Desegregation busing
Encyclopedia
Desegregation busing in the United States (also known as forced busing or simply busing) is the practice of assigning and transporting students to schools
in such a manner as to redress prior racial segregation of schools, or to overcome the effects of residential segregation on local school demographics.
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court landmark decision in Brown vs Board of Education made racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. The process of integrating public schools met fierce resistance in the South where segregation laws took hold after the American Civil War
and the Reconstruction era of the United States. In Northern and Western states, de facto segregation was the customary practice. Due to patterns of residential segregation, a principal tool for racial integration was the use of busing. In the 1971 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education
ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal courts had the discretion to include busing as a desegregation tool to achieve racial balance. While the Swann decision addressed de jure segregation in the South, it failed to address de facto segregation which persisted elsewhere in the country. In Georgia, Governor Jimmy Carter
saw that Swann was "clearly a one-sided decision; the Court is still talking about the South, the North is still going free." In the 1974 Milliken v. Bradley
decision, the U.S. Supreme Court placed an important limitation on Swann when they ruled that students could be bused across district lines only when evidence of de jure segregation across multiple school districts existed.
In the 1970s and 1980s, under federal court supervision, many school districts implemented mandatory busing plans within their district. A few of these plans are still in use today. The stiffest resistance to desegregation busing was the brief mass movement
in Boston
, Restore Our Alienated Rights
.
Since the 1980s desegregation busing has been in decline. Even though school districts provided zero-fare bus
transportation to and from students' assigned schools, those schools were in some cases many miles away from students' homes, which often presented problems to them and their families. In addition, many families were angry about having to send their children miles to another school in an unfamiliar neighborhood when there was an available school a short distance away. The movement of large numbers of white families to suburbs of large cities, so-called white flight
, reduced the effectiveness of the policy. Many whites who stayed moved their children into private
or parochial schools; these effects combined to make many urban school districts predominantly nonwhite, reducing any effectiveness mandatory busing may have had. In addition, school districts started using magnet school
s, new school construction, and more detailed computer-generated information to refine their school assignment plans.
Due to these efforts and the fact that housing patterns had changed, by the early 1990s, most school districts had been released from court supervision and ceased using mandatory busing to try to desegregate schools. However, many continued to provide a similar level of school bus services, because families had become accustomed to the transportation and to the school choice available in recent assignment programs.
Prior to World War II, most public schools in the country were de jure or de facto segregated. All Southern states had Jim Crow laws
mandating racial segregation of schools. Northern states and some border states were primarily white (as of 1940, populations of Detroit and Chicago were more than 90% white) and, furthermore, existing black populations were confined to ghettos by various restrictive covenants.
Starting in 1941, the so-called Second Great Migration
brought large numbers of blacks into Northern cities. Shelley v. Kraemer
(1948) allowed them to settle in formerly white neighborhoods, contributing to racial tension. Meanwhile, the post-war housing boom and the rise of suburbia
allowed whites to migrate into the suburbs. By 1960, all major Northern cities had sizable black populations (23% in Chicago, 29% in Detroit). Blacks tended to be concentrated in inner cities, whereas newer suburbs of most cities were almost exclusively white.
At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs Board of Education (1954) overturned racial segregation
laws for public schools that had been in place in a number of states since the late 19th century, and ruled that separate but equal
schools were "inherently unequal". Although the Brown decision affirmed principles of equality and justice, it did not specify how its ruling would promote equality in education. Thurgood Marshall
and the NAACP wanted a speedy process for desegregating the school districts, but the Court waited until the following year to make its recommendations. Reasons for delaying had to do with the changes in the Court and with Chief Justice Earl Warren
steering a careful course given the expected opposition from Southern states. In May 1955, the Court ruled in Brown II that the school districts desegregate "with all deliberate speed." Public school administrators had to begin the process of desegregating the schools through the development of policies that would promote racial mixing. A backlash of resistance and violence ensued. Even members of Congress refused to abide by the decision. In 1956 over a hundred congressmen signed the Southern Manifesto
, promising to use all legal means to undermine and reverse the Court's ruling.
The impact of the ruling in both the North and South was limited because whites and blacks tended to live in all-white or all-black communities. Initial integration in the South tended to be symbolic: for example, the integration of Clinton High School, the first public school in Tennessee to be integrated, amounted to admission of twelve black students to a formerly all-white school.
The struggle to desegregate the schools received impetus from the African-American Civil Rights Movement, whose goal was to dismantle legal segregation in all public places. The movement's efforts culminated in Congress passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964
and the Civil Rights Act of 1965. Signed by President Lyndon Johnson, the two laws signaled the end of discriminatory voting practices and segregation of public accommodations. The importance of these two laws was the injection of both the legislative and executive
branches joining the judiciary to promote racial integration. In addition, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 authorized the federal government to cut off funding if Southern school districts did not comply and also to bring lawsuits against school officials who resisted.
The momentum continued with two additional Supreme Court decisions aimed at implementation. In 1968, the Warren Court in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County
, rejected a freedom of choice plan. The Court ordered the county to desegregate immediately and eliminate racial discrimination "root and branch." Then in 1971, the
Burger Court in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education
ruled that the school district must achieve racial balance even if it meant redrawing school boundaries and the use of busing as a legal tool. The impact of Green and Swann served to end all remnants of de jure segregation in the South. However, the consequence of the Swann decision ushered in new forms of resistance in subsequent decades. The decision failed to address de facto segregation.
Consequently, despite being found "inherently unequal" in Brown vs Board of Education, by the late 1960s public schools remained de facto segregated in many cities - because of demographic patterns, school district lines being intentionally drawn to segregate the schools racially, and, in some cases, due to conscious efforts to send black children to inferior schools. Thus, for example, by 1969, more than nine of every ten black students in Nashville still attended all-black schools. Evidence of such de facto segregation motivated early proponents of plans to engage in conscious "integration" of public schools, by busing schoolchildren to schools other than their neighborhood schools, with an objective to equalize racial imbalances. Proponents of such plans argued that with the schools integrated, minority students would have equal access to equipment, facilities and resources that the cities' white students had, thus giving all students in the city equal educational opportunities.
One argument against the Civil Rights Act of 1964
that opponents of the proposed legislation found particularly compelling was that the bill would require forced busing to achieve certain racial quotas
in schools. Proponents of the bill, such as Emanuel Celler
and Jacob Javits, said that the bill would not authorize such measures. Leading sponsor Sen. Hubert Humphrey
wrote two amendments specifically designed to outlaw busing. Humphrey said "if the bill were to compel it, it would be a violation [of the Constitution], because it would be handling the matter on the basis of race and we would be transporting children because of race." While Javits said any government official who sought to use the bill for busing purposes "would be making a fool of himself," two years later the Department of Health, Education and Welfare said that Southern school districts would be required to meet mathematical ratios of students by busing.
Another catalyst for the development of busing was an influential sociological report on educational equality commissioned by the U.S. government in the 1960s. It was one of the largest studies in history, with more than 150,000 students in the sample. The result was a massive report of over 700 pages. That 1966 report — titled "Equality of Educational Opportunity" (or often simply called the "Coleman Report" after its author James Coleman) — the study contained many controversial findings. One conclusion from the study was that, while black schools in the South were not significantly underfunded as compared to white schools, and while per-pupil funding did not contribute significantly to differences in educational outcomes, socially disadvantaged black children still benefited significantly from learning in mixed-race classrooms. Thus, it was argued that busing (as opposed to simply increasing funding to segregated schools) was necessary for achieving racial equality.
A federal court found that in Boston
, schools were constructed and school district lines drawn intentionally to segregate the schools racially. In the early 1970s, a series of court decisions found that the racially imbalanced schools trampled the rights of minority students. As a remedy, courts ordered the racial integration
of school districts within individual cities, sometimes requiring the racial composition of each individual school in the district to reflect the composition of the district as a whole. This was generally achieved by transporting children by school bus
to a school in a different area of the district.
"Forced busing" was a term used by many to describe the mandates that generally came from the courts. Court-ordered busing to achieve school desegregation was used mainly in large, ethnically segregated school systems, including Boston, Massachusetts; Cleveland, Ohio
; Columbus, Ohio
; Kansas City, Missouri
; Pasadena, California
; Richmond, Virginia
; San Francisco, California
; Detroit, Michigan
; and Wilmington, Delaware
. From 1972 to 1980, despite busing, the percentage of blacks attending mostly-black schools barely changed, moving from 63.6% to 63.3%.
The judge who instituted the Detroit busing plan said that busing "is a considerably safer, more reliable, healthful and efficient means of getting children to school than either car pools or walking, and this is especially true for younger children." He therefore included kindergarten
children in the busing scheme: "Transportation of kindergarten children for upwards of forty-five minutes, one-way, does not appear unreasonable, harmful, or unsafe in any way." The resultant Supreme Court case, Milliken v. Bradley
, imposed limits on busing. The key issue was whether a district court could order a metropolitan-wide desegregation plan between urban Detroit and suburban school districts. Busing would play a key role in the implementation phase. The Court essentially declared that federal courts did not have the authority to order inter-district desegregation unless it could be proven that suburban school districts intentionally mandated segregation policies. The implication of the decision was that suburban school districts in the North were not affected by the principles established by Brown. De facto segregation was allowed to persist in the North. The courts could order desegregation where segregation patterns existed, but only within municipalities, not suburban areas. The lasting consequence of the Milliken decision is that it opened the door for whites to flee to the suburbs and not be concerned about compliance with mandatory integration policies.
For the 1975-76 school year, the Louisville, Kentucky
school district, which was not integrated due to whites largely moving to the suburbs, was forced to start a busing program. The first day, 1,000 protestors rallied against the busing, and a few days into the process, 8,000 to 10,000 whites from Jefferson County, Kentucky
, many teenagers, rallied at the district's high schools and fought with police trying to break up the crowds. Police cars were vandalized, 200 were arrested, and people were hurt in the melee, but despite further rallies being banned the next day by Louisville's mayor, demonstrators showed up to the schools the following day. Kentucky Governor Julian Carroll
sent 1,800 members of the Kentucky National Guard
and stationed them on every bus. On September 26, 1975, 400 protestors held a rally at Southern High School, which was broken up by police tear gas, followed by a rally of 8,000 the next day, who marched led by a woman in a wheelchair
to prevent police reprisals while cameras were running. Despite the protests, Louisville's busing program continued.
With waning public support, the courts began relaxing judicial supervision of school districts during the 1990s and 2000s, calling for voluntary efforts to achieve racial balance. In the early 1990s, the Rehnquist Court ruled in three cases coming from Oklahoma City, Kansas City, and DeKalb County, Ga. that federal judges could ease their supervision of school districts “once legally enforced segregation had been eliminated to the extent practicable." With these decisions, the Rehnquist Court opened the door for school districts throughout the country to get away from under judicial supervision once they had achieved unitary status. Unitary Status meant that a school district had successfully eliminated segregation in dual school systems and thus no longer bound to court-ordered desegregation policies. Then in 2002, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision in Belk v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education which declared that the school system had achieved desegregation status and that the method to achieve integration, like busing, was unnecessary. The refusal of the Court to hear the challenges to the lower court decision effectively overturned the earlier 1971 Swann ruling. Finally, in 2007, the Roberts Court
produced a contentious 5-4 ruling in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1
(PICS). The decision prohibited the use of racial classifications in any student assignment plan to maintain racial balance. Whereas the Brown case ruled that racial segregation violated the Constitution, now the use of racial classifications violated the equal protections clause of the 14th Amendment. Writing for the minority, Justice Breyer said the “ruling contradicted previous decisions upholding race-conscious pupil assignments and would hamper local school boards’efforts to prevent ‘resegregation’ in individual schools.”
