The Busing Dilemma
Carrying books and paper-bag lunches, some 200 inner-city black boys and girls walked quickly but quietly from five yellow school buses, past dozens of armed state and county troopers, and into Louisville's suburban Valley High School. Nervously they joked among themselves about the curious stares from dozens of white students pressing against the school's windows. Within minutes the same buses left, carrying a handful of apprehensive white boys and girls to the formerly all-black Shawnee High School on the city's west side. Muttered a woman driver: "I'm ashamed and worried. But this is something that we've got to make the best of."
At roughly the same time in Boston, about 500 police in riot gear and federal marshals surrounded shabby Charlestown High School, in the shadow of the Bunker Hill Monument. Armed with a high-powered rifle, a police sharpshooter carefully watched a sullen crowd of whites as three yellow buses unloaded 66 black boys and girls. They showed their student identification cards to school officials, passed through an electronic metal detector that checked for weapons, and walked into the gray stone building. Later that day, a band of 100 white youths rampaged down Monument Street, overturning three Volkswagens, and other angry whites beat up a black student at near by Bunker Hill College. Thus, in scenes that have become a fall ritual since the Supreme Court outlawed segregated schools in 1954, classes opened last week in the two cities that are the primary targets in this year's battle over busing. There were surprisingly few violent incidents, in part because of the massive show of strength by law authorities in both cities, which included standby contingents of National Guardsmen. Even so, this year's efforts to desegregate schools in Boston, Louisville and at least 18 other cities promise to be a searing experience for both blacks and whites, chiefly because of a growing national concern about school desegregation and its much-hated stepchild, forced busing. As the ideal of integration moved from merely opening up all-white schools to blacks toward the far more difficult aim of achieving a balance in schools that does not exist in society, too much of the burden of social advance was placed on the yellow school buses.
Busing began as a well-intentioned idea to help eliminate a shameful American condition. But it ran against the deepest instincts of a clear majority of whites and quite a few blacks as well. The issue involves extremely painful conflicts of conscience and of law.
As a unanimous Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled for 21 years, the law and the Constitution require that public schools be desegregated. Because of neighborhood segregation, the only feasible way to integrate many urban schools is by busing students. Antibusing groups have tried and failed to get Congress to approve a constitutional amendment that would ban forced busing. Time and again Congress has prohibited the use of federal funds to pay for busing, but federal courts have ruled that this does not absolve the cities of the obligation to integrate schools by busing. In sum, barring an unlikely reversal of previous opinions by the Supreme Court, forced busing is here to stay for the foreseeable future and will spread to more cities.
Many black leaders regard the opposition to busing of Northern and Border-state cities like Boston and Louisville as racist and no different from the Deep South's efforts to block school desegregation in the 1950s and early 1960s. As the title of a bitter N.A.A.C.P. report put it: It's Not the Distance, It's the Niggers. Observes Kenneth Clark, a black psychologist and leading education theorist: "The North is trying to get away with what the South tried. If the North succeeds, and I don't think that it will, it will make a mockery of our courts and laws." But other black leaders are far less certain and wonder whether busing really moves their cause forward.
The cruel dilemma over busing has caused parents, both black and white, to raise a series of legitimate questions to which there are no easy answers: Is forced busing to balance schools racially worth all the uproar? Does it produce better schooling for disadvantaged black youngsters and no loss for the white youngsters?
Once, the answer to both was widely thought to be yes. But researchers have raised gnawing doubts about these propositions--without necessarily disproving them. Moreover, forced busing or the threat of it has accelerated the white flight to the suburbs, leaving the inner cities increasingly nonwhite. In this situation, urban desegregation may mean little more than spreading a dwindling white minority among overwhelmingly black and increasingly mediocre schools, with minimal benefit for either race. In short, does school desegregation improve or worsen race relations? Are there alternatives to busing for achieving desegregation and improving the education of black children?
Questions such as these have profoundly shaken the formerly strong national coalition of support for school integration. Besides, moral backing for busing long ago disappeared from the White House. Echoing his predecessor's doubts, President Ford recently observed: "I don't think that forced busing to achieve racial balance is the proper way to get quality education." Instead he called for "better school facilities, lower teacher-pupil ratios, the improvement of neighborhoods as such." Similarly, local politicians like Louisville Mayor Harvey I. Sloane and Boston Mayor Kevin White have misgivings about busing. Says White: "To pursue blindly a means that may not be correct is to use one wrong to correct another." Even black mayors like Coleman Young of Detroit and Maynard Jackson of Atlanta have reservations about busing, largely because they want to avoid driving out the small minority of whites who remain in their cities' public schools.
