Pro Publica has partnered with The Atlantic to do a series on the resegregation of public schools in America. It’s heartbreaking to read how all the difficult, dangerous work of school integration done by so many people in the 1960s and 1970s has essentially been undone by an unwillingness on the part of the politicians, the judiciary and local communities to keep at it. Instead, you’ve got the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court engaging in word games:

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Now there’s a statement which will live forever in American rhetoric, although perhaps not for the reason Roberts might hope. It’s a monument to cynicism, as are many of his arguments. (See his majority opinion in McCutcheon v. FEC, 2014).

Anyway, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s story tells how Tuscaloosa, AL backslid from being one of the most successful school integration stories in the country to a city whose schools have fallen backward: “In Tuscaloosa today, nearly one in three black students attends a school that looks as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened.”

Read the whole thing.