Civil Rights advocates see the 2007 ruling as the inevitable consequence of gradual Court decisions dating back to the early 1970s to ease judicial supervision and limit important tools to achieve integrated schools. Even those school districts that voluntarily created race-conscious programs are under pressure to abandon these efforts as more white parents are refusing to participate in any pupil assignment programs. In some cases, white parents filed reverse discrimination lawsuits in court. Wherever the courts have backed away from mandating school districts to implement desegregation plans, resegregation of Blacks and Latinos has increased dramatically. In 1988, 44% of southern black students were attending majority white schools, about 435 in 1000. In 2005, 27% of black students were attending majority white schools, an average of 270 in 1000. The PICS decision is sure to accelerate these trends. The ruling reflects the culmination of the conservative’s central message on education that “race should be ignored, inequalities should be blamed on individuals and schools, and existing civil rights remedies should be dismantled.” In 2001 Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act
(NCLB) which was promptly signed by President George W. Bush
. The law put a premium on student testing, not integration, to measure academic progress. Financial penalties were incurred on schools if students did not demonstrate adequate academic performance. Initially supported by Democrats, the law, critics say, has failed to address adequately the achievement gap between whites and minorities and there are problems with implementation and inflexible provisions.
attitudes, but because they believed it destroyed neighborhood schools and camaraderie and increased discipline problems. It is said that busing eroded the community pride and support that neighborhoods had for their local schools. After busing, 60% of Boston parents, both black and white, reported more discipline problems in schools. In the 1968, 1972, and 1976 presidential elections, candidates opposed to busing were elected each time, and Congress voted repeatedly to end court-mandated busing.
Opponents of desegregation busing claim that children were being bused to schools in dangerous neighborhoods, compromising their education and personal safety. Critics point out that children in the Northeast were often bused from integrated schools to less integrated schools. The percentage of Northeastern black children who attended a predominantly black school increased from 67% in 1968 to 80% in 1980 (a higher percentage than in 1954).
Busing is claimed to have accelerated a trend of middle-class relocation to the suburbs of metropolitan areas. Many opponents of busing claimed the existence of "white flight
" based on the court decisions to integrate schools. Such stresses led white middle-class families in many communities to desert the public schools and create a network of private schools.
Ultimately, even many black leaders, from Wisconsin
State Rep. Annette Polly Williams, a Milwaukee Democrat, to Cleveland Mayor Michael White, have come to the conclusion that it is patronizing to think that minority students need to sit next to a white student to learn, and as such led efforts to end busing.
In 1978, a proponent of busing, Nancy St. John, studied 100 cases of urban busing from the North and did not find what she had been looking for: she found no cases in which significant black academic improvement occurred, but many cases where race relations suffered due to busing, as those in forced-integrated schools had worse relations with those of the opposite race than those in non-integrated schools. Researcher David Armour, also looking for hopeful signs, found that busing "heightens racial identity" and "reduces opportunities for actual contact between the races."
A 1992 study led by Harvard University
Professor Gary Orfield
, who supports busing, found black and Hispanic students lacked "even modest overall improvement" as a result of court-ordered busing.
Another mystery was why Asian students, segregated in some school systems, nevertheless thrived academically.
During the 1970s, 60 Minutes
reported that some members of Congress, government, and the press who supported busing most vociferously sent their own children to private schools, including Senator Edward Kennedy
, George McGovern
, Thurgood Marshall
, Phil Hart, Ben Bradlee, Senator Birch Bayh
, Tom Wicker
, Philip Geyelin and Donald Fraser
. Many of the judges who ordered busing also sent their children to private schools.
Supreme Court decision that busing children across districts is unconstitutional limited the extent of busing to within metropolitan areas. This decision made suburbs attractive to those who wished to evade busing.
Some metropolitan areas in which land values and property-tax structures were less favorable to relocation saw significant declines in enrollment of whites in public schools as white parents chose to enroll their children in private schools. Currently, most segregation occurs across school districts as large cities have moved significantly toward racial balance among their schools.
Recent research by Eric Hanushek
, John Kain, and Steven Rivkin has shown that the achievement of black students is adversely affected by higher concentrations of black students in their schools. Further, the impact of racial concentration appears to be greatest for high achieving black students.
found a recurring pattern of racial discrimination in the operation of the Boston public schools in a 1974 ruling. Garrity's ruling found the schools were unconstitutionally segregated. As a remedy, he used a busing plan developed by the Massachusetts State Board of Education to implement the state's Racial Imbalance Law that had been passed by the Massachusetts
state legislature a few years earlier, requiring any school with a student enrollment that was more than 50% nonwhite to be balanced according to race. The Boston School Committee consistently disobeyed orders from the state Board of Education. Garrity's ruling, upheld on appeal by conservative judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and by the Supreme Court led by Warren Burger, required school children to be brought to different schools to end segregation. By the final Garrity-decided court case in 1988, Garrity would have assumed more control over a school system than any judge in American history.
The conflict in Boston over busing primarily affected the traditionally Irish-American neighborhoods of West Roxbury
, Roslindale
, Hyde Park
, Charlestown
, South Boston and Dorchester
and the traditionally Italian-American neighborhood of the North End
. It also affected the community of Roxbury, a formerly Jewish section of Boston that by the early 1970s had become predominantly black. To a lesser extent, schools many miles away in Springfield, Massachusetts
were affected by Garrity's order, but the plan caused little overt controversy there as the minority population was relatively small.
In one part of the plan, Garrity decided that the entire junior class from the mostly poor white South Boston High School would be bused to Roxbury High School, a black high school in a ghetto
. Half the sophomores from each school would attend the other, and seniors could decide what school to attend. David Frum
asserts that South Boston and Roxbury were "generally regarded as the two worst schools in Boston, and it was never clear what educational purpose was to be served by jumbling them." For three years after the plan commenced, Massachusetts state troopers were stationed at South Boston High. The first day of the plan, only 100 of 1,300 students came to school at South Boston. Only 13 of the 550 South Boston juniors ordered to attend Roxbury showed up. Parents showed up every day to protest, and football season was cancelled. Whites and blacks began entering through different doors. An anti-busing mass movement developed, Restore Our Alienated Rights
.
The integration plan aroused fierce criticism among some Boston residents. Of the 100,000 enrolled in Boston school districts, attendance fell to 40,000 from 60,000 during these years. Opponents personally attacked Garrity, claiming that because he lived in a white suburb, his own children were not affected by his ruling. The author of the busing plan, Robert Dentler, lived in the suburb of Lexington
, which was unaffected by the ruling. It has been noted that the children of Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis
attended school in Brookline
, which was also unaffected, not being part of Boston. Garrity's hometown of Wellesley
welcomed a small number of black students under the METCO
program that sought to assist in desegregating the Boston schools by offering places in suburban school districts to black students. However, most METCO students were from middle-class black families, and METCO was not available to poor white students from Boston. Another important difference in the suburbs was that white students there were not bused away from their neighborhoods, and towns were not under court order to enroll in the state-run program but did so voluntarily.
There were a number of protest incidents that turned severely violent, even resulting in deaths. In one case, a black attorney named Theodore Landsmark was attacked by a group of white teenagers as he exited Boston City Hall
. One of the youths, Joseph Rakes, attacked Landsmark with an American flag, using the flagpole as a lance. A photograph of the attack on Landsmark, The Soiling of Old Glory
taken by Stanley Forman
for the Boston Herald American
, won the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography
(now the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography
) in 1977. In a retaliatory incident the next day, black teenagers in Roxbury threw rocks at a white man's car and caused him to crash. The youths dragged him out and crushed his skull with nearby paving stones. When police arrived, the man was surrounded by a crowd of 100 chanting "Let him die" while lying in a coma
from which he never recovered.
In another instance, a white teenager was stabbed nearly to death by a black teenager at South Boston High School. The community's white residents mobbed the school, trapping the black students inside. There were dozens of other racial incidents at South Boston High that year. The school was forced to close for a month after the stabbing. When it opened again, it was one of the first high schools to install metal detector
s; with 400 students attending, it was guarded by 500 police officers every day. In December 1975, Garrity turned out the principal of South Boston High and took control himself.
Garrity increased the plan down to first grade for the following school year. In October 1975, 6,000 marched against the busing in South Boston.
By the time the experiment with busing ended in 1988, the Boston school district had shrunk from 100,000 students to 57,000, only 15% of whom were white. Today the Boston Public Schools are 76% black and Hispanic
, and 14% White
. According to the 2000 census
, Boston's white (non-Hispanic) population is 54.48%, whereas Boston's black and Hispanic populations together total 39.77%. Newcomer professional families in the city have comparatively fewer children, and some of those parents, both white and black, prefer to send their children to private and parochial school
s rather than have their children attend public school. In South Boston, a neighborhood found by U.S. News and World Report (October 1994) to have had the highest concentration of white poverty in the country, dropout rates soared, its poorer census tracts' dropout rates superseding rates based on race and ethnicity citywide. South Boston, along with other poor and working class white census tracts of Charlestown and parts of Dorchester, saw an increase in control by organized crime and young deaths due to murder, overdose, and criminal involvement. Boston's South Boston High School (now the South Boston High complex) was declared "dysfunctional" by the State Board of Education.
. Since the district and the state had been found severally liable for the lack of integration, the state was responsible for making sure that money was available for the program. It was one of the most expensive desegregation efforts attempted and included busing, a magnet school program, and an extensive plan to improve the quality of inner city schools. The entire program was built on the premise that extremely good schools in the inner city combined with paid busing would be enough to achieve integration.
A number of local factors made the program unworkable. The school board never really functioned to enable the program to succeed. The administration in charge of the district was ill equipped to handle the amount of money it had available. Due to wounded racial pride, concerns about closing neighborhood schools, and the large percentage of local jobs provided by the schools, the community was alternately distrustful and demanding of the program. Perhaps most damaging was that parents in the surrounding area didn't send their children to be educated in the inner city. It ended in 1999.
chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) filed a lawsuit against the Clark County School District
(CCSD). The NAACP wanted the CCSD to acknowledge publicly, and likewise, act against the de facto segregation that existed in six elementary schools located on the city's Westside. This area of Las Vegas had traditionally been a black neighborhood. Therefore, the CCSD did not see the need to desegregate the schools, as the cause of segregation appeared to result from factors outside of its immediate control.
The case initially entered the Eighth Judicial District Court of Nevada, but quickly found its way to the Nevada Supreme Court. According to Brown II, all school desegregation cases had to be heard at the federal level if they reached a state's highest court. As a result, the Las Vegas case, which became known as Kelly v. Clark County School District, was eventually heard by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. On May 10, 1972, the Ninth Circuit handed down its decision in favor of the NAACP, which therefore, required the CCSD to implement a plan for integration. The CCSD then instituted its Sixth Grade Center Plan, which converted the Westside's six elementary schools into sixth grade classrooms where nearly all of the school district's sixth graders (black and white alike) would be bused for the 1972-73 school year.
. The California Supreme Court required the district to come up with a plan in 1977. The board returned to court with what the court of appeal years later would describe as "one of if not the most drastic
plan of mandatory student reassignment in the nation." A desegregation busing plan was developed to be implemented in the 1978 school year. Two suits to stop the enforced busing plan, both titled Bustop, Inc. v. Los Angeles Board of Education, were filed by the group Bustop Inc. and were petitioned to the United States Supreme Court. The petitions to stop the busing plan were subsequently denied by Justice Rehnquist and Justice Powell. California Constitutional Proposition 1, which mandated that busing follow the Equal protection clause
of the U.S. Constitution passed in 1979 with 70% of the vote. The Crawford v. Board of Education of the City of Los Angeles lawsuit was heard in the Supreme Court in 1982. The Supreme Court upheld the decision that Proposition 1 was constitutional, and therefore mandatory busing was not permissible.