Given the supercharged atmosphere in Louisville and Boston, law-enforcement authorities feared that last week's relative calm might be only temporary. In Louisville, officials were sternly determined that the previous weekend's violent antibusing protests by whites (TIME, Sept. 15) would not be repeated. The rioting, burning of buses and looting of stores badly damaged the great political ambitions of the county's chief executive, Judge Todd Hollenbach, who delayed calling on city and state police for help until after the rampaging crowds were out of control. U.S. District Court Judge James Gordon, who had originally ordered an exchange of 22,600 students between the largely black schools in the city and the predominantly white schools of suburban Jefferson County, banned demonstrations near the 165 public schools and gatherings of more than three persons along the school bus routes.
At first, demonstrators defied Gordon's order. For four hours on Sunday night, several thousand unruly whites, blaring their cars' horns and shouting bitter epithets ("In God we trust, in Gordon we don't!" and "Keep the niggers out!"), clogged four-lane Preston Highway. Gradually, however, some 400 disciplined state troopers cleared the highway, sometimes smashing windshields or subduing demonstrators with 3-ft. riot sticks.
Next morning, under the watchful eyes of 2,500 police and National Guardsmen, the 470 school buses began rolling long before dawn, each carrying an armed guard. In obedience to Gordon's order, however, there were only occasional white demonstrators along the routes or at the schools. Indeed, by week's end, a boycott of the schools by whites had become largely ineffective; on Friday, 77.3% of the merged city-county district's enrollment of 120,000 students (20% black) attended schools, up from 50% a week earlier.
Behind locked doors, teachers and students went about the business of education, uneasy yet remarkably undisturbed by the tensions in the community. Said Bart Coonce, 15, a white senior at Fairdale High School: "We're all against busing, but now we should try to make it work." Argued Joe Barnett, 17, a white senior at Shawnee High School: "The problem is parents." Added Dawn Babbage, 16, a white sophomore at Shawnee: "Mom was afraid at first and I was too, but I think that it is going to be okay." Said Reggie Foster, 16, a black sophomore at Valley High: "If people don't bother me, I know that I can get a better education here."
This mood elated city and county officials. But they realized that opposition to busing had been broken only by the weekend show of force; such security will be difficult to maintain for more than another week or two. Tensions in the blue-collar neighborhoods seemed likely to remain high for some time to come, and were fanned by antibusing leaders like Bill Kellerman, automobile assembly plant foreman and president of Citizens Against Busing, which claims to have 400 followers. He vowed: "Kentucky will sit still no longer. We will make Boston look like nothing."
Meanwhile, on the day before schools opened in Boston, some 8,000 whites rallied outside city hall to protest the federal court's desegregation order, waving placards (sample slogan: "If Boston is lucky, it'll be twice as bad as Kentucky") and cheering defiant speeches. Last year 18,200 of the city's 94,000 pupils were assigned to be bused to desegregate 80 public schools; last week 26,000 students were supposed to be bused to 162 schools. City Councilwoman Louise Day Hicks, an inflammatory foe, urged the crowd to continue last year's boycott of the schools and vowed, "Whatever is going to happen in Boston is going to set the tone for the forced-busing issue elsewhere."
Despite the rhetoric, and in contrast to last year's disruptions, almost all the school openings were uneventful. But there were two trouble spots: the high schools in the blue-collar neighborhoods of Charlestown and South Boston. At both, police and federal marshals cordoned off the bused black students from the crowds of angry white protesters. The main confrontation took place in Charlestown, where about 200 white mothers, chanting Hail Marys, tried to push their way through the police lines.
Sporadic violence erupted every night, chiefly scattered skirmishes involving white youths who hurled rocks and beer bottles at police. Some whites were also irate that Senator Edward Kennedy has urged compliance with the court's busing order. The house in Brookline where John F. Kennedy was born was damaged by a Molotov cocktail. Painted on the front sidewalk was a piece of angry advice: BUS TEDDY.
