Justice Department is reviewing longstanding cases in several Louisiana parishes, including cases where it says districts have met their constitutional obligations. In some of those cases, the department has asked federal judges to dismiss federal oversight, arguing that districts have made sufficient progress.

The roots of these cases stretch back to the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled state-mandated segregation in public schools unconstitutional. Federal courts eventually had to step in and impose orders and monitor school systems that operated segregated schools.

Dr. Albert Samuels, an educator and longtime observer of school desegregation, says the Justice Department's decision reflects changing realities in classrooms, in people's homes and in statehouses and the White House.

"It's hard to desegregate a system in which the whites have already left," Samuels said. "There's not much to desegregate."

Samuels says demographic changes, housing patterns and the movement of families between school systems have reshaped the original political and racial landscape. He argues a district can appear to have met the terms of a court order while students still attend schools separated by race and income.

"I think they're being indiscriminate about it and not looking at the individual cases," Samuels said. "What they're saying is we don't care about civil rights, we don't care about the educational opportunities for Black students."

"I think if we truly want to be a multiracial democracy that provides equal opportunity, we have to figure out a way to provide equal opportunity," Samuels said.

The Justice Department says dismissal does not end a district's responsibility to follow federal civil rights law.