Busing for school desegregation

The use of buses to alter a school’s racial balance to achieve integration. Controversies raised by busing were more pronounced than those brought about by changes in housing, transportation, and voting.

Origins and History

In May, 1954, in response to a lawsuit by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the U.S. Supreme Court declared that legally segregated schools then prevalent in the southern states, and in Topeka, Kansas were contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing every citizen equal protection under the law. A second decision (1955), ordering that desegregation take place “with all deliberate speed” kept the pace of southern school desegregation glacially slow until the Supreme Court, in Green v. New Kent County (1968), outlawed the merely token integration of the South’s freedom-of-choice plans.

The 1954 decision was riddled with ambiguity; it did not make clear whether the injustice of segregation lay in the fact that African American students were set apart by law or that they were not able to mingle with white schoolchildren. Many, if not most, African Americans supported the decision, believing, on the basis of bitter experience, that all-black public schools would inevitably be starved of public funds by school boards beholden to majority-white electorates.

In areas of the rural South where blacks and whites lived side by side, the end of legal segregation could mean the true integration of the public schools, barring a massive flight of white children to private schools. In metropolitan areas of the North and in some urban areas of the South, however, blacks and whites tended to live in separate neighborhoods; large-scale white migration to the suburbs in the 1950’s exacerbated this tendency. As the 1960’s began, more and more school boards in northern cities came under pressure from black civil rights groups and their liberal white allies to try to reduce or eliminate de facto public school segregation.

Early Attempts

The first experiments in busing for integration, on a small scale, were carried out in New York City. In 1961, pupil transfers were arranged between white Yorkville and black and Latino East Harlem in Manhattan. Just before the 1964-1965 school year, Superintendent of Schools Calvin Gross announced a plan of exchange of pupils between predominantly black schools and predominantly white schools in certain parts of Brooklyn and Queens; only a few of the city’s 850 public schools were affected by this plan. Because some, but not all, of the pupil exchanges between black and white schools involved transportation by bus, the process came to be known as “busing.”

Throughout the country, other communities acted in a similar fashion. In 1965, the California community of Riverside instituted a program of busing for integration; between 1964 and 1968, Berkeley, California, under the direction of school chief Neil Sullivan, used busing to integrate its elementary and junior high schools (the senior high school was already integrated). In 1967, Evanston, Illinois, began a program of busing for integration. In Massachusetts, in 1965, the state legislature passed the Racial Imbalance Act to penalize local school boards that had too many all-black schools. In the same state, a voluntary busing program was created in 1965, in which some schools in the white suburbs accepted token numbers of black pupils from inner-city neighborhoods. In 1966, a similar program, Project Concern, linked Connecticut suburbs with nearby Connecticut inner-city neighborhoods (in both Massachusetts and Connecticut, participation by suburban school boards was purely voluntary). Proposals to bus children for purposes of integration were also made in other parts of the country; where local authorities were resistant to the idea, civil rights activists sued them in court.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 mandated denial of federal education aid to school districts practicing segregation; yet from 1964 to 1969, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare used enforcement powers more vigorously in the South than in the North. In the early and mid-1960’s, the courts neither encouraged nor discouraged busing for integration. In 1964, a federal judge rejected a lawsuit demanding that the Gary, Indiana, schools do something to end de facto segregation derived from residential patterns. When white parents challenged a Long Island school board’s attempt to reduce segregation through busing, however, a New York state court decided, in 1965, that the board’s action was constitutional. It was not until late 1969 that a federal judge (James McMillen) actually ordered a school district (Charlotte-Mecklenburg, in North Carolina) to use busing to create racially integrated schools. The Supreme Court would confirm that lower court decision in April, 1971, in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education.

