A Supreme Court Yes to Busing

NO single word in all the arguments over school integration has inspired as much fear and anger as busing. The idea of taking a child out of his own neighborhood to help integrate a school elsewhere outrages many parents. Yet as a practical matter, the bus is an indispensable corrective tool in cities where large areas are predominantly white or black. Thus when President Nixon last year praised the ideal of the neighborhood school and attacked busing, he was in effect suggesting a slowdown of integration--and Southern holdouts acquired new hope for delay. That hope dissolved last week. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed unanimously that transporting pupils to remedy school board-imposed segregation does not violate anyone's constitutional rights.

While the court's approval of busing will have the most practical impact, its decisions on four overlapping school cases also gave federal judges wide discretion to use almost any means they consider effective in desegregating dual school systems. Judges may demand the redrawing of school-district boundaries, even creating gerrymandered districts in which children from noncontiguous areas may be assigned to the same schools; they may pair or group schools from racially different neighborhoods and require transfers of students among those schools. They may establish racial quotas for schools, at least as a starting point to remedy past segregation. All of those methods may involve the transportation of children. Ruled the court: "Desegregation plans cannot be limited to the walk-in school."

Not Equal. The decision was written by one of President Nixon's own appointees: Chief Justice Warren Burger. His most quotable passages seemed to acknowledge, but to dismiss Nixon's defense of neighborhood schools. "All things being equal, with no history of discrimination," Burger wrote, "it might well be desirable to assign pupils to schools nearest their homes. But all things are not equal in a system that has been deliberately constructed and maintained to enforce racial segregation. The remedy may be administratively awkward, inconvenient and even bizarre and may impose burdens on some; but all awkwardness and inconvenience cannot be avoided in the interim period when remedial adjustments are being made to eliminate the dual school systems." Noting that about 39% of U.S. schoolchildren have routinely been riding buses, Burger indicated that only when a busing plan required such long rides as "to risk either the health of the children or significantly impinge on the educational process" would the high court find it objectionable.

Any Way. The court thus took another decisive step in the 17-year process of federal judicial and Administrative pressure that began with the 1954 decision defining officially sanctioned separate school systems as inherently unequal and thus unconstitutional. It was not until 1968 that the court lost patience with the slow pace of desegregation and gave a curt answer to the question of when it must be completed: "Now." Last week's decision addressed the question of how --and the answer, in effect, was "any way that works."

The specific case that led to the decision involved an order by U.S. District Judge James B. McMillan (see THE LAW) concerning the schools of the Charlotte and Mecklenburg area of North Carolina. The judge had ordered 1) massive crosstown busing, 2) redrawing of school districts, and 3) a white-to-black ratio in the elementary schools that reflects the existing 71-to-29 racial makeup of the district's enrollment. The Nixon Administration argued that this plan was not constitutionally required, but the Supreme Court upheld it. The court also struck down North Carolina's antibusing statute. The Justices ordered the use of "all available techniques" to correct persistent segregation in Mobile, Ala., and reversed a Georgia Supreme Court decision blocking voluntary integration efforts in Athens.

Some Consolation. Nixon's Justice Department had sided with the arguments of Southern school lawyers, who contended that "excessive" busing was being demanded or that children had a right to attend the schools nearest their homes. It was the third time that the Supreme Court had rejected the Nixon Administration's legal position on school-desegregation issues. While the court, with two Nixon appointees, has turned more conservative on some issues, its reasoning has been so consistent on school issues that the Justice Department has sometimes had difficulty persuading its own lawyers to prepare the Government's cases--cases that have often seemed more political than legal.

The Government could find some consolation in the fact that the court last week agreed that the mere existence of an all-white or all-black school in a previously segregated district does not necessarily mean that the district is in defiance of desegregation rulings. But Burger warned that such situations should be carefully watched by the courts.

Actually, the court angered the South more for something it did not do: it made no attempt to decide whether federal courts should require any similar plans to reverse the rapidly rising trend toward segregated schools in Northern cities. Burger specifically pointed out that the decision applied only to cases where school officials had, currently or in the past, created or sustained the dual system. The ruling did not cover situations where voluntary neighborhood patterns created racial imbalance in schools, as in much of the North, or even where other official agencies, such as planning boards and housing authorities, helped create or sustain segregated neighborhoods.

That omission caused many responsible Southern officials to complain, with considerable justification, that the nation was following a double racial standard: nonaction in the North, stern demands for integration in the South. Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, who has urged an end to racial discrimination, said that it was "clearly a one-sided decision; the court is still talking about the South; the North is still going free." There was the expected outcry from intransigent segregationists. Alabama Governor George Wallace called the decision "arbitrary, asinine and illogical," and claimed that it is now "legal to bus little children to kingdom come." But one of the affected school officials, Kenneth Schubring, president of Georgia's Clarke County school board, welcomed the decision. "The South/' he said, "used to bus to segregate; now we're busing to integrate."

Explosive Situation. The court's decision coincided with a new effort in the Senate by a most improbable pair of Democrats--Connecticut's liberal Abraham Ribicoff and Mississippi's conservative John Stennis--to require nationwide school integration. Ribicoffs amendment to an Administration bill appropriating $1.5 billion to help school districts desegregate would have required all U.S. schools in metropolitan areas to achieve a minimum racial ratio by 1985. This would be done by discarding city and suburban boundaries and requiring each school in the area to have at least half the percentage of black students that the whole region contained.

The Stennis amendment more simply would extend school segregation to cover instances of de facto as well as de jure discrimination.

Arguing that more blacks attend integrated schools in the South than in the North, Ribicoff warned that the U.S. is moving toward apartheid as big cities throughout the nation turn increasingly black while suburbs remain white. He charged that Northern liberal politicians were guilty of "hypocrisy" and did not "have the guts to face their liberal white constituents, who have fled to the suburbs for the sole purpose of avoiding having their sons and daughters go to schools with blacks." All of the most likely Democratic presidential candidates voted with Ribicoff as his plan was defeated 51 to 35. The Senate later adopted the Stennis proposal--as it had a year ago--by a vote of 44 to 34. Its fate in the House is uncertain.

Forced Hand. Both the Senate debate and the Supreme Court decision served as reminders that racial friction still sharply divides the nation. President Nixon's negative stance against strong federal action may be politically popular North and South, but the courts still insist on immediate action as a matter of law. Some 50 school cases in the South were awaiting the Supreme Court's decision and may now be quickly processed by federal judges. Two cases directly involving Northern-style segregation are at the high court's door.

The President's hand is fast being forced, and his Justice Department may be required to become more active in dispensing justice well before he faces reelection. But in the wake of last week's decision, Nixon merely authorized his press secretary to offer the bland observation that Administration officials "will continue to carry out their statutory responsibilities." That does not have the ring of strong presidential leadership on one of the nation's most agonizing and enduring domestic crises.

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