On July 9, 2019, just after this blogger read the essay by Erin Kramer that will be posted today in this blog, the blogger received another e-mail from an infrequent reader of this blog who had an important take on the issue of busing non-white students to previously all-white schools. She wrote
What this white girl remembers about busing of black students in 1978–it requires an apology.
In the most recent Democratic presidential primary debate, candidate and current Sen. Kamala Harris raised the issue of busing when she criticized candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden for his past position opposing court-ordered busing to address school segregation. Later, Harris said she would not support busing today to address segregation or inequality in schools. There have been many scholarly articles and books written on the subject of busing, including the two most recent articles from the Washington Post, and it remains as controversial today as it was post Brown v. Board of Education when it was imposed in many school districts in an attempt to desegregate schools. This important conversation made me recall when I—as a white girl—entered Coronado Elementary School in Amarillo, Texas in 1978. At that time, black children were bused to Coronado (and I assume other predominately white schools in the town). Elementary school started at 8:10 AM. On good weather days, we played on the playground until the first bell rang. On bad weather days, we were permitted into the hall in the school. At all times, the black children who were bused to school were kept in the cafeteria. At some point, I learned that they were bused in very early and given free breakfast in the cafeteria. But what I remember with vivid detail, on the bad weather days when we crowded into the hall waiting for the bell to ring, was peering through the window in the door to the cafeteria and seeing the black children with their heads down on the table. For all kids my age, being forced to put your head down on the table was the tell-tale sign that you were in trouble—big trouble. I never wanted to put my head down on the table. So I recall thinking that the black kids were in trouble. On good weather days, the black children were not permitted out to the playground. I assume (and maybe l saw) the kids with their heads down on the table then, too. Why? Probably because the teacher or cafeteria worker who was assigned to watch the kids during and after free breakfast did not want to deal with children talking and moving around, as children do. Was there a rule prohibiting the black kids from joining us after breakfast on the playground or in the hall, where we talked and moved around, as children do? Or did the teacher/worker make that decision on his/her own? Did the black kids’ parents know that they were being treated differently than the white kids? I have to assume that the black kids realized that we were playing on the playground, and to be sure, they knew we were in the hall talking and laughing while they had to remain in the cafeteria with their heads down. How did that feel? Is that fair that we—the white children—were permitted to run around on the playground or stand in the hall with our friends, laughing and playing, while the black children -- who presumably had done nothing but get bused to Coronado--were forced to put their heads down as if they had all misbehaved. Now, I’m sure some of the children in that cafeteria misbehaved at some point (we all did)—but EVERY black student, every day? And then they were expected to join us in class and pretend that none of that mattered? I’ve thought about how badly I felt then and how badly I feel now at the clear difference (and preference) that I experienced as a white child compared to the black children who were bused in to school, and I can’t imagine that any of those black children who were bused to Coronado would view that time in favorable terms. I have no idea if Sen. Harris was treated the same way as the black kids at Coronado, but I would be curious to know if she, too, had to put her head down in the cafeteria. In any event, to her and to the black students who were bused to Coronado during this time, I’m so sorry. If this is a (fair & balanced) apology about busing to integrate schools, so be it.
And this blogger, touched by the words that came from a good heart, adds — so be it.
[x WaPo — DC Fishwrap]
Effective But Never Popular, Court-Ordered Busing Is A Relic Few Would Revive
By Laura Meckler
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the following piece of writing
Sixteen years after the US Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in public schools, an attorney representing black families in Charlotte stood before the court. The landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, he argued, had failed to deliver on its promise.
“Black children and parents in Charlotte have struggled since Brown,” said the attorney, Julius Chambers. He urged the high court to embrace a plan to integrate Charlotte schools through a controversial method: busing black children to white schools, and vice versa.
The Supreme Court agreed, unanimously endorsing busing as a legitimate means of unraveling the segregation of children by race. The 1971 decision launched an explosive chapter in American history, touching off a long and polarizing battle that set public opinion against busing for decades, even as the programs succeeded in promoting integration.
Later, evidence would emerge that busing improved outcomes for black students, with no harm to white students. But that evidence came far too late to change public perceptions of a program that was hugely unpopular among whites and left blacks divided.
The vexing issue has reverberated through the Democratic presidential primary since last month’s debates, when Senator Kamala D. Harris (D-CA) criticized former vice president Joe Biden for opposing court-ordered busing in the 1970s. But Harris soon found herself backpedaling when asked whether she would advocate busing today: Last week, she called it a tool to be “considered” but mandated only if local governments are “actively opposing integration.”
