Let's revisit an old issue: Forced School Busing

[bluestateguy]

People forget how this issue divided the Democratic Party in the 1970's, arguably more than the Vietnam War.

[El Mariachi]

1. i dont know

i was born in 1977
i dont even know the issue

[maine_raptor]

2. Never could understand

why they had to force those poor yellow busses to go to school.

:evilgrin:

[The Backlash Cometh]

3. It was a good idea at the time.

But today I prefer magnet programs to encourage diversity.

[leftist_rebel1569]

4. I haven't the slightest clue

what you're talking about

It doesn't help I was born in 1988, but still....

[ScreamingMeemie]

6. I thought they taught desegregation in high school.

It was the busing of students black or in the case of Detroit here, a lot of times white, into another district, to racially diversify schools. It is and was a horrendous idea. I am sure they are teaching this. Pay attention in class.;-)

[JohnKleeb]

7. he was only a freshman last year Mrs Grumpy

I am not sure if Lefty has the same criteria as I do but when I was a freshman I learned history from the beginning of time to the Reinassance. I didnt learn about it either this year as a sophomore though I am suprised then again they didnt teach us about Northern Ireland either. Thats the case right Lefty? you learned pre Reinassance history this year, maybe MN has a different criteria than VA on history.

[ScreamingMeemie]

8. Oh wow, times have changed. All we ever got around to in high school

was American History...and then American Government. Renaissance history was not until college. Nice that they have added that. But, then, I'm in Michigan and they still might be doing things like that.

[AnnabelLee]

9. I went to a suburban all-white high school

during the 80s. Not one word about desegregation, heck, not even a whisper about the entire civil rights movement was ever heard in those classrooms.

[leftist_rebel1569]

12. well...

last year I was in American Government, this year i'm in American History. That would prolly explain why. That...and i've never gotten farther that WWII in a history class in my middle school and elementary days...

[BiggJawn]

5. It was wrong.

It did absolutely NOTHING for diversity. What you had were kids who had to ride the bus an hour each way every day, and how can you participate in sports, or drama, or any other after-school activities that build community when you had no way to get back home every night? and if you DID want to play ball for Whitebred High, how was your mom or your folks gonna come see you play? Or even come pick you up after the game w/o some cracker suburban Sheriff's Deputy jacking her up for "DWB"?

And you could look at the lunchroom at noon and decide for yourself what a big-assed failure it was. White kids sat with White kids, and Black kids sat with Black kids. There was damn little crossing over the "colour line".

It was an experiment, an EXPENSIVE experiment, in terms of childhoods ruined as well as $$$ and FAILED miserably, IMO.

I hope Judge S. Hugh Dillon burns in Hell.

[I AM SPARTACUS]

10. doesn't this question belong in the "Respect Perversity" thread...???

...force, coupled with a perversely inept answer to the diversity question...

[amazona]

11. i was bussed in Greenville, SC

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.

[The Backlash Cometh]

20. It's easy to misunderstand busing if you don't know the circumstances

It was a different era back then. Your post did an excellent job of hitting some of the main points. I wasn't even aware of how necessary it was until someone gave a presentation on the history of Affirmative Action. Those who think it was a bad decision, should look up: Plessy v. Fergusson & Brown v. Board of Education. It was a very segregated world back then. Forced busing was the first step, until we could get integrated communities that would make it unnecessary. (Which, btw, we still haven't managed to attain true integrated communities, but at least, with magnet programs, it is possible to find integrated schools.)

[PunkinPi]

13. I don't know about the busing issue,

because I was born until 1976, but my mom was a teacher in a predominately black neighborhood and she thought that instead of the forced busing, they force the realtors to create integration of schools by integrating the neighborhoods. This always seemed like a better approach then busing kids all over creation.

[TheBigGuy]

14. I'm a veteran of the anti-bussing riots in Lousville...and of bussing.

I actually ended up arrested, sent to juvenile hall, and was given a sentanced to an evening curfew for six months...got off easy....for waving a big confederate flag out of my car and obstructing traffic....

That was back when I was in high school in the 1970s.

Now, though, i think the way they did bussing in Louisville was the correct way. The court merged the (bankrupt) city system with the suburban county system, and bussed the entire county...the city and suburbs. White flight was impossible. It was the fair way, bussing both the city and suburbs.

Other places where ive seen it done ...the suburbs where NOT bussed, only the city, and the city in question became subject to serious white flight, leaving a white underclass within the city limits, and also leading to white fligh to a private "christian" school system.