The result of that law suit was what came to be known as the "Nashville Plan," an attempt to integrate the public schools of Nashville (and later all of Davidson County when the district was consolidated in 1963). The plan, beginning in 1957, involved the gradual integration of schools by working up through the grades each year starting in the fall of 1957 with first graders. Very few black children who were zoned for white schools showed up at their assigned campus on the first day of school, and those who did met with angry mobs outside several city elementary schools. No white children assigned to black schools showed up to their assigned campuses.
After a decade of this gradual integration strategy, it became evident that the schools still lacked full integration. Many argued that Housing Segregation
was the true culprit in the matter. In 1970 the Kelley case was reintroduced to the courts. Ruling on the case was Judge L. Clure Morton, who, after seeking advice from government HEW consultants, decided the following year that to correct the problem, forced busing of the children was to be mandated, among the many parts to a new plan that was finally decided on. This was a similar plan to that enacted in Charlotte-Mecklenberg in North Carolina the same year.
What followed were mixed emotions from both the black and white communities. Many whites did not want their children to share schools with black children, arguing that it would decrease the quality of their education. While a triumph for some, many blacks believed that the new plan would enforce the closure of neighborhood schools such as Pearl High School, which brought the community together. Parents from both sides did not like the plan because they had no control over where their children were going to be sent to school, a problem that many other cities had during the 1970s when busing was mandated across the country. Despite the judge's decision and the subsequent implementation of the new busing plan, the city stood divided.
As in many other cities across the country at this time, many white citizens took action against the desegregation laws. Organized protests against the busing plan began before the order was even official, led by future mayoral candidate Casey Jenkins. While some protested, many other white parents began pulling their children out of the public schools and enrolling them in the numerous private schools that began to spring up almost overnight in Nashville in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of these schools continued to be segregated through the 1970s. Other white parents moved outside of the city limits and eventually outside the Davidson county line so as not to be part of the Metropolitan District and thus not part of the busing plan.
In 1979 and 1980, the Kelley case was again brought back to the courts because of the busing plan's failure to fully integrate the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools. The plan was reexamined and reconfigured to include some concessions made by the school board and the Kelley plaintiffs and in 1983 the new plan, which still included busing, was introduced. However, problems with "white flight" and private schools continued to segregate the Metro Nashville Public Schools to a certain degree, a problem that has never fully been solved.
ordered the desegregation of the public schools in Pasadena, California
. At that time, the proportion of white students in those schools reflected the proportion of whites in the community, 54% and 53%, respectively. After the desegregation process began, large numbers of whites in the upper and middle classes who could afford it pulled their children from the integrated public school system and placed them into private schools instead. As a result, by 2004 Pasadena became home to 63 private schools, which educated one-third of all school-aged children in the city, and the proportion of white students in the public schools had fallen to 16%. (In the mean time, the proportion of whites in the community has declined somewhat as well, to 37% in 2006) The superintendent of Pasadena's public schools characterized them as being to whites "like the bogey-man," and mounted policy changes, including a curtailment of busing, and a publicity drive to induce affluent whites to put their children back into public schools.
, became the largest school district in the nation forced to adopt a busing plan. The county, a large suburban school district east of Washington, D.C.
, was over 80% white in population and in the public schools. In some county communities close to Washington, there was a higher concentration of black residents than in more outlying areas. Through a series of desegregation orders after the Brown decision, the county had a neighborhood-based system of school boundaries. However, the NAACP argued that housing patterns in the county still reflected the vestiges of segregation. Against the will of the Board of Education of Prince George's County, the federal court ordered that a school busing plan be set in place. A 1974 Gallup poll showed that 75% of county residents were against forced busing and that only 32% of blacks supported it.
The transition was very traumatic as the court ordered that the plan be administered with "all due haste." This happened during the middle of the school term, and students even in their senior year in high school were transferred to different schools to achieve racial balance. Many high school sports teams' seasons and other typical school activities were disrupted. Life in general for families in the county was disrupted by things such as the changes in daily times to get children ready and receive them after school, transportation logistics for extra curricular activities, and parental participation activities such as volunteer work in the schools and PTA meetings.
The white population of the Prince George's County Public Schools
was growing until school busing was started; it dropped significantly afterward. The county population is now less than 25% white and more than 65% black. The statistics for the 136,095 student school district changed even more, and it is now less than 8% white and more than 77% black.
The federal case and the school busing order was officially ended in 2001, as the "remaining vestiges of segregation" had been erased to the court's satisfaction. Neighborhood-based school boundaries were restored. The Prince George's County Public Schools was ordered to pay the NAACP more than $2 million in closing attorney fees and is estimated to have paid the NAACP over $20 million over the course of the case.
Nevertheless, these demographic changes caused by desegregation busing have changed the county, transforming a great number of neighborhoods that were formerly middle-class and white to black and upper-middle class.
. When a massive busing program began in the fall of 1971, parents of all races complained about the long rides, hardships with transportation for extracurricular activities, and the separation of siblings when elementary schools at opposite sides of the city were "paired", (i.e. splitting lower and upper elementary grades into separate schools). One result was further white flight to private schools and to the suburbs. The percentage of white students in Richmond city schools declined from 45 to 21 percent between 1960 and 1975. This so-called "white flight" prevented Richmond schools from becoming truly integrated. A number of assignment plans were tried to address the non-racial concerns, and eventually, most elementary schools were "unpaired."
, located in New Castle County
, segregated schools were required by law until 1954, when, due to Belton v. Gebhart (which was later rolled into Brown vs Board of Education on appeal), the school system was forced to desegregate. As a result, the school districts in the Wilmington metropolitan area were split into eleven districts covering the metropolitan area (Alfred I. duPont, Alexis I. duPont, Claymont, Conrad, De La Warr, Marshallton-McKean, Mount Pleasant, New Castle-Gunning Bedford, Newark, Stanton, and Wilmington school districts). However, this reorganization did little to address the issue of segregation, since the Wilmington schools (Wilmington and De La Warr districts) remained predominantly black, while the suburban schools in the county outside the city limits remained predominantly white.
In 1976 the U.S. District Court, in Evans v. Buchanan, ordered that the school districts of New Castle County all be combined into a single district governed by the New Castle County Board of Education. The District Court ordered the Board to implement a desegregation plan in which the students from the predominantly black Wilmington and De La Warr districts were required to attend school in the predominantly white suburb districts, while students from the predominantly white districts were required to attend school in Wilmington or De La Warr districts for three years (usually 4th through 6th grade). In many cases, this required students to be bused a considerable distance (12 to 18 miles in the Christina district) due to the distance between Wilmington and some of the major communities of the suburban area (such as Newark
).
However, the process of handling an entire metropolitan area as a single school district resulted in a revision to the plan in 1981, in which the New Castle County schools were again divided into four separate districts (Brandywine
, Christina
, Colonial
, and Red Clay)http://www.iccjournal.biz/Scholarly_Articles/Hoff,%20S/DelawareEducationandDesegregation.htm. However, unlike the 1954 districts, each of these districts was racially balanced and encompassed inner city and suburban areas. Each of the districts continued a desegregation plan based upon busing.
The requirements for maintaining racial balance in the schools of each of the districts was ended by the District Court in 1994, but the process of busing students to and from the suburbs for schooling continued largely unchanged until 2001, when the Delaware state government passed House Bill 300, mandating that the districts convert to sending students to the schools closest to them, a process that continues . In the 1990s, Delaware schools would utilize the Choice program, which would allow children to apply to schools in other school districts based on space.
Wilmington High, which many felt was a victim of the busing order, closed in 1998 due to dropping enrollment. The campus would become home to Cab Calloway School of the Arts
, a magnet school focused on the arts that was established in 1992. It would also house Charter School of Wilmington
, which focuses on math and science, and opened up in 1996.
As of now, Delaware has a high rate of children who attend private schools, magnet schools, and charter schools due to the perceived weaknesses of the public school system.
, the desegregation of U.S. public schools peaked in 1988; since then, schools have become more segregated because of changes in demographic residential patterns with continuing growth in suburbs and new communities. Jonathan Kozol
has found that as of 2005, the proportion of black students at majority-white schools was at "a level lower than in any year since 1968." Changing population patterns, with dramatically increased growth in the South and Southwest, decreases in old industrial cities, and much increased immigration of new ethnic groups, have altered school populations in many areas.
School districts continue to try various programs to improve student and school performance, including magnet schools and special programs related to the economic standing of families. Omaha proposed incorporating some suburban districts within city limits to enlarge its school-system catchment area. It wanted to create a "one tax, one school" system that would also allow it to create magnet programs to increase diversity in now predominately white schools. Ernest Chambers
, a 34-year-serving black state senator from North Omaha, Nebraska
, believed a different solution was needed. Some observers said that in practical terms, public schools in Omaha had been re-segregated since the end of busing in 1999.
In 2006, Chambers offered an amendment to the Omaha school reform bill in the Nebraska State Legislature which would provide for creation of three school districts in Omaha according to current racial demographics: black, white and Hispanic, with local community control of each district. He believed this would give the black community the chance to control a district in which their children were the majority. Chambers’ amendment was controversial. Opponents to the measure described it as "state-sponsored segregation".
The authors of a 2003 Harvard study on re-segregation believe current trends in the South of white teachers leaving predominately black schools is an inevitable result of federal court decisions limiting former methods of civil rights-era protections, such as busing and affirmative action in school admissions. Teachers and principals cite other issues, such as economic and cultural barriers in schools with high rates of poverty, as well as teachers' choices to work closer to home or in higher-performing schools. In some areas black teachers are also leaving the profession, resulting in teacher shortages.
Education conservatives refute any talk about resegregation and argue that any apparent separation of races is due to patterns of residential demographics not due to court decisions. They argue that the Brown decision has been achieved and that there is no segregation in the way that existed before the ruling. Employing race to impose desegregation policies discriminates and violates Brown’s central warning of using racial preferences. The achievement gap between white and minorities is not due to one school having better facilities over others. The issue is to change school culture so that it is held accountable to improve discipline, address student behavior, and implement better teaching strategies. Conservatives celebrate the recent Court decisions and Bush’s NCLB and the focus now needs to be on teaching the kids, rather than chasing “demographic rainbows.”
Student transport
Student transport is the transporting of children and teenagers to and from schools and school events. School transport can be undertaken by school students themselves , they may be accompanied by family members or caregivers, or the transport may be organised collectively, using buses or...
in such a manner as to redress prior racial segregation of schools, or to overcome the effects of residential segregation on local school demographics.
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court landmark decision in Brown vs Board of Education made racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. The process of integrating public schools met fierce resistance in the South where segregation laws took hold after the American Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
and the Reconstruction era of the United States. In Northern and Western states, de facto segregation was the customary practice. Due to patterns of residential segregation, a principal tool for racial integration was the use of busing. In the 1971 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education
Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education
Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 was an important United States Supreme Court case dealing with the busing of students to promote integration in public schools...
ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal courts had the discretion to include busing as a desegregation tool to achieve racial balance. While the Swann decision addressed de jure segregation in the South, it failed to address de facto segregation which persisted elsewhere in the country. In Georgia, Governor Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter
James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. is an American politician who served as the 39th President of the United States and was the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, the only U.S. President to have received the Prize after leaving office...
saw that Swann was "clearly a one-sided decision; the Court is still talking about the South, the North is still going free." In the 1974 Milliken v. Bradley
Milliken v. Bradley
Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 , was a significant United States Supreme Court case dealing with the planned desegregation busing of public school students across district lines among 53 school districts in metropolitan Detroit. It concerned the plans to integrate public schools in the United...
decision, the U.S. Supreme Court placed an important limitation on Swann when they ruled that students could be bused across district lines only when evidence of de jure segregation across multiple school districts existed.
