Desegregation busing

Desegregation busing, referred to as forced busing in some areas, is the practice of pursuing racial or economic integration in American public schools by transporting schoolchildren to schools outside their area of residence.

Rationale

After desegregation laws proscribed legally-enforced segregation of public schools by states and municipal authorities, schools in many parts of the country continued to be segregated by race. Many times, supporters of segregation argued that neighborhoods retained racial imbalances and there was no intent to discriminate, but many times those arguments were shown to be specious when school construction pattern and the drawing of district lines were analyzed.

A federal court found that in Boston, schools were constructed and school district lines drawn intentionally to segregate racially the schools. 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.

The "forced" adjective describes how the mandates generally came from the state government or courts and were often opposed by white city residents and local government. Court-ordered busing to achieve school desegregation was used mainly in large, ethnically segregated school systems, including Boston, Massachusetts, Cleveland, Ohio, Kansas City, Missouri, Pasadena, California, Richmond, Virginia, San Francisco, California and Wilmington, Delaware.

Among the most radical busing plans took place in Charlotte, North Carolina (from 1969) and Savannah, Georgia (from 1970). In both plans, students were often transported many miles from their homes, passing one or more schools before arriving at their assigned campus. The Charlotte and Savannah plans are noteworthy in that most students were affected, and that a majority of blacks as well as whites would not attend their neighborhood school for two decades. (The two plans ended in the 1990s.)

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. They also pointed out that the United States Supreme Court had found that separate but equal schools are inherently unequal.

Criticism

Opponents of busing claim that children were being bused to schools in dangerous neighborhoods, compromising their education and personal safety. Many also criticised the implementation of the policies, claiming that children were often bused from integrated schools to less integrated schools. The increased average distance of students from their schools allegedly reduced the ability of students to participate in extracurricular activities and parents to volunteer for school functions.

Busing accelerated a trend of middle-class relocation to the suburbs of metropolitan areas. The media labeled this apparent avoidance of integration as "white flight" and proponents of busing often characterized it as racist. The majority of those who relocated deny the implication that they were acting for racist reasons and defend their decision to relocate as one of assuring the best education and environment for themselves and their children.

Some opponents of busing even claim that busing exacerbated both economic and racial segregation, forcing cities to divide themselves along explicitly racial lines. They contend that the "white flight" to the suburbs exacerbated by busing has permanently eroded the tax base of major metropolitan areas - impairing the metropolitan areas' abilities to offer programs aimed at improving the plight of the ethnic minorities whom busing was allegedly supposed to benefit.

Effects of busing

Busing did not have the intended effect of integrating ethnic minorities. The Milliken v. Bradley 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. Enrollment in private schools increased dramatically, especially in metropolitan areas in which there were economic or geographical barriers to moving to suburbs.

Rust Belt cities experienced large population declines exacerbated by busing, with declines of fifty percent or more between 1950 and 2000 in Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo. In Boston and California, where land values are higher and property tax structures less favorable to relocation, it became more common for parents to enroll their children in private or parochial schools.

Elimination and Aftermath

In an effort to satisfy parents concerned with mandated long bus rides, many districts later modified their pupil placement plans to provide attractive programs in "magnet schools", built new school buildings and reconfigured older buildings to logistically develop more favorable attendance plans which met desegregation goals. Combined with changes in housing patterns, forced busing programs were gradually eliminated during the 1990s as the courts nationwide released districts from orders under old lawsuits. The population of most cities affected by forced busing continues to decline and many anchor cities are now among the poorest cities in their respective metropolitan area. Busing continues in the Boston area under the rubric of Controlled Choice, allowing any student to go to a school outside his or her own neighborhood as long as the move is conducive to achieving racial balance.

Ironically, today school buses are still used in most of these districts, but this is much more due to reduced walking zone distances, concern for pupil safety, and a wider choice of programs and locations for many students than requiring a pupil to ride to a school when a closer one was within walking distance. In an era where many families have working parents, the school bus is seen as a safe and protected way to and from school, whether the trip is to the closest school or another.

