Williams knew that she had to be there, so she asked her parents to watch the kids.

The move had come to the attention of the federal judge overseeing a decades-old desegregation order that requires Jefferson County-once a front in the resistance against the Brown decision-to maintain racially integrated schools.

The majority of children living in Jefferson County’s increasingly diverse subdivisions are black and Latino Gardendale’s new district would be about 80 percent white. Gardendale, a mostly white city 15 minutes north of Birmingham, had proposed separating from the Jefferson County School District, which encompasses Birmingham’s suburbs. Board of Education school-segregation decision, Williams saw a post on Facebook shared by an old high-school friend she knew from her days playing trumpet in the Gardendale marching band: The newly empowered Gardendale Board of Education would be meeting in a few hours. On May 16, the eve of the 63rd anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v.

Credit: Tamika Moore for The Hechinger Report She grew up in the neighborhood and currently lives there with her children. Leslie Williams stands in the North Smithfield community park. But if the white parents in Gardendale get their way, that 46-year-old tradition may come to an end. Since 1971, a county school bus has arrived to take kids from North Smithfield Manor, a small pocket of suburban bliss built by black families who were blocked from buying homes in white subdivisions, to Gardendale High School, Williams’s alma mater, eight miles north. The plan was for her children to follow in another longtime neighborhood tradition.

Her daughter, 12, and two sons, 11 and 10, started school, and Williams got a job in medical billing in Jasper, 30 minutes from Birmingham. After her husband took a job that would keep him on the road most of the time, Williams moved back in with her parents in 2012 to save money.

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