By week's end attendance had risen to 68.4%, up from the 48% average during the yearlong white boycott in 1974-75, and was giving school officials some reason to hope that the boycott was crumbling. Said Lou Perullo, a school department statistician: "As parents see that it's safe, they are sending their kids." Observed Phyllis Curtis, an antibusing mother of four non-boycotting children in South Boston: "Some parents would keep their children out of school for five years to stop the busing. But the kids would have to pay the price. When they look for jobs, they won't find them because they'll have no education. That's not healthy, not for them and not for the community."
Still, emotions were high inside many schools. Said Karen O'Leary, 15, a white freshman at South Boston High School: "It's very strange. We just eye each other." Added a white schoolmate, Susan Downs, 15: "It's scary. With the black kids coming in, it's getting more and more tense. You can't trust anybody because you never know what they'll do." Kenny Williams, a black student at Boston's Hyde Park High School, found that "everything is cool right now. Of course all the white kids here are being nice to us, but you know they're sneaky and probably at some point they will try something." Added Malinda Brown, 15, a black junior who is bused to Charlestown High School: "I don't want to graduate from there. I'd rather go to my old school. I felt more free there." Indeed, as in Louisville, there was widespread concern that the uneasy peace in the city might end in violence once the National Guardsmen and federal marshals were withdrawn.
Boston and Louisville demonstrated anew that Northern cities are no happier with school desegregation than their counterparts in the South. Since the historic Supreme Court decision of 1954 that separate schools can never be equal, hundreds of communities have been forced by the courts to desegregate. Most are in the South, which had dual black and white school systems for nearly a century. More recently, the N.A.A.C.P. and other civil rights organizations have successfully challenged the legality of segregated schools in the North. They argue that such official actions as building schools in all-black or all-white neighborhoods and racial gerrymandering of district boundaries also constitute illegal segregation.
To remedy such situations, the federal courts have frequently ordered cities to bus children to neighborhoods far from their homes. In addition to Boston and Louisville, cities now being forced by courts to bus include Miami; Corpus Christi and Beaumont, Texas; Charlotte, N.C.; Denver; San Francisco; Springfield, Mass.; and Riverside, Calif.
Other cities are under court order to begin busing to desegregate schools by the next school year. Among them: Dallas, Detroit, Indianapolis, Omaha, and Wilmington, Del. Desegregation suits have been filed in still other communities, including Philadelphia, Baltimore, Dayton and St. Louis County. Eventually, suits are likely to be brought to court in Chicago, New York and other cities where schools are largely segregated, even though the cause is most often housing patterns. The chances are very good that these communities will be ordered to bus.
So far the Supreme Court has not upheld the civil rights lawyers' argument that busing should be required between city and suburban schools in cases where the city schools have a majority of nonwhites. In the celebrated case of Detroit, whose schools are 71.5% black, the Supreme Court reasoned in 1974 that since there had been no complicity between the city and its suburbs to segregate schools, the suburbs could not be forced to help remedy the city's problem. In contrast, a federal appellate court last year found that Louisville and its suburbs had deliberately segregated students and for that reason ordered the Jefferson County schools to exchange white pupils for blacks from the city's schools.
Surveys have repeatedly shown that a majority of Americans, both black and white, overwhelmingly favor integration but oppose busing to accomplish it in schools. Part of the opposition is racist; much is based on fears among both black and white parents that desegregation will endanger the children. In addition, white parents fear that busing will lead to lowered academic standards. Compounding parents' worries is that the experience of those cities that have had forced busing is somewhat confusing and contradictory. Examples:
CHARLOTTE, N.C. Tensions ran high when a federal judge ordered cross-district busing to desegregate schools in Charlotte and suburban Mecklenberg County in 1970. Racial fights erupted, sometimes among hundreds of students. One in every six white students transferred to private schools. But whites have gradually if rather grudgingly accepted the busing of 23,000 of the district's 75,000 pupils, in part because there are some limits to the number of years that each pupil will be bused. Lately the racial composition of the merged schools has stabilized at about 35% black. As gauged by national achievement tests in reading and math, student achievement has been unaffected.