In the 1970s and 1980s, under federal court supervision, many school districts implemented mandatory busing plans within their district. A few of these plans are still in use today. The stiffest resistance to desegregation busing was the brief mass movement
Mass movement
Mass movement refers to the political concept of a political party or movement which is supported by large segments of a population. Political movements that typically advocate the creation of a mass movement include the ideologies of communism and fascism...
in Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
, Restore Our Alienated Rights
Restore Our Alienated Rights
Restore Our Alienated Rights was an anti-desegregation busing organization formed in Boston, Massachusetts by Louise Day Hicks in about 1974. The group's purpose was to fight off U.S. Federal Judge W...
.
Since the 1980s desegregation busing has been in decline. Even though school districts provided zero-fare bus
Bus
A bus is a road vehicle designed to carry passengers. Buses can have a capacity as high as 300 passengers. The most common type of bus is the single-decker bus, with larger loads carried by double-decker buses and articulated buses, and smaller loads carried by midibuses and minibuses; coaches are...
transportation to and from students' assigned schools, those schools were in some cases many miles away from students' homes, which often presented problems to them and their families. In addition, many families were angry about having to send their children miles to another school in an unfamiliar neighborhood when there was an available school a short distance away. The movement of large numbers of white families to suburbs of large cities, so-called white flight
White flight
White flight has been a term that originated in the United States, starting in the mid-20th century, and applied to the large-scale migration of whites of various European ancestries from racially mixed urban regions to more racially homogeneous suburban or exurban regions. It was first seen as...
, reduced the effectiveness of the policy. Many whites who stayed moved their children into private
Private school
Private schools, also known as independent schools or nonstate schools, are not administered by local, state or national governments; thus, they retain the right to select their students and are funded in whole or in part by charging their students' tuition, rather than relying on mandatory...
or parochial schools; these effects combined to make many urban school districts predominantly nonwhite, reducing any effectiveness mandatory busing may have had. In addition, school districts started using magnet school
Magnet school
In education in the United States, magnet schools are public schools with specialized courses or curricula. "Magnet" refers to how the schools draw students from across the normal boundaries defined by authorities as school zones that feed into certain schools.There are magnet schools at the...
s, new school construction, and more detailed computer-generated information to refine their school assignment plans.
Due to these efforts and the fact that housing patterns had changed, by the early 1990s, most school districts had been released from court supervision and ceased using mandatory busing to try to desegregate schools. However, many continued to provide a similar level of school bus services, because families had become accustomed to the transportation and to the school choice available in recent assignment programs.
History
The origins of desegregation busing can be tracked back to two major developments that occurred in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s.Prior to World War II, most public schools in the country were de jure or de facto segregated. All Southern states had Jim Crow laws
Jim Crow laws
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for black Americans...
mandating racial segregation of schools. Northern states and some border states were primarily white (as of 1940, populations of Detroit and Chicago were more than 90% white) and, furthermore, existing black populations were confined to ghettos by various restrictive covenants.
Starting in 1941, the so-called Second Great Migration
Second Great Migration (African American)
The Second Great Migration was the migration of more than 5 million African Americans from the South to the North, Midwest and West. It took place from 1941, through World War II, and lasted until 1970. It was much larger and of a different character than the first Great Migration...
brought large numbers of blacks into Northern cities. Shelley v. Kraemer
Shelley v. Kraemer
Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 , is a United States Supreme Court case which held that courts could not enforce racial covenants on real estate.-Facts of the case:...
(1948) allowed them to settle in formerly white neighborhoods, contributing to racial tension. Meanwhile, the post-war housing boom and the rise of suburbia
SubUrbia
subUrbia is a play by Eric Bogosian chronicling the nighttime activities of a group of aimless 20-somethings still living in their suburban Boston hometown and their reunion with a former high school classmate who has become a successful musician...
allowed whites to migrate into the suburbs. By 1960, all major Northern cities had sizable black populations (23% in Chicago, 29% in Detroit). Blacks tended to be concentrated in inner cities, whereas newer suburbs of most cities were almost exclusively white.
At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs Board of Education (1954) overturned racial segregation
Racial segregation
Racial segregation is the separation of humans into racial groups in daily life. It may apply to activities such as eating in a restaurant, drinking from a water fountain, using a public toilet, attending school, going to the movies, or in the rental or purchase of a home...
laws for public schools that had been in place in a number of states since the late 19th century, and ruled that separate but equal
Separate but equal
Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law that justified systems of segregation. Under this doctrine, services, facilities and public accommodations were allowed to be separated by race, on the condition that the quality of each group's public facilities was to...
schools were "inherently unequal". Although the Brown decision affirmed principles of equality and justice, it did not specify how its ruling would promote equality in education. Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, serving from October 1967 until October 1991...
and the NAACP wanted a speedy process for desegregating the school districts, but the Court waited until the following year to make its recommendations. Reasons for delaying had to do with the changes in the Court and with Chief Justice Earl Warren
Earl Warren
Earl Warren was the 14th Chief Justice of the United States.He is known for the sweeping decisions of the Warren Court, which ended school segregation and transformed many areas of American law, especially regarding the rights of the accused, ending public-school-sponsored prayer, and requiring...
steering a careful course given the expected opposition from Southern states. In May 1955, the Court ruled in Brown II that the school districts desegregate "with all deliberate speed." Public school administrators had to begin the process of desegregating the schools through the development of policies that would promote racial mixing. A backlash of resistance and violence ensued. Even members of Congress refused to abide by the decision. In 1956 over a hundred congressmen signed the Southern Manifesto
Southern Manifesto
The Southern Manifesto was a document written February–March 1956 by Adisen and Charles in the United States Congress opposed to racial integration in public places. The manifesto was signed by 101 politicians from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South...
, promising to use all legal means to undermine and reverse the Court's ruling.
The impact of the ruling in both the North and South was limited because whites and blacks tended to live in all-white or all-black communities. Initial integration in the South tended to be symbolic: for example, the integration of Clinton High School, the first public school in Tennessee to be integrated, amounted to admission of twelve black students to a formerly all-white school.
The struggle to desegregate the schools received impetus from the African-American Civil Rights Movement, whose goal was to dismantle legal segregation in all public places. The movement's efforts culminated in Congress passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964
Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a landmark piece of legislation in the United States that outlawed major forms of discrimination against African Americans and women, including racial segregation...
and the Civil Rights Act of 1965. Signed by President Lyndon Johnson, the two laws signaled the end of discriminatory voting practices and segregation of public accommodations. The importance of these two laws was the injection of both the legislative and executive
Executive
Executive may refer to:* Executive , branch of government that has sole authority and responsibility for the daily administration of the state bureaucracy* Executive , monthly news magazine established in 1999...
branches joining the judiciary to promote racial integration. In addition, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 authorized the federal government to cut off funding if Southern school districts did not comply and also to bring lawsuits against school officials who resisted.
The momentum continued with two additional Supreme Court decisions aimed at implementation. In 1968, the Warren Court in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County
Green v. County School Board of New Kent County
Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, 391 U.S. 430 was an important United States Supreme Court case dealing with the freedom of choice plans created to comply with the mandate in Brown II...
, rejected a freedom of choice plan. The Court ordered the county to desegregate immediately and eliminate racial discrimination "root and branch." Then in 1971, the
Burger Court in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education
Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education
Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 was an important United States Supreme Court case dealing with the busing of students to promote integration in public schools...
ruled that the school district must achieve racial balance even if it meant redrawing school boundaries and the use of busing as a legal tool. The impact of Green and Swann served to end all remnants of de jure segregation in the South. However, the consequence of the Swann decision ushered in new forms of resistance in subsequent decades. The decision failed to address de facto segregation.
Consequently, despite being found "inherently unequal" in Brown vs Board of Education, by the late 1960s public schools remained de facto segregated in many cities - because of demographic patterns, school district lines being intentionally drawn to segregate the schools racially, and, in some cases, due to conscious efforts to send black children to inferior schools. Thus, for example, by 1969, more than nine of every ten black students in Nashville still attended all-black schools. Evidence of such de facto segregation motivated early proponents of plans to engage in conscious "integration" of public schools, by busing schoolchildren to schools other than their neighborhood schools, with an objective to equalize racial imbalances. Proponents of such plans argued that with the schools integrated, minority students would have equal access to equipment, facilities and resources that the cities' white students had, thus giving all students in the city equal educational opportunities.
One argument against the Civil Rights Act of 1964
Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a landmark piece of legislation in the United States that outlawed major forms of discrimination against African Americans and women, including racial segregation...
that opponents of the proposed legislation found particularly compelling was that the bill would require forced busing to achieve certain racial quotas
Racial quotas
Racial quotas in employment and education are numerical requirements for hiring, promoting, admitting and/or graduating members of a particular racial group. Racial quotas are often established as means of diminishing racial discrimination, addressing under-representation and evident racism against...
in schools. Proponents of the bill, such as Emanuel Celler
Emanuel Celler
Emanuel Celler was an American politician from New York who served in the United States House of Representatives for almost 50 years, from March 1923 to January 1973. He was a member of the Democratic Party.-Early life:...
and Jacob Javits, said that the bill would not authorize such measures. Leading sponsor Sen. Hubert Humphrey
Hubert Humphrey
Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Jr. , served under President Lyndon B. Johnson as the 38th Vice President of the United States. Humphrey twice served as a United States Senator from Minnesota, and served as Democratic Majority Whip. He was a founder of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and...
wrote two amendments specifically designed to outlaw busing. Humphrey said "if the bill were to compel it, it would be a violation [of the Constitution], because it would be handling the matter on the basis of race and we would be transporting children because of race." While Javits said any government official who sought to use the bill for busing purposes "would be making a fool of himself," two years later the Department of Health, Education and Welfare said that Southern school districts would be required to meet mathematical ratios of students by busing.
Another catalyst for the development of busing was an influential sociological report on educational equality commissioned by the U.S. government in the 1960s. It was one of the largest studies in history, with more than 150,000 students in the sample. The result was a massive report of over 700 pages. That 1966 report — titled "Equality of Educational Opportunity" (or often simply called the "Coleman Report" after its author James Coleman) — the study contained many controversial findings. One conclusion from the study was that, while black schools in the South were not significantly underfunded as compared to white schools, and while per-pupil funding did not contribute significantly to differences in educational outcomes, socially disadvantaged black children still benefited significantly from learning in mixed-race classrooms. Thus, it was argued that busing (as opposed to simply increasing funding to segregated schools) was necessary for achieving racial equality.
A federal court found that in Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
, schools were constructed and school district lines drawn intentionally to segregate the schools racially. In the early 1970s, a series of court decisions found that the racially imbalanced schools trampled the rights of minority students. As a remedy, courts ordered the racial integration
Racial integration
Racial integration, or simply integration includes desegregation . In addition to desegregation, integration includes goals such as leveling barriers to association, creating equal opportunity regardless of race, and the development of a culture that draws on diverse traditions, rather than merely...
of school districts within individual cities, sometimes requiring the racial composition of each individual school in the district to reflect the composition of the district as a whole. This was generally achieved by transporting children by school bus
School bus
A school bus is a type of bus designed and manufactured for student transport: carrying children and teenagers to and from school and school events...
to a school in a different area of the district.
