A lawsuit filed last week by the American Civil Liberties Union against Missouri’s Ferguson-Florissant School District in federal court alleges that the system to elect school board members locks Black voters out of the process.

According to the complaint, which was brought on behalf of the Missouri NAACP and some Black residents, the district’s at-large system of electing school board members violates the federal Voting Rights Act by diluting Black voting strength.

The complaint seeks to replace the at-large system with a system in which school board members are elected from single-member districts.

Rather than school board candidates running for designated seats, at-large elections like the one challenged in the ACLU’s complaint typically allow all candidates to run against one another for a number of seats, with the highest vote-getters winning the election.

Critics of at-large elections note that they often result in racially and politically homogenous elected bodies. It’s for this reason that courts frequently strike down at-large voting systems under the Voting Rights Act for failing to provide communities of color with fair representation.

It’s that failure to provide the Ferguson area’s Black community with fair representation on its school board that forms the foundation of the ACLU’s lawsuit. The complaint details the history of racial segregation in the Ferguson-Florissant School District, which was created pursuant to a 1975 desegregation order that extended the district through numerous municipalities in the surrounding area, and then explains how the school board election process has been gamed to dilute Black influence and participation on the board.

The desegregation order that created the Ferguson-Florissant School District required that two seats on the then-six-member Ferguson School Board be declared vacant, to be replaced by designees of the boards of the annexed districts that served Black students, according to the complaint.

The four remaining members were then to draw lots to determine the length of their terms in office to create staggered elections for an “initial period of stable governance for the new district” as explained in the complaint.

Today, according to the complaint, the Ferguson-Florissant School Board is composed of seven members, each serving for three years. The members of the board serve staggered terms, which means each year either two or three of the seven board seats are up for election. Those elections are held at-large and take place in April of each year.

The last at-large election for three seats on the school board was held on April 8, 2014, according to the complaint.

Despite the fact that Blacks are almost half of the school district’s population and compose a substantial majority of its students, there has never had adequate representation of Blacks on the school board. The Ferguson-Florissant School Board has only one Black member, and although in 2011, 2012, and 2013, all seven board seats were up for election in that three-year span, not a single Black candidate who ran for office during that time was elected, according to the complaint.

“The current system locks out African-American voters. It dilutes the voting power of the African-American community and severely undermines their voice in the political process,” Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said in a statement following filing the lawsuit.

The Ferguson-Florissant School Board voting practices and procedures such as staggered terms for board members, which place minority voters at a severe disadvantage by limiting the number of seats in any election, enhances the opportunity for discrimination against Black voters. School board elections are also held in April rather than November, which generally produces lower Black voter turnout, making it more difficult to elect their preferred candidates, the complaint alleges.

Other factors play into the systemic discrimination against Blacks in the Ferguson-Florissant School District as well, the complaint alleges. This includes the fact that the the local teachers’ union, the Ferguson-Florissant National Education Association, consistently endorses white candidates.

A failure to endorse Black candidates is not the only evidence of racial discrimination by the school board, according to the complaint. The lawsuit details a 2013 incident in which the board suspended and subsequently removed without any public explanation the district’s first Black school superintendent over the vigorous objections of Black parents, including one of the plaintiffs in the ACLU’s lawsuit, Redditt Hudson.

Hudson, a former St. Louis police officer who lives in Florissant with his wife and two daughters, both of whom are students in the Ferguson-Florissant School District, says it is this systemic failure to represent the interests of the Black community that inspired him to be a part of the lawsuit.

“We’ve seen African-Americans excluded from making decisions that affect our children,” said Hudson, who works for the NAACP. “We need to be able to advocate for an education that will put our kids first and not political agendas.”

The lawsuit seeks to have the court declare that Ferguson-Florissant’s at-large method of electing members to the Board of Education during the month of April violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and to block future elections in the district under the current at-large method of election.

The lawsuit also seeks an order implementing an election system for the Ferguson-Florissant School Board that complies with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, though that system is not specifically detailed in the compliant.

The Ferguson-Florissant School District has not yet responded to the lawsuit.