Attorneys for the Southern Education Foundation (SEF) will be in Federal Court Monday, May 12 to begin their defense of a portion of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which the Trump Administration is attempting to illegally cast aside by conflating it with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion or DEI issues. The simple message from the Southern Education Foundation: DEI and Civil Rights are two very different things.
At issue is the Department of Education’s misguided attempt to close the Equity Assistance Center-South, or EAC-South, which is operated by the SEF. This center, more accurately portrayed by its original name, Desegregation Assistance Centers, is not a DEI program. It is a facility mandated by Congress in the 1964 Civil Rights Act to assist school districts in dismantling an infrastructure of segregation built to continue the oppression of Black people after slavery ended.
“In today’s political climate, the lines between civil rights enforcement and DEI have been recklessly blurred,” SEF President Raymond Pierce said. “We now see attacks on constitutionally mandated civil rights programs under the false banner of fighting “wokeness.” That is legally flawed and morally wrong.”
SEF attorneys will make this argument, that executive orders and policy changes cannot override laws passed by the United States Congress, on Monday, May 12, 2025 in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. These arguments will take place just five days before the 70th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision that eventually led to the Civil Rights Act being passed, and the Desegregation Assistance Centers being opened.
“The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s that birthed the 1964 Civil Rights Act was not a DEI movement,” Pierce continued. “It featured heroic fights in Selma, Birmingham, Montgomery and Little Rock. It highlighted the work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black church that marched and prayed for deliverance from Jim Crow. It was and is about bringing the United States into compliance with its own Constitution. African Americans were jailed and beaten, and Black churches were bombed in resistance to the movement to end the system of racial segregation that was implemented primarily in the South. Let’s be clear — laws upholding racial segregation were for the purpose of continuing the oppression of Black people despite the end of slavery. It is factual ignorance and a gross insensitivity to blend the 1964 Civil Rights Act with DEI.”
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