More Trouble on The Busing Route

As the opening of another school year approaches, the U.S. faces fresh agonies over an old and divisive issue: desegregation of the public schools. Racial integration of the nation's classrooms remains the law of the land, but public support for large-scale busing of schoolchildren to achieve that goal, never very broad to begin with, now seems to be eroding rapidly. The Ford Administration has made no secret of its own distaste for busing. At the same time, the courts have helped create confusion by making contradictory rulings in two large cities that are struggling to satisfy desegregation orders:

BOSTON: Minimal Compliance

For the second year in a row, Boston seems headed for turmoil over busing. Federal District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity's Phase Two plan for school desegregation, announced in May, calls for the busing of some 25,000 students, up from 18,000 last year, to ensure that the racial mixture at most Boston schools approximates the citywide student ratio of 52% white, 36% black and 12% other minorities. But the Boston school committee, a steadfast opponent of busing, has been stalling on preparations for transportation, security and other matters. Recently, Garrity postponed school opening by one week, to Sept. 8, to give the school committee more time to act. Last week, with busing procedures still in chaos, the judge summoned committee members to his courtroom and sat them down with representatives of the Citywide Coordinating Council, a citizens' panel set up by Garrity as a watchdog over Phase Two. "The best way I know to frustrate the plan is delay, delay, delay, so that a shambles exists on opening day," Garrity lectured. "That's not going to happen."

The school committee was also taken to task last week by the six-member U.S. Civil Rights Commission, which has a congressional mandate to monitor the enforcement of civil rights laws. In a 223-page study of the city's school crisis, the commission bluntly accused the committee of a "deliberate policy of minimal compliance" with desegregation orders and urged Garrity to remove its authority over Boston's schools if the foot dragging continues. The commission also chided President Ford for his "equivocal support" of Garrity's court order last year.

Given the tempers on all sides, the prospects are that Boston will need every one of the more than 2,000 police and National Guardsmen who will be on hand to try to keep the peace when the buses begin to roll week after next. Boston's black community, which remained generally quiet last year, has grown increasingly restive about undiminished white opposition to busing. Indeed, sparks have already begun to fly. Last week several hundred members of the Committee Against Racism marched on city hall to demand that antibusing activists be indicted for violating the rights of schoolchildren.

DETROIT: Court Retreat

Citing what he called "the practicalities of the situation," Federal District Court Judge Robert E. DeMascio rejected two cumbersome plans that had been prepared to put into effect a Supreme Court desegregation order. One of them, proposed by the N.A.A.C.P., would have bused some 77,000 of Detroit's 260,000 public school pupils up to twelve miles across town each day to bring about racial balance in the city's predominantly (71.5%) black classrooms. The other plan, prepared by the Detroit Board of Education, called for the busing of 51,000 students, with primary concentration on leveling the racial mix in heavily white schools.

DeMascio argued plausibly that almost any large-scale busing scheme would yield only "negligible desegregation results" in the Motor City. Last year the Supreme Court ruled out "cross-district" busing of students between the city and the mostly white suburbs; thus limited to the city proper, busing could not do much more than merely shuffle students from one predominantly black school to another. The judge thought either plan would entail a massive effort, including the purchase of hundreds of buses, to little real effect. He called for new proposals that would accept any school with a black enrollment of more than 30% as sufficiently desegregated, a standard that is met at present by 79% of Detroit's 326 public schools.

The N.A.A.C.P. denounced DeMascio's judgment as a "whitewash." But many Detroiters, including the city's black mayor Coleman Young, praised the decision. With audible relief, Young said he did not "believe we have the ingredients in this order for another Boston or Little Rock."

Yet there are several other potential trouble spots round the nation. In Indianapolis, whose school system is 42% black, a federal appeals court last week stayed a lower court's ruling that would have required eight suburban school districts to accept enough black pupils from downtown to increase their black enrollment to 15%; the stay order is expected to be appealed. In Louisville, a federal court recently ruled that 22,600 students must be bused to bring the newly merged county and city school systems, now 5% and 53% black respectively, into racial balance. In Philadelphia's school system, which is 62% black, the new year begins with no integration plan in effect, but Commonwealth Court Judge Theodore Rogers has been hearing testimony on two proposals, one of which calls for massive busing between the city and some of its suburbs.

The court activity in these and other cities suggests that the national commitment to school desegregation may be severely tested this year. Indeed, an increasing tolerance among moderate blacks of a cooler, slower pace of desegregation is already becoming apparent in some cities. Militants, of course, have long scoffed at the idea that black children must be seated next to whites in order to receive a good education. But today such black mayors as Detroit's Young and Atlanta's Maynard Jackson concede that busing poses formidable economic and political problems that must be reckoned with. Even University of Chicago Sociologist James Coleman, one of the most influential early advocates of classroom desegregation, now argues that mandated busing on a large scale has "acted to further separate blacks and whites rather than bring them together." That may be all too evident on the streets of Boston and perhaps other cities as school doors open over the next several weeks.

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