The author uses the experience of the Ferguson (St. Louis County, Missouri) school district to raise questions about the implications of an apparently successful attempt to eliminate the distinction between "de facto" and "de jure" desegregation. Growing out of litigation begun in 1972, the U.S. District Court in 1975 ordered into effect a state plan requiring the Ferguson school district to annex two adjacent districts in order to implement desegregation in those districts. The purpose of this order was to correct an injustice done in 1937 when the other two districts were founded, despite Ferguson's allegation that it was an innocent party. That desegregation effort has been successful and the schools have been returned to local control. Now, however, Ferguson is faced with being part of a desegregation effort aimed at the St. Louis city schools but which attempts to involve all school districts in the metropolitan area. The legal argument is that the state imposed the segregation and the state must resolve it. The state has been ordered to take remedial action through or against the county districts, even those not a party to the case. This trend toward unlimited metropolitan desegregation calls into question the equal protection rights provided by the fourteenth amendment. (Author/IRT)