THE state Supreme Court in the southern US state of Louisiana, on April 26, gave the city of St George the right to secede from the larger capital city of Baton Rouge.

This has cleared the way for a group of wealthy white Baton Rouge residents to carve out a majority-white enclave of the largely black city — recalling the history in the US of segregation and white flight.

Wealthy, white residents of Baton Rouge have been trying to secede from the rest of the city in some shape or form for over a decade. In 2012, a group of parents went to the state legislature to propose the creation of a separate school district which they called the Southeast Community School District. This effort failed, but the following year they tried once again and also failed.

After these defeats, they began to adopt a new strategy: form an entirely separate city. This would ensure their children would not attend school with the rest of the Baton Rouge community.

“St George was born from the effort to create a local independent school district in the south-eastern part of East Baton Rouge Parish,” states the website of the newly incorporated city of St George.

“We have witnessed the further decline of our public school system, skyrocketing murder and crime rates, further decay of our Parish infrastructure, unprecedented exodus of our friends and families from the Parish, and a complete lack of trust in our City-Parish leadership.”

Re-segregation

Laramie Griffin, a lifelong resident of Baton Rouge and a community organiser, calls the St George split “neosegregation.”

“This is essentially a land-grab, a money-grab that will decimate the city of Baton Rouge,” Griffin said. It is estimated that Baton Rouge will lose around $48 million in tax revenue that wealthy St George residents would have otherwise brought into the city.

The schools of Baton Rouge operated under a desegregation order as a result of the 1956 Brown v Board of Education Supreme Court ruling, which established that the segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. The school district is now 81 per cent black and 89 per cent of students are not white.

“The St George plan poses significant risks to our education system, threatens the continuity of critical programs, and challenges community representation,” writes the Baton Rouge chapter of the NAACP.

“The creation of a new municipality introduces considerable uncertainty around funding allocation for our schools, jeopardising the cornerstone of our community’s future: education.”

This is not the first time wealthy, white residents in the southern US have successfully split off from larger cities to form independent school districts. Similar efforts in Alabama, Tennessee and Louisiana have proven to lead to more segregation in schools.

Opponents of the split within Baton Rouge argue that the split, like many other historical examples of white flight, would deprive the city of the tax revenue generated by its wealthiest residents. The effects of white flight historically are felt throughout the country, including through the various water crises in the Mississippi capital of Jackson.

After schools in Jackson were desegregated in the ’70s and ’80s, white residents left the city en masse. By 1990, although Jackson’s population grew to 196,637, the city was only 44 per cent white, a decrease of about 6,000 white residents.

Their departure meant a significant decrease in public funding as they constituted a large portion of the wealthy tax base because white people are historically more well-off than descendants of black slaves in the US who suffer from systemic and structural racism and discrimination in regions across the country.

In the US South where labour legislation is particularly weak and union density is low, black workers are also super-exploited and underpaid.

In Jackson, the decrease in funding for public services ultimately resulted in a broken water system, leaving the city without drinkable water in several rounds of crisis.

Griffin founded a non-profit organisation called Evolve Louisiana, which in part pledges to “rebuild impoverished communities.” Griffin denounced the organisers of the St George split for wanting to move away from what wealthy white residents labeled as high crime rates, rather than give back to their communities.

“If you live here in the capital city and have a problem, wouldn’t you want to fix it, do what we call preventative care to prevent these things from happening?”

Baton Rouge does have higher violent crime rates than the rest of the nation. However, with the elimination of a major source of funding for the city’s public services in the form of taxes, crime could only get worse, as research has proven the links between poverty, few economic opportunities and crime. The median household income of Baton Rouge was $50,155 between 2018 and 2022, far lower than the national median of $74,580.

For many years, Baton Rouge has been plagued by race-based income inequality, with black households seeing some of the lowest earnings. The poverty rate of Baton Rouge is 15.3 per cent, higher than the national average of 12.6 per cent. The most common racial grouping living below the poverty line is black. Income inequality in East Baton Rouge Parish, the larger governing body which contains Baton Rouge, has been steadily rising for the past decade.

This article appeared on Peoplesdispatch.org.