(Louisiana Illuminator) — Terrica Williams stood before the Metro Council with a question that should embarrass every policymaker in East Baton Rouge Parish.
Her office, the Baton Rouge City Court constable, employs certified law enforcement officers who complete the same academy training as the Baton Rouge Police Department. But when Mayor-President Sid Edwards proposed cuts to every non-police and non-fire department for 2026, someone in City Hall declined to exempt Williams’s operation.
She asked, plainly: If we are exempting police and fire, why was her law enforcement agency being handed an 11% budget reduction?
Nobody had a clear answer. What they had was a $50 million hole, one the City of St. George carried away when it seceded from East Baton Rouge Parish.
St. George’s origin is not a governance efficiency story. It began in 2012 as a school district breakaway attempt, what would have been the fourth in East Baton Rouge in 16 years. When the Louisiana Legislature refused, organizers incorporated an entire city.
The school district St. George fled was 81% Black and 89% students of color. The neighborhoods they drew their new boundaries around were wealthier and whiter — more than 70% white, less than 15% Black, in a parish that is 47% Black overall.
Baton Rouge endured the nation’s longest federal school desegregation order, from 1956 to 2003. Perhaps the courts believed society would be different 47 years later. Progressive, no longer captive to antiquated beliefs that cost communities opportunity, safety and shared investment.
Even while schools were supposed to be desegregated, courts and lawmakers were making rules that let them become separated again. In 1974, the Supreme Court decided it was much harder to combine schools across district lines unless there was clear proof of illegal segregation.
The desegregation order for East Baton Rouge Parish schools lasted until 2003, when the schools were declared mixed. By the time people in St. George tried to form their own school district in the 2010s, earlier breakaways and new rules had already shown that changing district lines could cause schools to become separated again.
Harvard Law professor Derrick Bell, a principal architect of critical race theory, called this dynamic what it is: Racial progress advances only when aligned with white institutional power, and retreats the moment it no longer does.
The courts bet on progress. What they underestimated was the durability of structural self-interest.
We are not there. Not yet. And “not yet” is not an abstraction. It is a budget classification, a misclassified office, a $50 million exit ramp that law built and structural self-interest drove.
Economist Charles Tiebout calls it “voting with your feet,” where residents chose to cross jurisdictions in pursuit of preferred public services. What Tiebout never accounted for was the people who cannot move. They didn’t vote. They got voted on.
Myron Orfield, a University of Minnesota law professor and urban researcher, calls this metropolitics. It’s when affluent enclaves fragment from urban cores, concentrating their wealth elsewhere while leaving the poor with debt and defunded institutions.
Most understand white flight as bodies moving. What actually migrates is harder to see. The quality of what those taxpayers are able to furnish. The power behind them. Schools don’t just lose tuition dollars; they lose political capital, the civic infrastructure wealth generates. Safety nets don’t just shrink, the human capacity to maintain them walks out the door.
Sociologists Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro of Brandeis University show the racial wealth gap is compound interest on deliberate policy. St. George incorporated the neighborhoods that benefited most from decades of racially discriminatory lending practices. It’s the same federal lending policy that steered federally backed mortgages into majority-white suburbs while Black families in North Baton Rouge were systematically denied access.
Those policies were so pervasive that the U.S. Department of Justice’s very first fair housing case, filed in 1968, targeted Baton Rouge real estate firms for refusing to show homes in all-white subdivisions to Black buyers.
St. George didn’t just take tax dollars. It took the downstream dividend of that structural racism and called it home equity.
Williams’s office is where that bill comes due, left holding the ledger after the wealth that once balanced it incorporated southeast and left.
She is worth every penny her office receives. But this fight is bigger than her. She is the innocent bystander, a law enforcement professional doing everything right, standing in a debris field she did not create.
Terrica Williams is still at the microphone. The question is still unanswered. And people who are still in need of safety nets, protection, structure and a stable community are all still living in the parish that fiscal secession built.
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Andrea Hagan is a faculty member at the Loyola University New Orleans in its Department of Criminology and Justice. Her perspective is grounded in years of direct experience with youth in secondary education as a social studies teacher. Her research focuses on the intersections of youth, society and the justice system. Her primary areas of focus include the abuse-to-prison pipeline, juvenile delinquency, gang violence and criminal justice reform.