This didnt happen that much in Louisville as the only parallel system was the Catholic system, which instituted a policy of not accepting 'white flight' students.

[ScreamingMeemie]

15. What?! No kissing???

I thought we were talking about busing...

[TheBigGuy]

16. I thought we where, too...

...at least thats what my post was about.

[Kat45]

17. I grew up in the Boston area, was there in the seventies

and things got mighty ugly. (To this day, people think of Boston as a racist city because of the reaction to busing in the 70s, but it is not an especially racist place these days.)

I think some of the people reacting against busing were racist; some were scared; some just wanted their kids to go to school in their own neighborhoods, as they did when they were kids. There was white flight. There were more whites going to Catholic schools. Like many other cities, the population of the city today is heavily minority. A case of unintended consequences: I often wonder if the city would have remained with a more diverse population if forced busing had not occurred.

[Withergyld]

18. I was bussed in LA as a kid

This was in the late 70's. I remember the hour long bus ride. In a way it was kind of strange because they only did it for two years. I went to k to 2nd at my local school, then was bussed for third and fourth grade to a different school. For fifth and sixth grade I attended my local school again.

[PeakOil2008]

19. I have mixed feelings about it.

Even though I had barely set foot upon this Earth when desegregation busing took effect in my city of Akron, to this very day, I still hear stories relating to it, and I can see how it has affected entire communities around the city.

Anyone who knows anything about the Akron Public Schools system knows that it is divided into "clusters" of schools that generally center around one of the district's several high schools. When desegregation took place, Akron had nine high schools. The South Cluster, which centered around South High School in Akron's predominately African-American near-west side neighborhood, felt the brunt of the desegregation order. South High School, West Junior High and Thornton Junion High schools, and most of the South Cluster's elementary schools were decommissioned and shut down. The neighborhood once served by those schools was arbitrarily divided up among the "whitest" of the surviving eight clusters, and the students were bussed to those clusters.

Sounds like a good idea, right? Well, many students who lived less than a 5 or 10 minute walk from an old South Cluster school found themselves on daily, 30 to 45-minute bus trips to the edges of town, transported to predominately white neighborhoods with predominately white schools. To say they were somewhat less than warmly received during the early years of busing would be a very mild statement. Racial tensions flared in well-to-do Northwest Akron, and the one-time Akron suburbs of Ellet and Kenmore, which to this day still jealously guard their pre-annexation identities (and remain close to 95% caucasian in population). African-American students faced daily reminders of their "inferior" and "outsider" status, from harassment, threats and even violence in school hallways and at bus stops, to discrimination and exclusion from school clubs, councils and extra-curricular activities. Despite these things, the would-be students of the South Cluster were still expected to make the grade and make it to graduation. The 1980s were troubled years for bussed minority students in Akron.

Akron's near-west side neighborhood, without schools, suffered through its own problems. Without immediately local schools to serve their children, many of the parents who could afford to move, did so, packing up their families and heading to other neighborhoods and suburbs where their children wouldn't be bussed. They left behind impoverished families with limited options to dominate the demographics. The neighborhood today remains among Akron's poorest.

Flash forward two decades to the present day. The old South Cluster neighborhood is experiencing a renaissance thanks to several major urban renewal projects and a growing desire amongst its residents for erstwhile community services -- particularly neighborhood schools. The general consensus around the city is that busing and closing schools to meet the desegregation order was perhaps not the best solution. Interestingly enough, however, racial tensions have significantly subsided in many of the former hotbed areas, though it arguably may have more to do with general increase in level of tolerance and acceptance of diversity among the up and coming generation, than years of community exposure and desensitization to minority presence. But I'm not so naive to think that we've become a multicultural utopia. Not by any stretch of the imagination. It's still only been a mere five years since an African-American student was shot while waiting after school for the bus home in Akron's Kenmore neighborhood. He recovered, fortunately. However, the city's wounds are still healing.

So, in short, I can see where desegregation busing may have been good for my town in the long haul, by forcing integration of traditionally segregated schools, and interaction among so-called racial groups. But I can also see where it has done some significant damage and impeded progress in my town, namely by robbing a viable neighborhood of its schools -- it's very lifeblood. I also know that if I had been a South Cluster student facing busing, I would not have wanted to be taken to a neighborhood or a school where I would have confronted the darker side of human ignorance on a daily basis.