The federal judge overseeing Alabama’s college-desegregation lawsuit has approved settlements between the plaintiffs and the state. The judge’s order, issued on Tuesday, formally ends court oversight of the 25-year-old case.

In issuing his order, Judge Harold L. Murphy of the U.S. District Court in Rome, Ga., said that Alabama and its traditionally white colleges had eliminated, “to the extent practicable and consistent with sound educational practice, the vestiges of de jure segregation remaining in their institutional conditions, policies, and practices and have demonstrated their commitment to continuing to operate in a constitutional and nondiscriminatory fashion,” according to The Birmingham News.

As a new trial date approached this fall, parties in the case struck a deal in October on how to resolve the major outstanding issues in the lawsuit, which dates to 1981 and was the subject of two lengthy trials. The two sides in the case had not been able to agree on at least three main issues. The plaintiffs wanted the state to expand its need-based student-aid program; to provide more money for facilities at Alabama A&M and Alabama State Universities, the state’s two public, four-year historically black colleges; and to require the state’s traditionally white institutions to recruit and employ more black faculty members and administrators.

To comply with previous orders in the case, Alabama has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on new facilities, programs, scholarships, and endowments, among other things, at historically black colleges in an effort to remove traces of segregation that the plaintiffs have said still exist in the state’s higher-education system. Over the next several years, the state will have to continue to finance various programs to comply with previous court orders.

Alabama is the second state to resolve its college-desegregation case this fall. A judge dismissed Tennessee’s case in September.