Monday, Nov. 15, 1971
The Agony of Busing Moves North
"We're fighting for our civil rights now!"
--Antibusing sign in Pontiac, Mich.
TO millions of white Americans, there is a new "yellow peril" on the nation's streets and highways this fall. It consists of caravans of that familiar homey vehicle, the yellow school bus. This year, however, the school bus has become a symbol of one of the most controversial developments in American life: the forced transportation of children away from neighborhood schools to distant classrooms, in obedience to court-ordered desegregation plans.
Until recently, judicial rulings that schools must integrate were largely limited to the South, where Jim Crow laws long made segregation of the races in education a reality of life. Now some courts are declaring that segregation in the North must be dismantled as thoroughly as it was in the South, at least where school boards have contributed to keeping classes segregated. The forced busing produced by this stand has caused an explosive outburst of anger and hatred that has vast implications for the future of domestic politics, the public schools and U.S. education itself.
Corrosive Problems
In a way, the school bus is a strangely chosen symbolic target, since without it many American children, particularly in rural areas, might have no access to formal education at all. Nearly 40% of the nation's elementary-school children are bused to class for reasons that have nothing to do with desegregation. Yet millions of white parents are panicked by the thought of using those buses to increase the proportion of blacks in their children's schools.
Some of the protests are clearly motivated by racism and unreason. Other objections, though, stem from parents' not unfounded fears that the buses will bring the corrosive problems of the ghettos to "their" schools, or take their children into the midst of the ghettos' often violent, crime-ridden culture. White parents fear that their children will be exposed to what blacks have learned to hate--the rapes, ripoffs, robberies and dope addiction that have turned all too many inner-city schools into blackboard jungles where learning is less important than learning how to survive. Beyond that, whites who have moved to a suburb for the sake of its school system resent the fact that courts they have never seen and judges they did not elect are telling them that their children cannot use those schools.
"I don't see any reason why they've got a right to come in here and tell me my kids can't use the school I bought and paid for," says Mrs. Mary Jane Marcozzi of Madison Heights, Mich., a Detroit suburb. She and her family will move if busing is brought to their community. ''My kids may be riding a bus," she says, "but it won't be to Detroit. In Detroit there's more dope, more robberies, more rapes, more of everything." That kind of reaction is not untypical of parents when they are first told that their children must be bused away. I'll lay my body in front of any bus. I'll chain myself to the school doors," cried Douglas Easter of Boston's Jamaica Plain, when he was informed that his children would have to attend a school three miles away.
The battle against busing by Northern whites has been observed with a certain degree of cynical amusement in the South, where, according to Government statistics, schools are now less segregated than those outside the Old Confederacy. As of the last school year, 39% of black children in the South went to schools where whites were in the majority, compared with only 28% in the North and West. Busing offers many blacks not only a release from segregation but the hope of a much better education than they now receive. For that reason, and encouraged by the Supreme Court's refusal to review local busing decisions, the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund has announced plans to bring busing suits in at least twelve cities for each of the next three years.
Telling Confrontation
Clearly, busing is beginning to emerge as one of the major political issues of 1972. It has already had its impact in the nation's capital, where President Nixon has made it plain that he strongly opposes "busing of children for the sake of busing." Inspired in part by mountains of angry constituent mail, more than 100 Congressmen have announced their support of a proposed constitutional amendment to prohibit busing. Just how deep feelings run on the subject was apparent last week when the House of Representatives took up the Administration's $1.5 billion measure to assist in desegregating school districts. Northerners and Southerners united to insert in the bill a ban on any use of the money for busing; they also added a rider encouraging districts not to comply with court busing orders until all legal appeals have been exhausted--a process that could take years.
The highly emotional debate on the bill featured a telling confrontation between two of the nation's best-known Congresswomen. "I never bought a home without looking first to find out about the schools my boys would attend," said Oregon Republican Edith Green. "If the Federal Government is going to reach its long arm into my house and say, 'We are sorry but your children are going to have to be bused 30 miles,' I say the Government has gone too far." In vain. Brooklyn's black Democrat Shirley Chisholm answered with scorn and fury: "Let me bring it right down front to you. Your only concern is that whites are affected. Where were you when black children were bused right past the white schools?"