The Controversy Begins

By the end of 1969, busing had already aroused much controversy. In many communities where busing for school integration was introduced or even seriously discussed, it encountered vehement resistance from white parents of school-age children. Some white parents simply disliked the inconvenience caused by their children being required to attend school farther from home; others feared for their children’s safety in strange schools and strange neighborhoods; and others opposed the mixing of black and white schoolchildren for racist reasons, fearing that their children’s attending the same school with black children might eventually lead to interracial marriage. Even when white children were not bused, the busing of black children into previously all-white schools aroused antagonism when white homeowners feared that integration of the school might lead to the neighborhood becoming black. In the autumn of 1964, parents in Brooklyn and Queens (New York) organized in the Parents and Taxpayers association (PAT), illegally withdrew their children from school in a one-day boycott to protest a plan that involved busing their children into previously all-black schools. The furor led to Superintendent Gross’s resignation in August, 1965. In 1969, in Richmond, California, and in Denver, Colorado, school board members who had voted for busing for racial integration were voted out of office. In Chicago, in the 1967-1968 school year, school superintendent James Redmond announced a plan that would transport black children into underutilized schools in white neighborhoods; howls of outrage from white parents and the absence of any support from Mayor Richard Daley led to the busing plan’s first being scaled back drastically and then abandoned completely. Despite the 1965 Massachusetts law mandating racial balance, the members of the Boston School Board fought so tenaciously against busing for integration that it was not carried out until the middle of the following decade. Faced with a 1963 lawsuit demanding action for integration, the school board of Los Angeles, California, was able to stave off the introduction of busing until 1978. In 1966, amendments to education legislation forbidding forced busing began to be introduced in the U.S. Congress; in 1969, an unsuccessful motion to ban busing was raised in the New York state legislature, and in the same year, a Newsweek poll revealed overwhelming opposition to compulsory busing for integration among middle-income white Americans.

Impact

A short-term consequence of busing for integration was, sometimes, the inflammation of conflict between white and black students. Black students who attended previously all-white schools often gained the benefit of newer textbooks and better school buildings. Busing for integration sometimes hindered the participation of parents in the life of the school and of students in afterschool activities. There is evidence that, in some localities at least, the integration of black children achieved through busing raised their level of academic performance; whether this was true of all black children who were bused is difficult to determine.

What is easier to assess is the political impact of busing. Antagonism toward busing for integration, combined with other conflicts with African Americans over jobs and housing, helped drive working-class ethnic white voters in the metropolitan areas of the North away from their traditional allegiance to the Democratic Party, whose liberal wing had become strongly identified with the black struggle for civil rights. Republicans, badly beaten at the polls in 1964, began to gain seats in the congressional off-year election of 1966; in 1968, the Republican Richard M. Nixon was elected president.

Subsequent Events

Throughout the 1970’s, plans to carry out racial integration of the schools through busing were carried out in numerous communities across the United States. In almost all cases (except that of Seattle, Washington, in 1977), busing resulted not from local initiative but from the orders of federal courts that found school boards guilty of deliberate segregation. Presidents Nixon and Gerald Ford both openly denounced busing; President Jimmy Carter was slightly more favorable to busing as a tool for integration. The U.S. Supreme Court, having approved busing in the Swann case and in Keyes v. School District Number One of Denver (1973), suddenly changed course in its 1974 Milliken v. Bradley decision, in which, by a five-to-four margin, it rejected a metropolitan area (suburb-city) busing plan ordered for the Detroit area by a lower federal court. (It did not nullify all plans for suburb-city busing, however.) Turmoil sometimes resulted from court-ordered busing; the worst violence took place in Boston in 1974-1975.

No new busing orders were implemented under Republican President Ronald Reagan, an outspoken foe of busing. In the early 1980’s, brief experiments at busing in Chicago and Los Angeles, both undertaken in the 1970’s under outside pressure, were ended. In the 1990’s, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed some localities to abandon busing. Busing produced long-term racial integration when (as in Charlotte, North Carolina), it was applied to an entire metropolitan area, not merely within the political boundaries of a city; otherwise, white flight to the suburbs produced resegregation. In some places (for example, California), heavy immigration in the 1980’s ensured that many urban schools would be multicultural, even if they contained few children of native-born non-Hispanic whites.

Additional Information

Diane Ravitch’s The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805-1987 (1974) is a mine of information on attempts in 1964 at busing for integration in New York City. W. J. Rorabaugh’s Berkeley at War: The Sixties (1989), a historian’s study of that California university town, has a good chapter on race relations and the origins of the area’s busing plan. For a look at the conservative-liberal struggle over busing in Richmond, California, in the late 1960’s, sociologist Lillian Rubin’s Busing and Backlash: White Against White in a California School District (1972), based on firsthand observation and interviewing of participants, is useful. For the origins of busing in Charlotte, North Carolina, one can consult Davison M. Douglas’s Reading, Writing, and Race: The Desegregation of the Charlotte Public Schools (1995). The historian Ronald Formisano’s Boston Against Busing (1991), although it concentrates mainly on the crisis of 1974-1975, has good background material on the 1960’s.