Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka officially rendered racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional in 1954, but more than 60 years later, other forms of segregation hold firm in the United States. Just ask Camilla, Georgia, mayor Rufus Davis, who is protesting his own city for what could be considered regressive racial policies, reported by WCTV-2.

Davis is voluntarily sitting out Camilla city council meetings as a form of civil disobedience, he told Atlanta radio host Rashad Richey in an interview Thursday. Around 70 percent of Camilla’s population of just over 5,000 is African-American, yet Davis said the town has no black police officers and the majority of workers in city hall are not black. Also central to Davis’s claims is that the local cemetery is segregated, with dead black citizens buried in a separate area from whites, which Davis said is not well maintained, according to WFXL-31.

According to Davis, the cemetery segregation is not part of city policy, but has been effectively practiced as one for decades. City manager Bennett Adams told WTXL-27 that anyone can be buried in the cemetery regardless of race if they pay the fee, while admitting the lack of black police officers in the majority-black city is true. He did say, however, that there are non-black minorities on the police force.

While it is now illegal to segregate public schools by race, Davis said Camilla’s school system still operates along racial boundaries. All white children to go a private school, while black children go to public school, according to the mayor.

An ongoing feud between Davis and Camilla’s city council served as the backdrop for all of this, as city council voted not to give Davis keys to his own office. According to Davis, the city council has too much power and consistently votes against the best interests of the city’s black population.

“If the white council members had the authority to reinstitute slavery, one of them would probably make the motion and the other would second it,” Davis told Richey in his radio interview.

Despite the United States Supreme Court’s landmark decision in 1954, many claim racial segregation lives on in the U.S. in other ways, and not just in the south. A CNN report from 2015 outlined how Milwaukee, for example, is deeply divided on racial lines largely because there is no public transit between the city and its suburbs. As such, the city itself is predominantly black while the suburbs are predominantly white, with a low amount of socialization between the two groups.

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