Historical Examples

Boston

In the Boston metropolitan area, the term "forced busing" is primarily used by critics of a remedy prescribed by Massachusetts US District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. after finding a consistent and recurring pattern of racial discrimination in the operation of the Boston public schools in a 1974 ruling. Garrity's ruling found the schools were unconstitionally 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 of more than fifty percent "non-white" to be balanced according to race. The Boston School Committee had disobeyed orders from the state Board of Education to obey the law. Garrity's ruling, upheld on appeal by conservative judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Court and by the Supreme Court led by Warren Burger, required school children to be transported to different schools to end the pattern of segregation that had been illegally fostered by the school committee.

The conflict in Boston over busing primarily affected West Roxbury, Roslindale, Hyde Park, Charlestown, Dorchester, the North End, and South Boston (the latter being traditionally Irish-American but also having a sizable Polish/Lithuanian community). It also affected the mostly black community of Roxbury. (To a lesser extent, schools many miles away in Springfield, Massachusetts were also affected by Judge Garrity's order, but the plan caused little overt controversy there as public officials obeyed the rule of law).

The integration plan aroused fierce criticism among some Boston residents. Opponents personally attacked Judge Garrity, claiming that he lived in a white suburb, thus, his own children would not have been affected by his ruling. To their credit, Garrity's community welcomed black students under a program known as METCO which sought to assist in desegregating the Boston schools by offering places in suburban school districts to black students. Many civil rights supporters noted that blacks were, as a matter of fact, more welcome in Garrity's white suburb than in some of the all-white neighborhoods of Boston.

There were a number of incidents of protest that turned violent. 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, taken by Stanley Forman for the Boston Herald-American, won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography (known at that time as Spot News Photography) in 1977. ^* Today the Boston Public Schools are eighty-six percent African American and Hispanic. According to the 2000 census, Boston's white population is 54.48%, whereas Boston's black and Hispanic populations together total 39.77%. Newcomer professional white families in the city have comparatively fewer children, and some of those white parents prefer to send their children to private and parochial schools rather than have their children attend public school. In South Boston, a neighborhood found by U.S. News and World (October 1994) to have had the highest concentration of white poverty in the country, dropout rates soared, its poorer census tracts' dropout rates superceding 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.

Pasadena, California

In 1970 a federal court 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 sixty-three 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%. 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.

San Francisco

San Francisco, California also compels children to attend schools outside their own neighborhoods in order to promote racial diversity; however, in San Francisco the practice's most vocal opponents are not whites, but rather Asians, particularly Chinese-Americans, who have been the group most affected by the city's plan.

Wilmington, Delaware

In Wilmington, Delaware, located in New Castle County, segregated schools were required by law until 1954, when, due to Brown v. Board of Education, 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 1978 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). 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 as of 2006.

Richmond, Virginia

In Richmond, Virginia, when a massive busing program began in 1971, parents of all races complained about the long rides, hardships with transportation for extra-curricular 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). A number of assignment plans were tried to address these concerns, and eventually, most elementary schools were "unpaired."

Prince George's County, Maryland

In 1974, Prince George's County, Maryland became the largest school district in the nation forced to adopt a busing plan. The county, a large suburban school district east of Washington, DC, was over 80 percent white in population and in the public schools. In some communities of the county 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 logical neighborhood-based system of school boundaries. Even with this, the NAACP was still not satisfied, because they believed 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 percent of county residents were against forced busing, and that only 32 percent 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 high 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, and 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, and then dropped significantly afterward. The county population is now less than 25% percent 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 finally been erased to the court's satisfaction. Logical school boundaries were finally 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.

Kansas City, Missouri

In 1985, a federal court took partial control of the KCMSD. 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.

External links

http://videoindex.pbs.org/program/all_chapters.jsp?item_id=5853
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html

Education in the United States | History of African-American civil rights | School bus | History of racial segregation in the United States | History of education

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