The Atlantic just published the most important story of the year.

Usually I put a post like this — all someone else, little me — in the Off the Cuff section.  I’m doing a full post for this, though, because I think it’s that important that everyone read this article by Pro-Publica’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, which was published this morning by The Atlantic.

Titled Resegregation in the American South, the article describes how local US school districts, freed from court-ordered integration, are actively and deliberately working to re-segregate both schools and society.  It’s important to note that we’re not talking about accidental situations where black people simply choose to live in black neighborhoods.  In the district that acts as the story’s microcosm, the leaders of Tuscaloosa, Alabama take a successful high school, split that high school up into multiple smaller schools, and then gerrymander he district’s neighborhoods to ensure a separation of blacks and whites.

Here is a taste of the article:

Freed from court oversight, Tuscaloosa’s schools have seemed to move backwards in time. The citywide integrated high school is gone, replaced by three smaller schools. Central [High School] retains the name of the old powerhouse, but nothing more. A struggling school serving the city’s poorest part of town, it is 99 percent black. D’Leisha, an honors student since middle school, has only marginal college prospects. Predominantly white neighborhoods adjacent to Central have been gerrymandered into the attendance zones of other, whiter schools…

In recent years, a new term, apartheid schools—meaning schools whose white population is 1 percent or less, schools like Central—has entered the scholarly lexicon. While most of these schools are in the Northeast and Midwest, some 12 percent of black students in the South now attend such schools—a figure likely to rise as court oversight continues to wane. In 1972, due to strong federal enforcement, only about 25 percent of black students in the South attended schools in which at least nine out of 10 students were racial minorities. In districts released from desegregation orders between 1990 and 2011, 53 percent of black students now attend such schools, according to an analysis by ProPublica…

Tuscaloosa’s business leaders and elected officials had witnessed the transformation of other southern cities after their school districts had reached a tipping point—the point at which white parents become unsettled by the rising share of black students in a school, and pull their children from the school en masse. School districts in cities such as Birmingham and Richmond had seen their integration efforts largely mooted: just about all the white students had left. As white families had moved out to the suburbs, eroding the tax base, both the schools and the cities themselves had suffered. Many officials in Tuscaloosa obsessed about the rippling consequences of continued white flight. “Money follows kids, and the loss of white students was very, very critical,” said Shelley Jones, who is white and served as a school-board member in the 1990s, and later as the chair…

When school officials make decisions that funnel poor children of color into their own schools, they promise to make those separate schools equal. But that promise is as false today as it was in 1954. Indeed, in some ways all-black schools today are worse than Druid High was back in the 1950s, when poor black students mixed with affluent and middle-class ones, and when many of the most talented black residents of Tuscaloosa taught there…

When President George W. Bush came into office, approximately 595 school districts nationwide—including dozens of non-southern districts—remained under court-ordered desegregation, according to a ProPublica analysis of data compiled by Stanford University researchers. By the end of Bush’s second term, that number had plummeted to 380. Nearly 60 percent of all the districts that have been released from their desegregation orders since 1967 were released under Bush, whose administration pressed the Justice Department to close those cases wherever possible. The trend has slowed under the Obama administration, but it has continued. Today, about 340 districts remain under court order.

A 2012 Stanford study examined school districts with at least 2,000 students that had been released from court order since 1990, finding that, typically, these districts grew steadily more segregated after their release. A separate study found that within 10 years of being released, school districts on average unwound about 60 percent of the integration they had achieved under court order…

High-poverty, segregated black and Latino schools account for the majority of the roughly 1,400 high schools nationwide labeled “dropout factories”—meaning fewer than 60 percent of the students graduate. School officials often blame poor performance on the poverty these kids grow up in. But most studies conclude that it’s the concentration of poor students in the same school that hurts them the most. Low-income students placed in middle-income schools show marked academic progress.

As a school’s black population increases, the odds that any given teacher there will have significant experience, full licensure, or a master’s degree all decline. Teacher turnover at segregated schools is typically high. And black students, overall, are less likely than any other group of students to attend schools with Advanced Placement courses and high-level classes like calculus.

I offer this piece — a year-long work of journalism, in the best and truest sense of that word — as a response to those fellow OTers who claim that racism against blacks is a thing of the past, and that being accused of promoting “racist policy” is the very worst slight that can befall a person in the year 2014.

I offer it as well to those OTers who assure me that, left to their own devices and freed from federal oversight, states and local governments will better solve problems such as racism and poverty in our communities.

Lastly, I offer it to those who claim that the adjacent policy movement of voter restriction — which seems to occur in the same places where racial segregation is being gerrymandered into a new renaissance  —  is just about “fraud.”

It’s a long article, but everyone needs to take the time to read it.