Attempting to merge the schools is where you will see how this is not "natural" segregation. I lived in a town of 38,000 people for five years that had schools

Attempting to merge the schools is where you will see how this is not "natural" segregation. I lived in a town of 38,000 people for five years that had schools that had "naturally" segregated. It was a culture shock for me, having just bought a house for $50k that I figured I could flip and sell for twice that because one block down the street similar homes were going for that much. After a couple of years of working on the house, I learned that it wouldn't matter how much I put into it. Friends and locals informed me that I had bought a house on the "black" street. The homes one street over were on the white street and that when I had kids, they would be going to the black school and soon "come home talking like them." I soon learned that most of the rural south is "naturally segregated" like this... which is a political way of saying that racists have naturally let their racist inclinations dictate the school district lines. One time, the city council tried to move the school district lines to mix the schools up a bit more. Protesters, all white, came out en mass and squashed the motion. When I published a letter to my local paper advocating moving the district lines, I received numerous racist letters in response. We are taught in history classes that the North won the Civil War, but those classes leave out the fact that the South won the insurgency that followed, which is why there are so many monuments to Confederates in Southern states and why--as a woman from Mississippi once told me when complaining about Northern culture, "Our nrs know their place." I don't know what the solution to this is except for slow, persistent cultural progress.