That position is not so far from Biden’s, and not a single Democratic candidate is arguing for a return to mandatory busing. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has promised to “execute and enforce desegregation orders” but has not said how. Most candidates have focused on creating incentives for districts and families to create diverse schools on their own.
“No one is really for compulsory busing today. Public opinion was never for compulsory busing,” said Richard Kahlenberg, senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a think tank that supports integration.
“Desegregation was highly successful. It provided a way to raise academic achievement for African Americans that was far more successful than anything we’ve tried since,” Kahlenberg said. “At the same time, it was a politically problematic way of achieving the goal.”
Even before the Supreme Court embraced busing in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, school desegregation was causing great agitation in American politics.
In 1954, the Supreme Court declared in Brown that schools that separated students by race were inherently unequal. In 1957, federal troops escorted nine black students into Little Rock’s Central High School. In 1960, 6-year-old Ruby Bridges needed the protection of federal marshals to enter kindergarten in New Orleans.
By the mid-1960s, it was growing difficult for most schools to ignore the issue. On the heels of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which denied federal funding to any district that discriminated based on race, Congress approved a major education bill that contained significant funding for local districts.
Suddenly, Washington had powerful tools to pressure schools to desegregate. Under President Lyndon Johnson, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, as it was known at the time, began wielding its new hammer.
Some communities acted voluntarily. In Berkeley, CA, where Harris grew up, local officials implemented a full integration program in 1968 after a report showed that 14 of 17 elementary schools and two of three junior highs were segregated. Critics tried to recall the school board, but the vote failed, with 61 percent voting no.
Both black and white students boarded buses to new schools, among them Harris, who entered first grade in 1970.
But many communities dragged their feet, even after the Supreme Court spoke again in 1968. That year, Richard Nixon won the White House after pursuing a “Southern strategy,” stoking white resentment toward African Americans and promising to prevent “forced busing” of children. Opposition spread as the courts began ordering desegregation plans in cities outside the South, starting in Denver in 1973.
Amid the backlash, Biden, then a newly elected US senator from Delaware, came out against busing. In a 1975 interview, one year before a federal court ordered busing in Wilmington, Delaware’s largest city, Biden called it “an asinine concept, the utility of which has never been proven to me.”
Biden was among the first liberal Democrats to side with conservatives and segregationists on the issue, and his support gave antibusing forces a burst of momentum in their effort to push back against the courts.
Talking to reporters last week, Harris said: “There were forces and individuals and supposed leaders in our country who actively worked against the integration of schools based on race. That is what was happening at that time. That’s why busing was mandatory at that time.”
Of Biden, she said, “He has yet to agree that his position on this, which was to work with segregationists to oppose busing, was wrong.”
In a speech Saturday in Sumter, SC, Biden pushed back. Expressing regret for his recent remarks about working alongside segregationists in the Senate, Biden defended his opposition to busing and argued that segregated housing is the more pertinent target.
“The better answer is to get to the root cause of segregation,” Biden told a mostly African American audience. “I don’t believe a child should have to get on a bus to attend a good school. There should be first-rate schools of quality in every neighborhood in this nation.”
Polling from that time, and for many years to follow, shows that Biden was swimming in the mainstream. Surveys consistently showed majority support for the Brown decision against separate-but-equal education but widespread opposition to using busing to achieve racial integration.
A 1972 Harris Poll found that only 20 percent of Americans favored “busing schoolchildren to achieve racial balance,” with 73 percent against it. A 1978 Washington Post poll found that 25 percent agreed that “racial integration of the schools should be achieved even if it requires busing.”
African Americans were more supportive than whites but also had concerns. John C. Brittain, a civil rights attorney who litigated school segregation cases in that era, noted it was usually black schools that closed, black teachers who were fired and black children who were forced to travel.
“African Americans always had to bear the brunt of implementing school integration,” Brittain said.
In a 1973 Gallup poll, just 9 percent of black respondents chose busing as the best way to achieve school integration from a list of options. The most popular was creating more housing for low-
income people in middle-income neighborhoods.
Still, when asked directly by Gallup in 1981 whether they favored busing to achieve racial balance in schools, 60 percent of black respondents said yes, compared with 17 percent of whites.
Court-ordered busing was often met with protests. When busing began in South Boston in 1974, police patrolled in riot gear as hundreds of white demonstrators threw bricks and stones at buses arriving from the black neighborhood of Roxbury.
“The protests all fixate on this word ‘busing.’ Protesters never say they don’t want to go to school with black kids,” said Matthew F. Delmont, a history professor at Dartmouth College who has studied the history of busing. “They would say they are for desegregation but against busing.”