"Forced busing" was a term used by many to describe the mandates that generally came from the courts. Court-ordered busing to achieve school desegregation was used mainly in large, ethnically segregated school systems, including Boston, Massachusetts; Cleveland, Ohio
Cleveland, Ohio
Cleveland is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and is the county seat of Cuyahoga County, the most populous county in the state. The city is located in northeastern Ohio on the southern shore of Lake Erie, approximately west of the Pennsylvania border...
; Columbus, Ohio
Columbus, Ohio
Columbus is the capital of and the largest city in the U.S. state of Ohio. The broader metropolitan area encompasses several counties and is the third largest in Ohio behind those of Cleveland and Cincinnati. Columbus is the third largest city in the American Midwest, and the fifteenth largest city...
; Kansas City, Missouri
Kansas City, Missouri
Kansas City, Missouri is the largest city in the U.S. state of Missouri and is the anchor city of the Kansas City Metropolitan Area, the second largest metropolitan area in Missouri. It encompasses in parts of Jackson, Clay, Cass, and Platte counties...
; Pasadena, California
Pasadena, California
Pasadena is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. Although famous for hosting the annual Rose Bowl football game and Tournament of Roses Parade, Pasadena is the home to many scientific and cultural institutions, including the California Institute of Technology , the Jet...
; Richmond, Virginia
Richmond, Virginia
Richmond is the capital of the Commonwealth of Virginia, in the United States. It is an independent city and not part of any county. Richmond is the center of the Richmond Metropolitan Statistical Area and the Greater Richmond area...
; San Francisco, California
San Francisco, California
San Francisco , officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.15 million people which includes San Jose and Oakland...
; Detroit, Michigan
Detroit, Michigan
Detroit is the major city among the primary cultural, financial, and transportation centers in the Metro Detroit area, a region of 5.2 million people. As the seat of Wayne County, the city of Detroit is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan and serves as a major port on the Detroit River...
; and Wilmington, Delaware
Wilmington, Delaware
Wilmington is the largest city in the state of Delaware, United States, and is located at the confluence of the Christina River and Brandywine Creek, near where the Christina flows into the Delaware River. It is the county seat of New Castle County and one of the major cities in the Delaware Valley...
. From 1972 to 1980, despite busing, the percentage of blacks attending mostly-black schools barely changed, moving from 63.6% to 63.3%.
The judge who instituted the Detroit busing plan said that busing "is a considerably safer, more reliable, healthful and efficient means of getting children to school than either car pools or walking, and this is especially true for younger children." He therefore included kindergarten
Kindergarten
A kindergarten is a preschool educational institution for children. The term was created by Friedrich Fröbel for the play and activity institute that he created in 1837 in Bad Blankenburg as a social experience for children for their transition from home to school...
children in the busing scheme: "Transportation of kindergarten children for upwards of forty-five minutes, one-way, does not appear unreasonable, harmful, or unsafe in any way." The resultant Supreme Court case, Milliken v. Bradley
Milliken v. Bradley
Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 , was a significant United States Supreme Court case dealing with the planned desegregation busing of public school students across district lines among 53 school districts in metropolitan Detroit. It concerned the plans to integrate public schools in the United...
, imposed limits on busing. The key issue was whether a district court could order a metropolitan-wide desegregation plan between urban Detroit and suburban school districts. Busing would play a key role in the implementation phase. The Court essentially declared that federal courts did not have the authority to order inter-district desegregation unless it could be proven that suburban school districts intentionally mandated segregation policies. The implication of the decision was that suburban school districts in the North were not affected by the principles established by Brown. De facto segregation was allowed to persist in the North. The courts could order desegregation where segregation patterns existed, but only within municipalities, not suburban areas. The lasting consequence of the Milliken decision is that it opened the door for whites to flee to the suburbs and not be concerned about compliance with mandatory integration policies.
For the 1975-76 school year, the Louisville, Kentucky
Louisville, Kentucky
Louisville is the largest city in the U.S. state of Kentucky, and the county seat of Jefferson County. Since 2003, the city's borders have been coterminous with those of the county because of a city-county merger. The city's population at the 2010 census was 741,096...
school district, which was not integrated due to whites largely moving to the suburbs, was forced to start a busing program. The first day, 1,000 protestors rallied against the busing, and a few days into the process, 8,000 to 10,000 whites from Jefferson County, Kentucky
Jefferson County, Kentucky
As of the census of 2000, there were 693,604 people, 287,012 households, and 183,113 families residing in the county. The population density was . There were 305,835 housing units at an average density of...
, many teenagers, rallied at the district's high schools and fought with police trying to break up the crowds. Police cars were vandalized, 200 were arrested, and people were hurt in the melee, but despite further rallies being banned the next day by Louisville's mayor, demonstrators showed up to the schools the following day. Kentucky Governor Julian Carroll
Julian Carroll
Julian Morton Carroll is a politician from the US state of Kentucky. A Democrat, he is presently a member of the Kentucky Senate, representing Anderson, Franklin, Woodford, and part of Fayette counties. From 1974 to 1979, he served as the 54th Governor of Kentucky, succeeding Wendell H. Ford, who...
sent 1,800 members of the Kentucky National Guard
Kentucky National Guard
The Kentucky National Guard consists of the:*Kentucky Army National Guard*Kentucky Air National Guard-External links:** compiled by the United States Army Center of Military History...
and stationed them on every bus. On September 26, 1975, 400 protestors held a rally at Southern High School, which was broken up by police tear gas, followed by a rally of 8,000 the next day, who marched led by a woman in a wheelchair
Wheelchair
A wheelchair is a chair with wheels, designed to be a replacement for walking. The device comes in variations where it is propelled by motors or by the seated occupant turning the rear wheels by hand. Often there are handles behind the seat for someone else to do the pushing...
to prevent police reprisals while cameras were running. Despite the protests, Louisville's busing program continued.
With waning public support, the courts began relaxing judicial supervision of school districts during the 1990s and 2000s, calling for voluntary efforts to achieve racial balance. In the early 1990s, the Rehnquist Court ruled in three cases coming from Oklahoma City, Kansas City, and DeKalb County, Ga. that federal judges could ease their supervision of school districts “once legally enforced segregation had been eliminated to the extent practicable." With these decisions, the Rehnquist Court opened the door for school districts throughout the country to get away from under judicial supervision once they had achieved unitary status. Unitary Status meant that a school district had successfully eliminated segregation in dual school systems and thus no longer bound to court-ordered desegregation policies. Then in 2002, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision in Belk v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education which declared that the school system had achieved desegregation status and that the method to achieve integration, like busing, was unnecessary. The refusal of the Court to hear the challenges to the lower court decision effectively overturned the earlier 1971 Swann ruling. Finally, in 2007, the Roberts Court
Roberts Court
In the United States, the Roberts Court refers to the Supreme Court of the United States since 2005, under the leadership of Chief Justice John G. Roberts...
produced a contentious 5-4 ruling in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1
Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1
Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, 551 U.S. 701 , decided together with Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education, is a decision of the U.S...
(PICS). The decision prohibited the use of racial classifications in any student assignment plan to maintain racial balance. Whereas the Brown case ruled that racial segregation violated the Constitution, now the use of racial classifications violated the equal protections clause of the 14th Amendment. Writing for the minority, Justice Breyer said the “ruling contradicted previous decisions upholding race-conscious pupil assignments and would hamper local school boards’efforts to prevent ‘resegregation’ in individual schools.”
Civil Rights advocates see the 2007 ruling as the inevitable consequence of gradual Court decisions dating back to the early 1970s to ease judicial supervision and limit important tools to achieve integrated schools. Even those school districts that voluntarily created race-conscious programs are under pressure to abandon these efforts as more white parents are refusing to participate in any pupil assignment programs. In some cases, white parents filed reverse discrimination lawsuits in court. Wherever the courts have backed away from mandating school districts to implement desegregation plans, resegregation of Blacks and Latinos has increased dramatically. In 1988, 44% of southern black students were attending majority white schools, about 435 in 1000. In 2005, 27% of black students were attending majority white schools, an average of 270 in 1000. The PICS decision is sure to accelerate these trends. The ruling reflects the culmination of the conservative’s central message on education that “race should be ignored, inequalities should be blamed on individuals and schools, and existing civil rights remedies should be dismantled.” In 2001 Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act
No Child Left Behind Act
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 is a United States Act of Congress concerning the education of children in public schools.NCLB was originally proposed by the administration of George W. Bush immediately after he took office...
(NCLB) which was promptly signed by President George W. Bush
George W. Bush
George Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....
. The law put a premium on student testing, not integration, to measure academic progress. Financial penalties were incurred on schools if students did not demonstrate adequate academic performance. Initially supported by Democrats, the law, critics say, has failed to address adequately the achievement gap between whites and minorities and there are problems with implementation and inflexible provisions.
Criticism
In a Gallup poll taken in the early 1970s, very low percentages of whites (4%) and blacks (9%) supported busing outside of local neighborhoods. A 1978 study by the RAND Corporation set out to find why whites were opposed to busing and concluded that it was not because they held racistRacism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
attitudes, but because they believed it destroyed neighborhood schools and camaraderie and increased discipline problems. It is said that busing eroded the community pride and support that neighborhoods had for their local schools. After busing, 60% of Boston parents, both black and white, reported more discipline problems in schools. In the 1968, 1972, and 1976 presidential elections, candidates opposed to busing were elected each time, and Congress voted repeatedly to end court-mandated busing.
Opponents of desegregation busing claim that children were being bused to schools in dangerous neighborhoods, compromising their education and personal safety. Critics point out that children in the Northeast were often bused from integrated schools to less integrated schools. The percentage of Northeastern black children who attended a predominantly black school increased from 67% in 1968 to 80% in 1980 (a higher percentage than in 1954).
Busing is claimed to have accelerated a trend of middle-class relocation to the suburbs of metropolitan areas. Many opponents of busing claimed the existence of "white flight
White flight
White flight has been a term that originated in the United States, starting in the mid-20th century, and applied to the large-scale migration of whites of various European ancestries from racially mixed urban regions to more racially homogeneous suburban or exurban regions. It was first seen as...
" based on the court decisions to integrate schools. Such stresses led white middle-class families in many communities to desert the public schools and create a network of private schools.
Ultimately, even many black leaders, from Wisconsin
Wisconsin
Wisconsin is a U.S. state located in the north-central United States and is part of the Midwest. It is bordered by Minnesota to the west, Iowa to the southwest, Illinois to the south, Lake Michigan to the east, Michigan to the northeast, and Lake Superior to the north. Wisconsin's capital is...
State Rep. Annette Polly Williams, a Milwaukee Democrat, to Cleveland Mayor Michael White, have come to the conclusion that it is patronizing to think that minority students need to sit next to a white student to learn, and as such led efforts to end busing.
In 1978, a proponent of busing, Nancy St. John, studied 100 cases of urban busing from the North and did not find what she had been looking for: she found no cases in which significant black academic improvement occurred, but many cases where race relations suffered due to busing, as those in forced-integrated schools had worse relations with those of the opposite race than those in non-integrated schools. Researcher David Armour, also looking for hopeful signs, found that busing "heightens racial identity" and "reduces opportunities for actual contact between the races."
A 1992 study led by Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
Professor Gary Orfield
Gary Orfield
Gary Orfield is an American professor of education, law, political science and urban planning at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, formerly of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is co-founder of The Civil Rights Project, now called The Civil Rights...
, who supports busing, found black and Hispanic students lacked "even modest overall improvement" as a result of court-ordered busing.
Another mystery was why Asian students, segregated in some school systems, nevertheless thrived academically.
