Known in the past for being prejudiced and politically corrupt, thirty-seven people and years of court proceedings define how one southern state overcame the face of prejudice.The 37 southern plaintiffs, federal government, state government and a local school system could not reach an agreement and held a lawsuit in court for fifty-one years before settling.

The 1956 lawsuit filed in Baton Rouge Louisiana made history as the longest running school desegregation suit in America.  The settlement marked a day and time of the past when the East Baton Rouge Parish School system refused African-American students the right to attend Rosenwald Elementary School - an all white school.

The 1956 lawsuit represented 37 students, who were refused a right to attend the elementary school, which was at that time, in a segregated school system. The U.S. Supreme Court stepped up and confirmed that segregation was unconstitutional and in 1970, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People took action. The NAACP appealed to the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the court ordered busing plan that was set forth four years earlier.

Thirteen years later, The U.S. Justice Department submitted a desegregation plan to try and end the deemed-prejudiced-by-the-plaintiffs-lawsuit. By 1996, the U.S. Justice Department laid out a Consent Decree for both the NAACP and the local school board, to improve the capacity at which students could learn, and to also set forth an authoritative order for better educational opportunities for students.

Forty-seven years later and in 2003, the desegregation lawsuit was out from under federal direction and plans were implemented within the Baton Rouge School Board system, to keep certain schools under special programs for the following four years. After which settlement was reached and the desegregation lawsuit ended in July 2007.

Bias,discrimination or unfairness in any degree can all paradoxically be prejudiced. Nevertheless, from a 51-year desegregation settlement, proof is certain that a prejudiced people can be undone. In early Louisiana, black people may have been prohibited from riding at the front of the bus or drinking from a white person's water fountain but proof exists in this generation that time changes everything.

Time has truly moved the south forward. The portrait of a prejudiced people in Louisiana has definitely changed since the 50’s. In 2007, a black woman named in the desegregation suit in 1956 who was once refused the right to attend the all-white school is now a professor at a Baton Rouge university. In 2008, holding their seats are Baton Rouge’s first-ever black mayor and black chief of police - among many other contributing black leaders in the city.

If the desegregation lawsuit settlement and black leaders aren’t enough validation that the south did do it again: Louisiana elected its first non-white and became the first in United States history to elect an Indian American governor. Republican Bobby Jindal is proof that Louisiana did change their minds and their prejudice thinking.

Making history won’t always take a longstanding court case to limp along in order to change principles of a prejudiced people. It takes time to change people. For had America limped along with principles of old, Barak Obama would not have been elected the first-ever black president of the United States of America, November 2008.

Time has clearly changed American people. With this presidential election, seeing is believing. It was not based on a court decision or was it a prejudiced people’s decision.

As the thirty-fifth president of the Unites States once said "We must use time as a tool, not as a crutch" - not 51 years and millions of dollars.