(AP) — Mississippi is violating the federal law that enabled the state to rejoin the union after the Civil War, a civil rights group alleged Tuesday in a lawsuit over school funding. The lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of four black public school students asks a federal judge to force the state's leaders to comply with the 1870 law, which says Mississippi must never deprive any citizen of the "school rights and privileges" described in its 1868 constitution. "From 1890 until the present day, Mississippi repeatedly has amended its education clause and has used those amendments to systematically and deliberately deprive African Americans of the education rights guaranteed to all Mississippi schoolchildren by the 1868 Constitution," the suit states. Former Gov.