PONTIAC, MICH. Racial confrontations, the bombing of buses and a school boycott made Pontiac a national symbol of white resistance to busing in 1971. Since then, tempers have cooled, and School Superintendent Dana Whitmer considers the busing program, which includes 15,500 of the city's 20,193 public school students, a qualified success. He concedes that overall test scores in reading and math have declined slightly because high-achieving white students from affluent families have left the district. But Whitmer maintains that individual achievement for both blacks and whites has remained the same and that "the outlook is good if we can maintain a stable, integrated population." That will be difficult; in four years, the percentage of blacks in Pontiac's schools has risen from 37.3% to 41.9% as a result of a white flight.
JACKSONVILLE. Because of advance planning for busing, in which advisory groups of both white and black parents exchanged views and worked together in other ways to reduce tensions. Jacksonville experienced only minor disturbances in 1972, when students were first bused. Still, during the next two years, about 10,000 white pupils transferred to private "segregation academies," leaving the public schools 30% black. The city now buses 22,114 of its 111,000 public-school students. According to Associate Superintendent Don Johnson, national test scores indicate that desegregation has resulted in "significant benefit for the black student and no loss of achievement for the white student."
DENVER. Contrary to many fears, Denver had no violence last year when it began busing a third of its 78,000 students (19% nonwhite) to desegregate all public schools. One reason for the calm: a court-appointed advisory council of blacks and whites defused tensions. Though white parents withdrew 7,000 children from the schools, many of them have since re-enrolled.
PASADENA, CALIF. This city peacefully integrated its public schools in 1970 by busing 43% of its 26,000 students. Since then, says School District Administrator Peter Hagen, white students' achievement in the nearly integrated schools has actually improved, but "we have not been able to bring the black and brown students' scores up to the performances of whites and Orientals." White parents transferred about 7,500 pupils to private and parochial schools; only about 120 subsequently returned to public schools, leaving them 58% nonwhite, up from 46% in 1970.
In sum, busing is most likely to be accomplished peacefully when 1) the number of nonwhites in each school is less than 40%; 2) students are not bused to schools that are inferior to the ones that they previously attended; 3) schools are near enough so that the parents of the bused students can easily stay involved in them; 4) most parents, educators and city officials are committed to preventing disturbances; and 5) black-white advisory groups are formed to defuse problems in advance.
Many parents--both black and white--believe that forced busing is futile unless it can be demonstrated to benefit black children. Some blacks consider it demeaning to pursue whites farther and farther out into the suburbs. On the other hand, long experience has shown that predominantly black schools in many instances are shortchanged by white-dominated school boards. Ghetto schools frequently are badly equipped and poorly maintained, have fewer textbooks and less experienced teachers because more senior teachers transfer to middle-class schools. Still, there is no conclusive evidence, despite hundreds of studies, that desegregation improves the school achievement of black children from lower-income families. Whether or not it does, integration remains a moral imperative in a decent democratic society.
The central argument for school integration as a means of improving black students' learning was framed in 1966 by Sociologist James Coleman, now at the University of Chicago. He found that children of all races from disadvantaged backgrounds did "somewhat better" in schools that were predominantly middle-class than in schools that were mostly lower-class. Moreover, the presence of the poor children did not seem to hinder the progress of the more privileged pupils. Although his study involved social classes, not race, Coleman and others immediately used his research as evidence in favor of school integration. Rather optimistically, Coleman once predicted that it would substantially close the gap between black and white academic achievement.
Later research, however, has not borne out his forecast. In a new study called Still a Dream, Sar A. Levitan, William B. Johnston and Robert Taggart concluded that "the weight of the evidence seems to suggest that integration in the schools can make small improvements in black I.Q. and achievement." Still other researchers find the evidence too contradictory to support any overall findings.
Coleman has recently cooled his enthusiasm for busing and believes that it drives too many whites out of the city school systems and leaves blacks with many of the same school problems as before. He cites the eight largest cities in the U.S. that have desegregated schools to some extent in recent years. Based on past history, they should have lost 7% of their white students between 1969 and 1973; instead, they lost 26%.
Urban school systems in both the South and the North are getting blacker, as white parents continue to transfer their children to private systems or move to the suburbs. Since court-ordered desegregation went into effect in Memphis in 1973, the white enrollment in the schools has declined from 50% to 30%. Schools in Inglewood, Calif., were 62% white when integrated in 1970; now they are 80% nonwhite, and a federal court agreed in May to let the city abandon crosstown busing since it no longer can accomplish desegregation.