During the 1970s, 60 Minutes
60 Minutes
60 Minutes is an American television news magazine, which has run on CBS since 1968. The program was created by producer Don Hewitt who set it apart by using a unique style of reporter-centered investigation....
reported that some members of Congress, government, and the press who supported busing most vociferously sent their own children to private schools, including Senator Edward Kennedy
Ted Kennedy
Edward Moore "Ted" Kennedy was a United States Senator from Massachusetts and a member of the Democratic Party. Serving almost 47 years, he was the second most senior member of the Senate when he died and is the fourth-longest-serving senator in United States history...
, George McGovern
George McGovern
George Stanley McGovern is an historian, author, and former U.S. Representative, U.S. Senator, and the Democratic Party nominee in the 1972 presidential election....
, Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, serving from October 1967 until October 1991...
, Phil Hart, Ben Bradlee, Senator Birch Bayh
Birch Bayh
Birch Evans Bayh II is a former United States Senator from Indiana, having served from 1963 to 1981. He was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president in the 1976 election, but lost to Jimmy Carter. He is the father of former Indiana Governor and former U.S. Senator Evan Bayh.-Life...
, Tom Wicker
Tom Wicker
Thomas Grey "Tom" Wicker was an American journalist. He was best known as a political reporter and columnist for The New York Times.-Background and education:...
, Philip Geyelin and Donald Fraser
Donald M. Fraser
Donald MacKay Fraser is an American politician from Minneapolis, Minnesota.-Early life:Donald Fraser played a critical role in making human rights an important part of U.S. policy. Fraser was born on 20 February 1924 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Everett and Lois Fraser. His parents were émigrés...
. Many of the judges who ordered busing also sent their children to private schools.
Effects
Busing integrated school age ethnic minorities with the larger community. The Milliken v. BradleyMilliken v. Bradley
Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 , was a significant United States Supreme Court case dealing with the planned desegregation busing of public school students across district lines among 53 school districts in metropolitan Detroit. It concerned the plans to integrate public schools in the United...
Supreme Court decision that busing children across districts is unconstitutional limited the extent of busing to within metropolitan areas. This decision made suburbs attractive to those who wished to evade busing.
Some metropolitan areas in which land values and property-tax structures were less favorable to relocation saw significant declines in enrollment of whites in public schools as white parents chose to enroll their children in private schools. Currently, most segregation occurs across school districts as large cities have moved significantly toward racial balance among their schools.
Recent research by Eric Hanushek
Eric Hanushek
Eric Alan Hanushek is a Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He is also an expert on educational policy. His main area of interest is the economics of education, focusing on controversial areas of education policy including the class size reduction,...
, John Kain, and Steven Rivkin has shown that the achievement of black students is adversely affected by higher concentrations of black students in their schools. Further, the impact of racial concentration appears to be greatest for high achieving black students.
Boston, Massachusetts
In the Boston metropolitan area, Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. of the United States District Court for the District of MassachusettsUnited States District Court for the District of Massachusetts
The United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts is the federal district court whose jurisdiction is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, USA. The first court session was held in Boston in 1789. The second term was held in Salem in 1790 and until 1813 court session locations...
found a recurring pattern of racial discrimination in the operation of the Boston public schools in a 1974 ruling. Garrity's ruling found the schools were unconstitutionally segregated. As a remedy, he used a busing plan developed by the Massachusetts State Board of Education to implement the state's Racial Imbalance Law that had been passed by the Massachusetts
Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
state legislature a few years earlier, requiring any school with a student enrollment that was more than 50% nonwhite to be balanced according to race. The Boston School Committee consistently disobeyed orders from the state Board of Education. Garrity's ruling, upheld on appeal by conservative judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and by the Supreme Court led by Warren Burger, required school children to be brought to different schools to end segregation. By the final Garrity-decided court case in 1988, Garrity would have assumed more control over a school system than any judge in American history.
The conflict in Boston over busing primarily affected the traditionally Irish-American neighborhoods of West Roxbury
West Roxbury, Massachusetts
West Roxbury is a neighborhood in Boston bordered by Roslindale to the north, the Town of Dedham to the east and south, the Town of Brookline and the City of Newton to the west. Many people mistakenly confuse West Roxbury with Roxbury, but the two are not connected. West Roxbury is separated from...
, Roslindale
Roslindale, Boston, Massachusetts
Roslindale is a primarily residential neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, bordered by Jamaica Plain, Hyde Park, West Roxbury and Mattapan.It is served by an MBTA Commuter Rail line, several MBTA bus lines and the MBTA Orange Line in nearby Jamaica Plain...
, Hyde Park
Hyde Park, Massachusetts
Hyde Park is a dissolved municipality and currently the southernmost neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, United States. Hyde Park is home to a diverse range of people, housing types and social groups. It is an urban location with suburban characteristics...
, Charlestown
Charlestown, Massachusetts
Charlestown is a neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, United States, and is located on a peninsula north of downtown Boston. Charlestown was originally a separate town and the first capital of the Massachusetts Bay Colony; it became a city in 1847 and was annexed by Boston on January 5, 1874...
, South Boston and Dorchester
Dorchester, Massachusetts
Dorchester is a dissolved municipality and current neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It is named after the town of Dorchester in the English county of Dorset, from which Puritans emigrated and is today endearingly nicknamed "Dot" by its residents. Dorchester, including a large...
and the traditionally Italian-American neighborhood of the North End
North End, Boston, Massachusetts
The North End is a neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. It has the distinction of being the city's oldest residential community, where people have lived continuously since it was settled in the 1630s. Though small , the neighborhood has approximately 100 eating establishments, and a variety of...
. It also affected the community of Roxbury, a formerly Jewish section of Boston that by the early 1970s had become predominantly black. To a lesser extent, schools many miles away in Springfield, Massachusetts
Springfield, Massachusetts
Springfield is the most populous city in Western New England, and the seat of Hampden County, Massachusetts, United States. Springfield sits on the eastern bank of the Connecticut River near its confluence with three rivers; the western Westfield River, the eastern Chicopee River, and the eastern...
were affected by Garrity's order, but the plan caused little overt controversy there as the minority population was relatively small.
In one part of the plan, Garrity decided that the entire junior class from the mostly poor white South Boston High School would be bused to Roxbury High School, a black high school in a ghetto
Ghetto
A ghetto is a section of a city predominantly occupied by a group who live there, especially because of social, economic, or legal issues.The term was originally used in Venice to describe the area where Jews were compelled to live. The term now refers to an overcrowded urban area often associated...
. Half the sophomores from each school would attend the other, and seniors could decide what school to attend. David Frum
David Frum
David J. Frum is a Canadian American journalist active in both the United States and Canadian political arenas. A former economic speechwriter for President George W. Bush, he is also the author of the first "insider" book about the Bush presidency...
asserts that South Boston and Roxbury were "generally regarded as the two worst schools in Boston, and it was never clear what educational purpose was to be served by jumbling them." For three years after the plan commenced, Massachusetts state troopers were stationed at South Boston High. The first day of the plan, only 100 of 1,300 students came to school at South Boston. Only 13 of the 550 South Boston juniors ordered to attend Roxbury showed up. Parents showed up every day to protest, and football season was cancelled. Whites and blacks began entering through different doors. An anti-busing mass movement developed, Restore Our Alienated Rights
Restore Our Alienated Rights
Restore Our Alienated Rights was an anti-desegregation busing organization formed in Boston, Massachusetts by Louise Day Hicks in about 1974. The group's purpose was to fight off U.S. Federal Judge W...
.
The integration plan aroused fierce criticism among some Boston residents. Of the 100,000 enrolled in Boston school districts, attendance fell to 40,000 from 60,000 during these years. Opponents personally attacked Garrity, claiming that because he lived in a white suburb, his own children were not affected by his ruling. The author of the busing plan, Robert Dentler, lived in the suburb of Lexington
Lexington, Massachusetts
Lexington is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 31,399 at the 2010 census. This town is famous for being the site of the first shot of the American Revolution, in the Battle of Lexington on April 19, 1775.- History :...
, which was unaffected by the ruling. It has been noted that the children of Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis
Michael Dukakis
Michael Stanley Dukakis served as the 65th and 67th Governor of Massachusetts from 1975–1979 and from 1983–1991, and was the Democratic presidential nominee in 1988. He was born to Greek immigrants in Brookline, Massachusetts, also the birthplace of John F. Kennedy, and was the longest serving...
attended school in Brookline
Brookline, Massachusetts
Brookline is a town in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, United States, which borders on the cities of Boston and Newton. As of the 2010 census, the population of the town was 58,732.-Etymology:...
, which was also unaffected, not being part of Boston. Garrity's hometown of Wellesley
Wellesley, Massachusetts
Wellesley is a town in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, United States. It is part of Greater Boston. The population was 27,982 at the time of the 2010 census.It is best known as the home of Wellesley College and Babson College...
welcomed a small number of black students under the METCO
METCO
METCO stands for the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity. Founded in 1966 in Boston, Massachusetts, METCO is the longest continuously running voluntary school desegregation program in the country and a national model for the few other voluntary desegregation busing programs currently...
program that sought to assist in desegregating the Boston schools by offering places in suburban school districts to black students. However, most METCO students were from middle-class black families, and METCO was not available to poor white students from Boston. Another important difference in the suburbs was that white students there were not bused away from their neighborhoods, and towns were not under court order to enroll in the state-run program but did so voluntarily.
There were a number of protest incidents that turned severely violent, even resulting in deaths. In one case, a black attorney named Theodore Landsmark was attacked by a group of white teenagers as he exited Boston City Hall
Boston City Hall
Boston City Hall is the seat of the municipal government of Boston, Massachusetts. Architecturally, it is an example of the brutalist style. It was designed by Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles...
. One of the youths, Joseph Rakes, attacked Landsmark with an American flag, using the flagpole as a lance. A photograph of the attack on Landsmark, The Soiling of Old Glory
The Soiling of Old Glory
The Soiling of Old Glory is a Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph taken for the Boston Herald American in 1976 by Stanley Forman.The photograph depicts a white teenager, Joseph Rakes, about to assault black lawyer and civil-rights activist Ted Landsmark with a flagpole bearing the American flag...
taken by Stanley Forman
Stanley Forman
Stanley Joseph Forman is a photojournalist who over a four-year period won a Pulitzer Prize three times while working at the Boston Herald American....
for the Boston Herald American
Boston Herald
The Boston Herald is a daily newspaper that serves Boston, Massachusetts, United States, and its surrounding area. It was started in 1846 and is one of the oldest daily newspapers in the United States...
, won the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography
Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography
The Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography was awarded from 1968 – 1999, thereafter being renamed as the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography.-List of winners:...
(now the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography
Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography
The Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography, has been awarded since 2000. Before 1968, there was only one photography category, the Pulitzer Prize for Photography, which was divided into the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography and feature categories...
) in 1977. In a retaliatory incident the next day, black teenagers in Roxbury threw rocks at a white man's car and caused him to crash. The youths dragged him out and crushed his skull with nearby paving stones. When police arrived, the man was surrounded by a crowd of 100 chanting "Let him die" while lying in a coma
Coma
In medicine, a coma is a state of unconsciousness, lasting more than 6 hours in which a person cannot be awakened, fails to respond normally to painful stimuli, light or sound, lacks a normal sleep-wake cycle and does not initiate voluntary actions. A person in a state of coma is described as...
from which he never recovered.
