Reply #11: i was bussed in Greenville, SC [View All]

[amazona]

It was definitely the right thing to do. Technically, the schools were never segregated because (before bussing) there was the one rural black child who attended our white suburban elementary school. It was all by neighborhoods, you see, but the neighborhoods were very segregated -- blacks couldn't buy houses in certain areas. So you would hear the anti-busing crowd rant about how, "They're sending our kids out of our neighborhoods, oh woe!" Anyway, this one pre-desegregation black kid lived at the very end of the bus line, at the very last stop, way out in the country, on a farm, and they had no choice but to let him in the white school if he was to attend school at all. So, anyway, in the early 1970s, the court ordered the use of bussing to desegregate the schools so the "white" suburban school became the 1-5 grades, and then the 6 graders went to the former "black" urban school. It was an interesting experience.

The white school was brand new, with a textbook in every subject for every child. If a child wished or needed to do homework, she had her own book she could take home with her. There were multiple televisions and other modern equipment. There was, of course, heating and air conditioning.

The black school had no air conditioning, and there was something wrong with the heating where some rooms wouldn't heat and some would over-heat. There was one book on any given subject for every six children. Homework could not be assigned because you could not take a book home.

If not for bussing, this is the school where 99 percent of the black children would have gone for 6 years. Instead, everyone went there for one year out of six.



I'm just one kid, but I bet I'm not the only one who really had her eyes opened to how much injustice existed in the world.

Another eye-opener, for me, was looking around and taking note of which white kids were suddenly yanked out of public school and put in religious schools. (It was well known that these religious schools were inferior to public schools -- teachers didn't even have to have certification! Every public school teacher, even at the "black" school, had a college degree and certification, unless she was a student teacher assisting the "real" teacher. ) I couldn't help make judgments about the kind of parents who would rather pay to send their kid to a worse school than have that child in class with more than one black child. All in all, it was an educational experience.