The most vehement objections to busing are raised by lower-class whites who regard blacks as an economic threat. Says Harvard Psychologist Robert Coles: "The ultimate reality is the reality of class. Having and not having is the real issue. To talk only in terms of racism is to miss the point. Lower-income whites and blacks are both competing for a very limited piece of pie." Illustrating that point, Social Worker Jerry Carey of South Boston observes: "I know that there's no way that my sons will get to Harvard, even if they have good grades, because the admissions committee will throw the Irish out and pick the blacks. That's crazy. It's also depressing as hell."
Experts disagree over whether forced busing will ultimately lead to better race relations or harden attitudes and breed a new generation of racists. After examining 120 studies, Sociologist Nancy St. John of the University of Massachusetts found no definitive answers but decided that desegregation worsened race relations in quite a few cases. James Deslonde, an education professor at Stanford University, drew similar conclusions from a study of 1,200 fourth-through eighth-graders in the integrated schools of San Mateo County, south of San Francisco. He reported that peer pressure prevented 35% of the students from forming friendships across racial lines. Further, most black youngsters experienced "high levels of anxiety within the school setting," chiefly because they considered themselves to be poorer students than the whites.
Blacks themselves are sharply divided over busing. Wilson Riles, superintendent of public instruction in California, argues: "If you have to have blacks sitting next to Caucasians to learn, we are in a mess, because two-thirds of the world is nonwhite, and we would not have enough whites to go around. If the schools are effective and children learn, that is the easiest way to achieve the ultimate goal of integration." Retorts Kenneth Clark: "There is no such thing as improvement in the schools while they are still segregated. As long as we have segregated schools, I see no alternative to busing. Integration is a painful job. It is social therapy, and like personal therapy it is not easy." Kenneth Tollett, director of Washington's Institute for the Study of Education Policy, calls for busing to undergo "almost a cost-benefit analysis" to determine its worth. He notes further: "The difference is not blacks v. whites but underclass v. middle class."
William Raspberry, a Washington Post columnist, writes: "A lot of us are wondering whether the busing game is worth the prize. Some of us aren't even sure just what the prize is supposed to be. Most whites have long since accepted the notion that segregation is wrong. But on the other hand, precious few whites, North or South, feel any guilt in resisting the disruption of their children's education by busing them to distant schools because those schools are 'too black.' Nor is there much more enthusiasm among black parents for large-scale busing for the primary purpose of racial integration."
Even Linda Brown Smith, 32, whose father brought the suit against Topeka, Kans., schools that resulted in the Supreme Court's historic 1954 decision, has reservations about busing but sees no alternative to it. Says she: "To get racial balance in the school system I would have my children bused [her son and daughter walk to integrated schools]. This is what my father was fighting for more than 20 years ago."
The bitter and seemingly endless debate over busing had led many politicians and educators to predict that it will be abandoned as a tool for desegregating schools. Declares a university president in Massachusetts: "Busing is a cause whose time has passed." There is a danger that opposition to busing will be used as a pretext to fight the principle of desegregation itself. The dilemma for the nation is that busing cannot be abandoned in many cities without pushing back desegregation, because of the large distances separating black and white neighborhoods. That in turn could well lead to what educators term "urban apartheid."
To achieve integration through evolution (better incomes for blacks, better housing, in time leading to peaceful mixed neighborhoods) would obviously be excruciatingly slow. Thus busing will remain inevitable and perhaps necessary in some situations. But it is clearly not a good solution. To replace it eventually, it is necessary to 1) make far greater use of other methods of school integration, admittedly slower and less dramatic, but perhaps more efficient in the long run; 2) upgrade the education of black youngsters in the inner city to speed the otherwise slow process of bringing them into the middle class; 3) fight for racial harmony beyond the schools and thus ease the tensions that have made school desegregation a volatile issue.