In another instance, a white teenager was stabbed nearly to death by a black teenager at South Boston High School. The community's white residents mobbed the school, trapping the black students inside. There were dozens of other racial incidents at South Boston High that year. The school was forced to close for a month after the stabbing. When it opened again, it was one of the first high schools to install metal detector
Metal detector
A metal detector is a device which responds to metal that may not be readily apparent.The simplest form of a metal detector consists of an oscillator producing an alternating current that passes through a coil producing an alternating magnetic field...
s; with 400 students attending, it was guarded by 500 police officers every day. In December 1975, Garrity turned out the principal of South Boston High and took control himself.
Garrity increased the plan down to first grade for the following school year. In October 1975, 6,000 marched against the busing in South Boston.
By the time the experiment with busing ended in 1988, the Boston school district had shrunk from 100,000 students to 57,000, only 15% of whom were white. Today the Boston Public Schools are 76% black and Hispanic
Hispanic
Hispanic is a term that originally denoted a relationship to Hispania, which is to say the Iberian Peninsula: Andorra, Gibraltar, Portugal and Spain. During the Modern Era, Hispanic sometimes takes on a more limited meaning, particularly in the United States, where the term means a person of ...
, and 14% White
White people
White people is a term which usually refers to human beings characterized, at least in part, by the light pigmentation of their skin...
. According to the 2000 census
Census
A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. It is a regularly occurring and official count of a particular population. The term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common...
, Boston's white (non-Hispanic) population is 54.48%, whereas Boston's black and Hispanic populations together total 39.77%. Newcomer professional families in the city have comparatively fewer children, and some of those parents, both white and black, prefer to send their children to private and parochial school
Parochial school
A parochial school is a school that provides religious education in addition to conventional education. In a narrower sense, a parochial school is a Christian grammar school or high school which is part of, and run by, a parish.-United Kingdom:...
s rather than have their children attend public school. In South Boston, a neighborhood found by U.S. News and World Report (October 1994) to have had the highest concentration of white poverty in the country, dropout rates soared, its poorer census tracts' dropout rates superseding rates based on race and ethnicity citywide. South Boston, along with other poor and working class white census tracts of Charlestown and parts of Dorchester, saw an increase in control by organized crime and young deaths due to murder, overdose, and criminal involvement. Boston's South Boston High School (now the South Boston High complex) was declared "dysfunctional" by the State Board of Education.
Kansas City, Missouri
In 1985, a federal court took partial control of the KCMSDKansas City, Missouri School District
Kansas City, Missouri School District, or KCMSD is a school district headquartered at 1211 McGee Street in Downtown Kansas City, Missouri.- Boundaries:The school district primarily serves residents within Kansas City....
. Since the district and the state had been found severally liable for the lack of integration, the state was responsible for making sure that money was available for the program. It was one of the most expensive desegregation efforts attempted and included busing, a magnet school program, and an extensive plan to improve the quality of inner city schools. The entire program was built on the premise that extremely good schools in the inner city combined with paid busing would be enough to achieve integration.
A number of local factors made the program unworkable. The school board never really functioned to enable the program to succeed. The administration in charge of the district was ill equipped to handle the amount of money it had available. Due to wounded racial pride, concerns about closing neighborhood schools, and the large percentage of local jobs provided by the schools, the community was alternately distrustful and demanding of the program. Perhaps most damaging was that parents in the surrounding area didn't send their children to be educated in the inner city. It ended in 1999.
Las Vegas, Nevada
In May 1968, the Southern NevadaSouthern Nevada
Southern Nevada is the region of Nevada which includes the Las Vegas Valley. Southern Nevada also includes the areas in and around Goldfield, Hawthorne, Pahrump, and Pioche. Geographically, Southern Nevada is partly, and in some cases, fully within the Mojave Desert. The population of the...
chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, usually abbreviated as NAACP, is an African-American civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909. Its mission is "to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to...
(NAACP) filed a lawsuit against the Clark County School District
Clark County School District
The Clark County School District, , is the 5th largest school district in the United States. It serves all of Clark County, Nevada, including the cities of Las Vegas, Henderson, North Las Vegas, Boulder City, and Mesquite; plus the census-designated places of Laughlin, Blue Diamond, Logandale,...
(CCSD). The NAACP wanted the CCSD to acknowledge publicly, and likewise, act against the de facto segregation that existed in six elementary schools located on the city's Westside. This area of Las Vegas had traditionally been a black neighborhood. Therefore, the CCSD did not see the need to desegregate the schools, as the cause of segregation appeared to result from factors outside of its immediate control.
The case initially entered the Eighth Judicial District Court of Nevada, but quickly found its way to the Nevada Supreme Court. According to Brown II, all school desegregation cases had to be heard at the federal level if they reached a state's highest court. As a result, the Las Vegas case, which became known as Kelly v. Clark County School District, was eventually heard by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. On May 10, 1972, the Ninth Circuit handed down its decision in favor of the NAACP, which therefore, required the CCSD to implement a plan for integration. The CCSD then instituted its Sixth Grade Center Plan, which converted the Westside's six elementary schools into sixth grade classrooms where nearly all of the school district's sixth graders (black and white alike) would be bused for the 1972-73 school year.
Los Angeles, California
In 1963, a lawsuit, Crawford v. Board of Education of the City of Los Angeles was filed to end segregation in the Los Angeles Unified School DistrictLos Angeles Unified School District
Los Angeles Unified School District is the largest public school system in California. It is the 2nd largest public school district in the United States. Only the New York City Department of Education has a larger student population...
. The California Supreme Court required the district to come up with a plan in 1977. The board returned to court with what the court of appeal years later would describe as "one of if not the most drastic
plan of mandatory student reassignment in the nation." A desegregation busing plan was developed to be implemented in the 1978 school year. Two suits to stop the enforced busing plan, both titled Bustop, Inc. v. Los Angeles Board of Education, were filed by the group Bustop Inc. and were petitioned to the United States Supreme Court. The petitions to stop the busing plan were subsequently denied by Justice Rehnquist and Justice Powell. California Constitutional Proposition 1, which mandated that busing follow the Equal protection clause
Equal Protection Clause
The Equal Protection Clause, part of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, provides that "no state shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws"...
of the U.S. Constitution passed in 1979 with 70% of the vote. The Crawford v. Board of Education of the City of Los Angeles lawsuit was heard in the Supreme Court in 1982. The Supreme Court upheld the decision that Proposition 1 was constitutional, and therefore mandatory busing was not permissible.
Nashville, Tennessee
In comparison with many other cities in the nation, Nashville was no hotbed of racial violence or massive protest during the civil rights era. In fact, the city was a leader of school desegregation in the South, even housing a few small schools that were minimally integrated before the Brown v. Board of Education decision reached the country in 1954. Despite this initial breakthrough, however, full desegregation of the schools was a far cry from reality in Nashville in the mid 1950s, and thus 22 plaintiffs, including black student Robert Kelley, filed suit against the Nashville Board of Education in 1955.The result of that law suit was what came to be known as the "Nashville Plan," an attempt to integrate the public schools of Nashville (and later all of Davidson County when the district was consolidated in 1963). The plan, beginning in 1957, involved the gradual integration of schools by working up through the grades each year starting in the fall of 1957 with first graders. Very few black children who were zoned for white schools showed up at their assigned campus on the first day of school, and those who did met with angry mobs outside several city elementary schools. No white children assigned to black schools showed up to their assigned campuses.
After a decade of this gradual integration strategy, it became evident that the schools still lacked full integration. Many argued that Housing Segregation
Housing Segregation
Housing Segregation is the practice of denying African American or other minority groups equal access to housing through the process of misinformation, denial of realty and financing services, and racial steering. Misinformation can take the form of realtors or landlords not giving African American...
was the true culprit in the matter. In 1970 the Kelley case was reintroduced to the courts. Ruling on the case was Judge L. Clure Morton, who, after seeking advice from government HEW consultants, decided the following year that to correct the problem, forced busing of the children was to be mandated, among the many parts to a new plan that was finally decided on. This was a similar plan to that enacted in Charlotte-Mecklenberg in North Carolina the same year.
What followed were mixed emotions from both the black and white communities. Many whites did not want their children to share schools with black children, arguing that it would decrease the quality of their education. While a triumph for some, many blacks believed that the new plan would enforce the closure of neighborhood schools such as Pearl High School, which brought the community together. Parents from both sides did not like the plan because they had no control over where their children were going to be sent to school, a problem that many other cities had during the 1970s when busing was mandated across the country. Despite the judge's decision and the subsequent implementation of the new busing plan, the city stood divided.
As in many other cities across the country at this time, many white citizens took action against the desegregation laws. Organized protests against the busing plan began before the order was even official, led by future mayoral candidate Casey Jenkins. While some protested, many other white parents began pulling their children out of the public schools and enrolling them in the numerous private schools that began to spring up almost overnight in Nashville in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of these schools continued to be segregated through the 1970s. Other white parents moved outside of the city limits and eventually outside the Davidson county line so as not to be part of the Metropolitan District and thus not part of the busing plan.
In 1979 and 1980, the Kelley case was again brought back to the courts because of the busing plan's failure to fully integrate the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools. The plan was reexamined and reconfigured to include some concessions made by the school board and the Kelley plaintiffs and in 1983 the new plan, which still included busing, was introduced. However, problems with "white flight" and private schools continued to segregate the Metro Nashville Public Schools to a certain degree, a problem that has never fully been solved.
Pasadena, California
In 1970 a federal courtUnited States district court
The United States district courts are the general trial courts of the United States federal court system. Both civil and criminal cases are filed in the district court, which is a court of law, equity, and admiralty. There is a United States bankruptcy court associated with each United States...
ordered the desegregation of the public schools in Pasadena, California
Pasadena, California
Pasadena is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. Although famous for hosting the annual Rose Bowl football game and Tournament of Roses Parade, Pasadena is the home to many scientific and cultural institutions, including the California Institute of Technology , the Jet...
. At that time, the proportion of white students in those schools reflected the proportion of whites in the community, 54% and 53%, respectively. After the desegregation process began, large numbers of whites in the upper and middle classes who could afford it pulled their children from the integrated public school system and placed them into private schools instead. As a result, by 2004 Pasadena became home to 63 private schools, which educated one-third of all school-aged children in the city, and the proportion of white students in the public schools had fallen to 16%. (In the mean time, the proportion of whites in the community has declined somewhat as well, to 37% in 2006) The superintendent of Pasadena's public schools characterized them as being to whites "like the bogey-man," and mounted policy changes, including a curtailment of busing, and a publicity drive to induce affluent whites to put their children back into public schools.
Prince George's County, Maryland
In 1974, Prince George's County, MarylandPrince George's County, Maryland
Prince George's County is a county located in the U.S. state of Maryland, immediately north, east, and south of Washington, DC. As of 2010, it has a population of 863,420 and is the wealthiest African-American majority county in the nation....
, became the largest school district in the nation forced to adopt a busing plan. The county, a large suburban school district east of Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
, was over 80% white in population and in the public schools. In some county communities close to Washington, there was a higher concentration of black residents than in more outlying areas. Through a series of desegregation orders after the Brown decision, the county had a neighborhood-based system of school boundaries. However, the NAACP argued that housing patterns in the county still reflected the vestiges of segregation. Against the will of the Board of Education of Prince George's County, the federal court ordered that a school busing plan be set in place. A 1974 Gallup poll showed that 75% of county residents were against forced busing and that only 32% of blacks supported it.
The transition was very traumatic as the court ordered that the plan be administered with "all due haste." This happened during the middle of the school term, and students even in their senior year in high school were transferred to different schools to achieve racial balance. Many high school sports teams' seasons and other typical school activities were disrupted. Life in general for families in the county was disrupted by things such as the changes in daily times to get children ready and receive them after school, transportation logistics for extra curricular activities, and parental participation activities such as volunteer work in the schools and PTA meetings.
