A federal appeals court has barred a predominantly white Alabama community from forming its own school district, ruling that racial animus led to efforts by Gardendale residents to secede from the majority-black Jefferson County school district. This case was covered extensively by New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, who spoke recently on Democracy Now!

Nikole Hannah-Jones: “So, in this particular case, there was a flier about this effort to—for Gardendale to secede from the Jefferson County school system, and it listed a bunch of towns, and it said, you know, 'We have a choice to make. Do we want to be these towns?'—and then it listed several other towns—’Or do we want to be these towns?’ They never mentioned race, but it was clear to everyone who lived there the towns that the community did not want to be like were all heavily black, and the towns that the community did want to be like were all heavily white. And the white towns had seceded and broken their schools off from the larger system, and as a result, their schools and the towns were very white.”

Tuesday’s ruling by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals reverses a lower court ruling that would have allowed the secession to proceed. Writing on behalf of a three-judge panel at the 11th Circuit, Judge William Pryor noted, “The district court found that the Gardendale Board acted with a discriminatory purpose to exclude black children from the proposed school system.” Despite that, Judge Pryor wrote, the district court improperly allowed the secession to continue.