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Since the 1970s, federal court orders have governed how many Southern communities integrated their public schools. But new research shows, as those orders have been lifted, school districts are gradually re-segregating. But why?

In the fading sunlight of late afternoon in a church basement in Clarkston, Georgia, Tucker High School junior Micky Zegeye studies for a math test with his tutor.

Stacey Hagg is outraged. She pours on her kitchen table years of research: enrollment numbers, meeting minutes and test scores.

“Three inch binder full of papers, letters, emails, petitions, news articles,” says Hagg.

The Haggs are one of the few white families still sending its children to almost all black Coldwater Attendance Center in rural Tate County, Mississppi.

“I would like to see a bigger mix in the race. My kids are the minority in school,” says Hagg. “They are okay with that, so I’m okay with that.”

The debate over who can sell alcohol and where dates back to liquor laws hashed out at the end of prohibition, but the latest controversy in the state Legislature is over expanding wine sales to grocery stores. Tennessee is in the minority on this issue. Thirty-six states allow wine in food stores. Polls show consumers favor the convenience of picking up a bottle of wine and the ingredients for dinner all in one stop, and this year grocery store companies have swarmed the state Capitol to lobby for a bill that would allow them to do just that.

From Richardson’s Landing, TN, to Greenville, MS, the sand and gravel bars of the Mississippi River cut through old sediments in the riverbed and along its banks, exposing fossil remains of ancient bison that roamed the Mid-South at least 10,000 years ago. These ancestors of modern bison stood almost seven feet tall at the shoulder, and weighed around 2,000 pounds.