The white population of the Prince George's County Public Schools
Prince George's County Public Schools
The Prince George's County Public Schools system is a large school district administered by the government of Prince George's County, Maryland, United States and is overseen by the Maryland State Department of Education...
was growing until school busing was started; it dropped significantly afterward. The county population is now less than 25% white and more than 65% black. The statistics for the 136,095 student school district changed even more, and it is now less than 8% white and more than 77% black.
The federal case and the school busing order was officially ended in 2001, as the "remaining vestiges of segregation" had been erased to the court's satisfaction. Neighborhood-based school boundaries were restored. The Prince George's County Public Schools was ordered to pay the NAACP more than $2 million in closing attorney fees and is estimated to have paid the NAACP over $20 million over the course of the case.
Nevertheless, these demographic changes caused by desegregation busing have changed the county, transforming a great number of neighborhoods that were formerly middle-class and white to black and upper-middle class.
Richmond, Virginia
In April 1971, in the case Bradley v. Richmond School Board, Federal District Judge Robert R. Mehrige, Jr., ordered an extensive citywide busing program in Richmond, VirginiaRichmond, Virginia
Richmond is the capital of the Commonwealth of Virginia, in the United States. It is an independent city and not part of any county. Richmond is the center of the Richmond Metropolitan Statistical Area and the Greater Richmond area...
. When a massive busing program began in the fall of 1971, parents of all races complained about the long rides, hardships with transportation for extracurricular activities, and the separation of siblings when elementary schools at opposite sides of the city were "paired", (i.e. splitting lower and upper elementary grades into separate schools). One result was further white flight to private schools and to the suburbs. The percentage of white students in Richmond city schools declined from 45 to 21 percent between 1960 and 1975. This so-called "white flight" prevented Richmond schools from becoming truly integrated. A number of assignment plans were tried to address the non-racial concerns, and eventually, most elementary schools were "unpaired."
Wilmington, Delaware
In Wilmington, DelawareWilmington, Delaware
Wilmington is the largest city in the state of Delaware, United States, and is located at the confluence of the Christina River and Brandywine Creek, near where the Christina flows into the Delaware River. It is the county seat of New Castle County and one of the major cities in the Delaware Valley...
, located in New Castle County
New Castle County, Delaware
New Castle County is the northernmost of the three counties of the U.S. state of Delaware. As of 2010 its population was 538,479, an increase of 7.6% over the previous decade. The county seat is Wilmington. The center of population of Delaware is located in New Castle County, in the town of...
, segregated schools were required by law until 1954, when, due to Belton v. Gebhart (which was later rolled into Brown vs Board of Education on appeal), the school system was forced to desegregate. As a result, the school districts in the Wilmington metropolitan area were split into eleven districts covering the metropolitan area (Alfred I. duPont, Alexis I. duPont, Claymont, Conrad, De La Warr, Marshallton-McKean, Mount Pleasant, New Castle-Gunning Bedford, Newark, Stanton, and Wilmington school districts). However, this reorganization did little to address the issue of segregation, since the Wilmington schools (Wilmington and De La Warr districts) remained predominantly black, while the suburban schools in the county outside the city limits remained predominantly white.
In 1976 the U.S. District Court, in Evans v. Buchanan, ordered that the school districts of New Castle County all be combined into a single district governed by the New Castle County Board of Education. The District Court ordered the Board to implement a desegregation plan in which the students from the predominantly black Wilmington and De La Warr districts were required to attend school in the predominantly white suburb districts, while students from the predominantly white districts were required to attend school in Wilmington or De La Warr districts for three years (usually 4th through 6th grade). In many cases, this required students to be bused a considerable distance (12 to 18 miles in the Christina district) due to the distance between Wilmington and some of the major communities of the suburban area (such as Newark
Newark, Delaware
Newark is an American city in New Castle County, Delaware, west-southwest of Wilmington. According to the 2010 Census, the population of the city is 31,454. Newark is the home of the University of Delaware.- History :...
).
However, the process of handling an entire metropolitan area as a single school district resulted in a revision to the plan in 1981, in which the New Castle County schools were again divided into four separate districts (Brandywine
Brandywine School District
Brandywine School District is a public school district in northern New Castle County, Delaware in the United States. It serves a portion of the city of Wilmington.-Current members:...
, Christina
Christina School District
The Christina School District is a public school district located in Newark, Delaware. It is the largest public school system in Delaware.- Schools :High Schools: Christiana High School, , and Newark High School.Middle Schools: , , and...
, Colonial
Colonial School District (Delaware)
The Colonial School District is a public school district in New Castle Hundred, Delaware. The current superintendent is George Meney, and the district offices are located at 318 East Basin Road, in New Castle, Delaware.-Middle schools:*Calvin R...
, and Red Clay)http://www.iccjournal.biz/Scholarly_Articles/Hoff,%20S/DelawareEducationandDesegregation.htm. However, unlike the 1954 districts, each of these districts was racially balanced and encompassed inner city and suburban areas. Each of the districts continued a desegregation plan based upon busing.
The requirements for maintaining racial balance in the schools of each of the districts was ended by the District Court in 1994, but the process of busing students to and from the suburbs for schooling continued largely unchanged until 2001, when the Delaware state government passed House Bill 300, mandating that the districts convert to sending students to the schools closest to them, a process that continues . In the 1990s, Delaware schools would utilize the Choice program, which would allow children to apply to schools in other school districts based on space.
Wilmington High, which many felt was a victim of the busing order, closed in 1998 due to dropping enrollment. The campus would become home to Cab Calloway School of the Arts
Cab Calloway School of the Arts
The Cab Calloway School of the Arts is an arts-oriented magnet school in Wilmington, Delaware, operated by the Red Clay Consolidated School District, that focuses on a strong academic curriculum along with an education in the arts. It is a public school, but children are required to audition within...
, a magnet school focused on the arts that was established in 1992. It would also house Charter School of Wilmington
Charter School of Wilmington
The Charter School of Wilmington is a high school in Wilmington, Delaware, one of the first public/private charter schools in the United States, opening in 1996. It occupies the third floor and a wing of the second floor of the former Wilmington High School building...
, which focuses on math and science, and opened up in 1996.
As of now, Delaware has a high rate of children who attend private schools, magnet schools, and charter schools due to the perceived weaknesses of the public school system.
Re-segregation
According to the Civil Rights Project at Harvard UniversityHarvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, the desegregation of U.S. public schools peaked in 1988; since then, schools have become more segregated because of changes in demographic residential patterns with continuing growth in suburbs and new communities. Jonathan Kozol
Jonathan Kozol
Jonathan Kozol is a non-fiction writer, educator, and activist, best known for his books on public education in the United States. Kozol graduated from Noble and Greenough School in 1954, and Harvard University summa cum laude in 1958 with a degree in English Literature. He was awarded a Rhodes...
has found that as of 2005, the proportion of black students at majority-white schools was at "a level lower than in any year since 1968." Changing population patterns, with dramatically increased growth in the South and Southwest, decreases in old industrial cities, and much increased immigration of new ethnic groups, have altered school populations in many areas.
School districts continue to try various programs to improve student and school performance, including magnet schools and special programs related to the economic standing of families. Omaha proposed incorporating some suburban districts within city limits to enlarge its school-system catchment area. It wanted to create a "one tax, one school" system that would also allow it to create magnet programs to increase diversity in now predominately white schools. Ernest Chambers
Ernie Chambers
Ernest W. Chambers is a former Nebraska State Senator who represented North Omaha's 11th District in the Nebraska State Legislature. He is also a civil rights activist and is considered by most citizens of Nebraska as the most prominent and outspoken African American leader in the state...
, a 34-year-serving black state senator from North Omaha, Nebraska
North Omaha, Nebraska
North Omaha is a community area in Omaha, Nebraska, USA. It is bordered by Cuming and Dodge Streets on the south, Interstate 680 on the north, North 72nd Street on the west and the Missouri River and Carter Lake, Iowa on the east, as defined by the University of Nebraska at Omaha and the Omaha...
, believed a different solution was needed. Some observers said that in practical terms, public schools in Omaha had been re-segregated since the end of busing in 1999.
In 2006, Chambers offered an amendment to the Omaha school reform bill in the Nebraska State Legislature which would provide for creation of three school districts in Omaha according to current racial demographics: black, white and Hispanic, with local community control of each district. He believed this would give the black community the chance to control a district in which their children were the majority. Chambers’ amendment was controversial. Opponents to the measure described it as "state-sponsored segregation".
The authors of a 2003 Harvard study on re-segregation believe current trends in the South of white teachers leaving predominately black schools is an inevitable result of federal court decisions limiting former methods of civil rights-era protections, such as busing and affirmative action in school admissions. Teachers and principals cite other issues, such as economic and cultural barriers in schools with high rates of poverty, as well as teachers' choices to work closer to home or in higher-performing schools. In some areas black teachers are also leaving the profession, resulting in teacher shortages.
Education conservatives refute any talk about resegregation and argue that any apparent separation of races is due to patterns of residential demographics not due to court decisions. They argue that the Brown decision has been achieved and that there is no segregation in the way that existed before the ruling. Employing race to impose desegregation policies discriminates and violates Brown’s central warning of using racial preferences. The achievement gap between white and minorities is not due to one school having better facilities over others. The issue is to change school culture so that it is held accountable to improve discipline, address student behavior, and implement better teaching strategies. Conservatives celebrate the recent Court decisions and Bush’s NCLB and the focus now needs to be on teaching the kids, rather than chasing “demographic rainbows.”
See also
- Civil Rights Movement in Omaha, NebraskaCivil rights movement in Omaha, NebraskaThe Civil rights movement in Omaha, Nebraska has roots that extend back until at least 1912. With a history of racial tension that starts before the founding of the city, Omaha has been the home of numerous overt efforts related to securing civil rights for African Americans since at least the...
- David S. Ettinger, "The Quest to Desegregate Los Angeles Schools" (March 2003) 26 Los Angeles Lawyer 54
- Milliken v. BradleyMilliken v. BradleyMilliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 , was a significant United States Supreme Court case dealing with the planned desegregation busing of public school students across district lines among 53 school districts in metropolitan Detroit. It concerned the plans to integrate public schools in the United...
was a United States Supreme Court case dealing with the planned desegregation busing of public school students among 53 school districts in metropolitan Detroit. - Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton University Press, 2006)
- Morgan v. HenniganMorgan v. HenniganMorgan v. HenniganThe case that defined the school busing controversy in Boston, Massachusetts during the 1970s was Morgan v. Hennigan. On 14 March 1972 the Boston chapter of the NAACP filed a class action lawsuit against the Boston School Committee on behalf of 14 black parents and 44 children...
External links
- The Legacy of School Busing NPRNPRNPR, formerly National Public Radio, is a privately and publicly funded non-profit membership media organization that serves as a national syndicator to a network of 900 public radio stations in the United States. NPR was created in 1970, following congressional passage of the Public Broadcasting...
- Money And School Performance: Lessons from the Kansas City Desegregation Experiment by Paul Ciotti. Policy Analysis, CATO Institute.
- A Boston judge’s experiment in social engineering has unraveled neighborhoods and frustrated black achievement. Hoover Institution.
- 25 Years of Forced Busing. Good Riddance to a Bad Idea, at Adversity.net
- John Joseph Moakley Oral History Project, Garrity Decision Oral History Interviews. Suffolk University Archives; Boston, MA.
- The Freedom House, Inc. records 1941-1996 (M16) are available at Northeastern University Libraries, Archives and Special Collections Department.
- The Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity records 1961-2005 (M101) are available at Northeastern University Libraries, Archives and Special Collections Department.