Reply #288: Is Milliken v. Bradley partially to blame for this? [View All]

[redqueen]

I've been listening to NPR's series on Busing, and today's segment mentioned this case. I missed some of the story, but it seems that the plan to integrate Detroit's schools fell apart


The Legacy of School Busing

April 29, 2004 -- Fifty years ago, school desegregation became the law of the land in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. But a decade after that ruling, few students attended integrated schools. As part of an ongoing examination this year of the legacy of the Brown decision, a three-part Morning Edition series looks at the results of school busing orders aimed at making desegregation a reality.

Stories in the Series:

Part 1: Charlotte, N.C., a Qualified Success

Wednesday, April 28, 2004: In 1969, a federal judge ordered the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district to use busing to speed integration -- a process that did not end until 2001. Now some residents wonder whether the tumultuous process was worth it: Test scores for black students continue to rise -- but school segregation has shot up dramatically. NPR's Phillip Davis reports.

Part 2: Detroit's Racial Divide

Thursday, April 29, 2004: Twenty years after Brown, the Supreme Court issued another landmark decision in a Detroit-based case -- Milliken v. Bradley. The 5-4 Milliken ruling put the brakes on busing and made desegregating schools in Detroit and other urban areas nearly impossible. NPR's Cheryl Corley reports.

Part 3: Boston's White Flight

Friday, April 30, 2004: Thirty years ago, court-ordered busing led to violence on the streets of Boston. Now the city is debating another busing plan. This one would end or alter three decades of moving kids around the city to ensure diversity and allow more students to attend schools in their own neighborhoods. A lack of choice has led many white parents to abandon public schools altogether in favor of private education. NPR's Anthony Brooks reports.


A Brief History of Civil Rights in the United States of America

Many observers believed that, for school busing to be effective as an instrument of school integration, black students should be bused out of the central cities into schools in the outlying suburbs. Only in this way, it was argued, could busing be instituted without having the effect of driving the remaining white families out of the city. The Supreme Court did not agree with this proposed solution, however, ruling five-to-four in Milliken v. Bradley that the suburbs had not caused the de facto segregation in the central cities and thus were not required to help provide a solution to the problem.

The Milliken decision represented a turning-point for the Supreme Court where racial matters were concerned. Richard M. Nixon, a Republican, had been elected president of the United States in 1968, succeeding Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson. Nixon did not share Johnson's enthusiasm for rapid advancement in the civil rights arena, and his Supreme Court appointments had reflected this less-involved attitude. All four Nixon appointees voted with the majority in the Milliken v. Bradley decision. The central cities were to cope alone with the problem of de facto segregation of public schools. The suburbs had been granted judicial permission to remain "lily white."

After the Milliken decision, school administrators in central cities searched for imaginative new ways to provide some measure of racial integration in their school systems. One idea was creating "magnet schools" with specialized curricula, such as advanced science or music classes, that students from the suburbs would want to attend. Improved school buildings often were combined with enriched academic programs to make magnet schools extra attractive to suburban students and their parents.