In many cities, white families fled to private schools or the suburbs, which often were not affected by busing orders. White flight reinforced the perception that busing was a mistake. Over time, the exodus of white families also made it harder for city school districts to create racially diverse schools.
Even as Boston erupted, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) spoke in favor of the program, emerging as one of busing’s most consistent champions. Some other Democrats were more cautious, if not opposed.
In 1972, Nixon’s Democratic opponent, Senator George McGovern (D-SD), generally supported busing but sometimes downplayed the issue, at one point calling it “number 92” on his list of priorities. In 1976, Democrat Jimmy Carter campaigned against busing but then resumed civil rights enforcement efforts abandoned under Nixon. Historian Larry McAndrews called it [PDF] a “calculated waffle.”
During these tumultuous years, Biden voted against some efforts to curb busing, taking heat from some constituents. But he also tried repeatedly to curb the power of the federal government and the courts, and he criticized the explicit racial quotas that busing was often employed to deliver.
“The new integration plans being offered are really just quota systems to assure a certain number of blacks, Chicanos, or whatever in each school,” he said in 1975. “That, to me, is the most racist concept you can come up with.”
In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan was elected as president after opposing busing on the campaign trail. Civil rights leaders were offended, insisting: “It’s not the bus, it’s us.”
Yet busing was working in some places, notably Charlotte.
After initial opposition and some violence, “an amazing thing started happening: People said we can’t keep doing this. We’re going to lose our school system if we don’t find some way to make this work,” said Frye Gaillard, who covered that period for the Charlotte Observer and later wrote a book about it.
Under the original plan, children in central Charlotte typically were forced to travel farther than children on the district’s suburban fringes. Urban parents — working-class blacks and whites — demanded a more equitable arrangement. It worked, Gaillard said. City leaders supported a new approach, and the resulting program became a point of civic pride.
“It was really a dramatic story to see it unfold,” said Gaillard, whose three children were bused. “A city diving into the implications of its segregated past, going through all sorts of turmoil and ugliness for a few years and then coming out the other side. There was this perverse Southern pride: ‘We can do it, and they can’t do it in Boston.’ ”
When Reagan denounced busing as “a social experiment that nobody wants” during a campaign stop in Charlotte in 1984, the crowd, once rapturous, responded with stony silence, according to Gaillard and news reports at the time.
Experts say school desegregation reached its pinnacle in 1988. After that, Nixon and Reagan appointees shifted the Supreme Court to the right, and the court declared that districts could escape desegregation orders if they proved their districts had eliminated the vestiges of past discrimination.
One by one, the plans were undone. And in 2007, the high court invalidated the use of race as a criterion in assigning students to schools.
Today, fewer than 200 desegregation plans remain in force, down from more than 1,000, according to an estimate by Erica Frankenberg, an expert on school segregation at Pennsylvania State University. Rather than mandatory busing, integration activists now call for voluntary initiatives, such as magnet programs to attract white students to schools in nonwhite neighborhoods.
And opposition to busing appears to remain strong. A 2004 Associated Press-Ipsos poll, one of the few to ask about busing in recent years, found that 78 percent of Americans surveyed preferred letting students go to their local school even if it meant most people would be of the same race. Only 19 percent said it would be better to transfer students to other schools to create more integration.
While segregation has increased in many places, it remains lower than before busing. And that may be reason enough for Democrats like Biden to acknowledge that busing had value in its day, said Leon Panetta, the former Pentagon and CIA chief who, as a young man in the late 1960s, led the federal education office pushing schools to integrate.
“Frankly, Joe would be better off to say [his opposition to busing] was a mistake and kind of move on. Because, frankly, it was important to the effort to provide equal education,” Panetta said in an interview.
“In the end, what everybody has to understand is, if we were going to implement Brown v. Board of Education and do it effectively, it was necessary to consider busing,” Panetta said. “That was the only way to get these kids to school.” ###
Laura Meckler is a national education writer for The Washington Post, where she covers national trends, federal policy and the Education Department. She came to The Post from the Wall Street Journal, where she covered presidential politics, the White House, changing American demographics, immigration and health care. Before that, she worked at the Associated Press Washington bureau and covered state government in Columbus, OH. She got her start writing about everything from schools and cops to the annual Pro Football Hall of Fame Festival at the Repository in Canton, OH, about 50 miles south of her hometown of Cleveland. Meckler received an AB (political science and international development from Washington University in St. Louis (MO).]
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