However, in the early to mid-1990s opposition from parents and lawmakers in Tuscaloosa caused the system to create a proposition to return to "neighborhood schools."

The schools remained segregated racially after Brown v. Board of Education.

In the segregated Druid High School, students would receive hand-me-down textbooks from the white Tuscaloosa High School, which would then cause them to fall behind academically to their white counterparts.

[4] In 1975 the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the U.S. Department of Justice started an effort to make Tuscaloosa schools racially integrated.

The school “snatched up National Merit Scholarships and math-competition victories just as readily as it won trophies in football, track, golf.”[4] Many students enjoyed the successes of Central High School, regardless of their race.

The current mayor of Tuscaloosa, Walt Maddox, who graduated from Central High School, said that Central prepared students for the "real world" because of how diverse its student population was.

The leaders made public statements that they wished to remove the desegregation order since it required the school system to get approval from the court for repairs and because not having neighborhood schools reduced its prestige.

With the new school established, the district then asked for the entire desegregation order to be removed.

To convince black leaders to appear at the federal hearings so they could give support to ending the desegregation order, white leaders suggested a quid pro quo of building new schools in black areas.

In August 2000 they voted to establish two new high schools and carve out three attendance zones, and Central High had a much smaller attendance zone serving a majority black student body, while the other two schools, had whiter student bodies.

The report states, "Thus, having a nearly all-black high school could be seen as a temporary expedient toward a future fully integrated system.

After the association of the University of Alabama-area historic district asked the board members to consider assigning its area to majority-white schools, even though majority-black schools were closer, the board granted their request one day later, on May 3, 2007, when it voted 5–3 to establish the plan, with the three no votes being two black board members and Virginia Powell, a white board member who held the seat of the district including the university area.