One of the chief backers of the antibusing amendment, which is now bottled up in the House Judiciary Committee, is a racial moderate--Michigan's Republican Senator Robert Griffin, who is up for re-election next year. There is a sound political reason for his support of the proposal: some of the most bitter busing battles are now being fought in his state. The most notable field of combat has been in Pontiac, a rough, grimy General Motors factory town of 85,000. Last summer District Judge Damon Keith, ruling on a suit filed by the N.A.A.C.P., rejected the city's argument that any segregation in Pontiac schools was caused by housing patterns. Keith, who is black, pointed out that there were numerous examples of attendance boundaries in Pontiac having been redistricted whenever blacks moved into a previously all-white neighborhood. He then ordered 9,000 of the city's 24,000 schoolchildren bused for an average of 15 minutes each way to achieve a better racial balance.
Right to Choose
On the eve of school opening in September, ten school buses that were to carry out the court order were firebombed; five members of Michigan's Ku Klux Klan were later charged with the crime. More important, a group of white parents calling themselves the National Action Group organized an illegal boycott that kept 35% of Pontiac's white children home on the first day of school. In a scene chillingly reminiscent of the angry desegregation of Little Rock's Central High School in 1957, children of both races who did show up for classes had to be protected from demonstrators by cordons of police.
Attendance at the schools is now back to normal. Nonetheless, the N.A.G., whose slogan is "Bus judges, not children," now has 71 branches in Pontiac and claims a membership of 100,000. New units are springing up in other Midwestern states. The highly vocal leader of the organization is Mrs. Irene McCabe, 36, an attractive blonde housewife of Greek descent, none of whose three children attend public schools themselves. She insists that the real issue is not racism but the right of parents to choose their children's schools. "I have to laugh at TV commentators who ask if I don't think it's right for black children to get a chance to attend schools previously dominated by whites," she says. "They think blacks and whites should exchange their cultures through schools. Personally, I don't think I'm required to study or participate in another group's ethnic culture if I don't want to. I don't go around demanding that everyone learn more about Greek civilization."
Metropolitan Busing
Pontiac is not the only city in an uproar over busing. An even more potentially explosive situation exists in nearby Detroit, where Federal Judge Stephen J. Roth in September astounded and outraged white suburbanites. As Judge Keith had done in the Pontiac case, Roth found that Detroit school segregation had been abetted by board of education policies. Then he went further and noted that all-white suburban havens had been promoted by official actions--in this case, by policies of the Federal Housing Administration and state agencies, which could have prohibited racial discrimination in real estate dealings had they wished. Consequently, Roth suggested, the suburbs would have to help overcome the school segregation to which they had contributed, perhaps through a plan that would bus children back and forth between the suburbs and the ghettos. He ordered the state board of education to produce a plan for a new metropolitan-area school district by Feb. 4. There have also been loud parental protests in San Francisco against a court-ordered, citywide busing plan for elementary schools that went into effect this fall. And last week, voters in Rochester, N.Y., turned out a school board that favored a new "two-way" busing plan.
Growing Support
Still, the public backlash against busing is far from universal. After doing their legal best to avoid the inevitable, a number of Southern cities have quietly accepted busing as the law of the land, and made a go of it. Last week voters in Sacramento, Calif., re-elected a pro-busing school board. In the wealthy suburb of Westport, Conn., the citizenry elected a school board that intends to continue the small-scale busing of 75 black children to the town's schools from the ghetto of nearby Bridgeport.