One limited approach would be to build new schools on the borders between black and white neighborhoods to make integration possible without busing. Another method would be to create more "magnet schools," which are designed to improve the education of blacks and also attract some whites. For example, Trotter High School, which was built in Boston's Roxbury ghetto in 1969, was heavily funded, staffed with some of Boston's best teachers, and given an exciting, innovative curriculum including fine arts courses. The result: before the city schools were disrupted by busing, Trotter was two-thirds black and yet had a long waiting list of whites. Just this year, previously all-black Hamilton Park Elementary School in the Dallas suburb of Richardson was turned into a model magnet school that is totally integrated. It offers an outstanding curriculum including courses in gymnastics, drama and music, and a 16-to-l pupil-teacher ratio; 80% of the faculty hold masters' degrees. Last week 289 white students voluntarily began attending the school, balancing 265 blacks.
Such schools usually are far too expensive to be anything more than glamorous exceptions. But there are less costly approaches. In an effort to ease the antibusing sentiment among whites, Boston this year has paired nearly two-thirds of its schools with 22 colleges and universities; using $900,000 in state funds, the schools are planning new curriculums, teacher workshops and model language programs to improve the quality of instruction. The program's success cannot be measured for at least several months, but the schools averaged 6% higher enrollments than others in Boston last week.
Instead of forced busing. Columnist Raspberry recommends that students be allowed to transfer voluntarily to any school where they would improve the racial balance. Such a policy, he notes, would "not generate the fear-spawned opposition that busing has generated." That, indeed, has been the experience in Portland, Ore., which already uses a voluntary transfer system. To date, 2,700 pupils, mostly black, have shifted to schools in white neighborhoods that have vacancies. Since whites are not forced to send their children to predominantly black schools, there has been no white flight from the city because of the transfer program.
The nation needs a greater commitment to improving the education of blacks, both those who remain in inner-city schools and those who are bused to predominantly white schools. Says a Baltimore school administrator: "These children aren't born retarded. We just haven't figured out how to teach them; so they end up functionally retarded." Tim Black, a Chicago community college teacher, has found college-level black students "who are very interested and highly motivated but cannot read above the first-or second-grade level."
Part of the solution, educators generally agree, is to concentrate on the earliest grades. Despite some contradictory evidence, many studies show that Head Start, a federal early-learning program, has improved black educational skills, particularly when the children go on to fairly sound schools. On the other hand, the gains are quickly lost if the pupils enter inferior schools. Most educators, therefore, call for spending more to upgrade the teachers at black schools and expanding Head Start.
Motivation remains a basic problem for black students. Says Phyllis Denny, a black counselor at Denver's Hamilton Junior High School: "White students feel a great deal of academic pressure. They are trying to fulfill goals set by their parents, while black kids are concerned about meeting goals set for themselves." That statement obviously does not apply to middle-class black students, who are as highly motivated as their white counterparts. But poor black students often have low self-esteem and lack pressure from their parents to do well in school. In integrated schools, there can also be a debilitating double standard for dealing with students. Complains Omar Blair, a black member of the Denver board of education: "Teachers don't discipline black students because they say that they are afraid of the consequences. Black students roam the halls and are ignored. Teachers allow black kids to talk back to them and won't do anything about it. In contrast, white kids would be sent to the principal."
Even worse, white teachers frequently push black students through the system without caring much whether they have learned anything. Says St. Louis University Instructor Ernest Calloway: "The expectation of the teacher is very low. One of the problems is raising the expectation so the child will be told, 'You can learn. You will learn.' " Good teaching indeed can motivate black students. For example, in Oakland, some 1,400 black underachievers have received remedial instruction since 1968 in math, English and science; 1,120 have gone on to college.
One approach to motivating black students would be to give new emphasis to programs that lead to technical careers, either directly from high school or after college. Kenneth Tollett notes that "Power in this society is increasingly in the hands of the technocrats. Blacks will be frozen in a subclass if they do not increase their numbers among the technocrats."
The alternative to what Tollett and others are worrying about is the familiar vicious cycle, which may begin with segregation in housing but leads inevitably to segregation in schools and ultimately to segregation on the job and a permanent black underclass. Most experts still agree that better schooling for blacks offers the soundest hope of breaking that pattern. There are no quick or painless ways to achieve equal educational opportunity, but that is no reason to abandon it as a goal.
Court-ordered busing obviously will remain part of the effort to achieve that goal for quite a while. But given the feeling of most Americans, and its own built-in shortcomings, busing is plainly neither a long-range solution nor the best instrument to bring one about.
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