She remembers walking with her big brothers down a sidewalk fractured by the roots of old oak trees while children played hopscotch on the playground. She remembers going outside and clapping erasers together so that plumes of chalk dust rose above her head. And she remembers being told that she was attending a school that many white parents had taken their children out of just a few years earlier because they didn't want them sitting in class with Negroes.
The U.S. Department of Justice is seeking to join a federal lawsuit accusing the Los Angeles school district of discriminating against white students. At issue is a long-running effort to help disadvantaged students of color in Los Angeles by providing somewhat smaller classes to the vast majority of schools - leaving out campuses with larger numbers of white students. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in January by the 1776 Project Foundation, targets a decades-old effort to combat the harms of segregation