A new Gallup poll shows that 76% of the nation's voters are opposed to busing; the striking fact is that the percentage figures are down five points from a year ago. Even in Pontiac, the student council of Northern High School has tried to send a letter home to parents explaining, as 16-year-old Swanola James puts it, that "we all aren't worked up." (The principal, she says, quashed the letter for fear of offending N.A.G. parents.) Parent volunteers have been working in the Pontiac schools and trying to counteract the N.A.G. with a slogan that has cropped up this year on bumper stickers in both North and South: LET'S MAKE IT WORK.
Can it really work? The necessarily ambiguous answer is yes, no and maybe. Busing for desegregation actually involves three different situations, with uncertain application to communities that may face them in the future. Limited, one-way busing is used in many cities to bring small groups of black children from ghettos to mostly white schools, sometimes in suburbs. More extensive two-way transportation is increasing also, under court orders, to produce proportional mixtures of whites and blacks within all the schools of a system. Still largely unexplored are proposals to expand two-way busing to entire metropolitan areas, bringing children from relatively remote suburbs into city schools as well as sending city children out beyond municipal lines.
In the many communities where it does work, one-way busing has proved to be a rewarding experience for white children as well as black. In suburban Wilton, Conn., one white lad recently startled a friend with an unusual expression of envy. "Boy, are you lucky! You live in a place with elevators, and you can walk to the candy store any time you want to." The surprised friend was a street-wise black from downtown Bridgeport. "That's all right," the black youngster answered. "You got some nice things here, too."
To sample those nice things, 50 Bridgeport children for the past year have been arriving each day in Wilton schools after a 25-minute bus ride. The experiment is still considered a bit controversial in Wilton; but in 25 other suburban Connecticut towns that take 2,100 ghetto children from Bridgeport, Hartford, New Haven and Waterbury, the state-financed Project Concern is accepted as a success. Project Concern's children are selected at random and exemplify the entire range of ghetto problems. Even so, their presence has not diluted the achievement of white children, nor has it caused any new disciplinary problems in the schools involved. A similar program in the Boston area, known as "Metco," now buses 1,600 black children to 30 different suburban school systems; in New York City, more than 18,000 ghetto children ride by bus or subway to take classes in largely white schools within the city limits.
The widespread suburban acceptance of Connecticut's Project Concern evaporates rapidly whenever it is proposed that the white children be bused into Bridgeport schools, or when it is suggested that the ratio of black children in classes be increased. And while black parents of children who entered the program are generally grateful for the opportunities presented, black educators are not. They see such one-way plans as a Northern form of tokenism that leaves the majority of black children trapped in inadequate and underfinanced ghetto schools. In truth, many of the one-way busing programs resemble the "freedom of choice" schemes--allowing a few blacks to "choose" a white school --that some Southern districts still use as a way of avoiding full-scale integration.
Tired of Court
One-way busing can also involve large areas and substantial numbers of students. In such Southern cities as Nashville, Tenn., and Winston-Salem, N.C., compliance with court orders to integrate has been achieved primarily by busing hundreds of blacks to hitherto all-white schools. But courts are increasingly insisting that cities desegregate their schools by more democratic two-way busing, even in major cities where logistics are complicated. Few have moved farther or faster than Mobile, Ala., which for years fought desegregation hard, appealing federal court orders no fewer than eleven times. At the time of the Supreme Court order upholding busing in the school district of Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C., the court made it clear that it wanted Mobile to integrate without further delay. School Board President Charles McNeil finally decided that "the people were tired of going to court all the time." In numerous meetings with 22 civic groups, he and School Superintendent Harold Collins worked out an integration plan.
For their part, black leaders conceded that even though the school system did not have to cope with the black majority that makes fearful whites elsewhere talk of moving away, instant integration of its 40% black student body might create panic. Thus they agreed to let nine of Mobile's presently all-black schools remain segregated until 1973. Another key to the success of Mobile's plan is its system of "split zones." which preserve at least a semblance of the neighborhood school system. A zone that includes black and white neighborhoods is drawn around each school, permitting the majority of students within the area to attend it; the rest are brought in by busing. Yet a further inducement was the decision of Superintendent Collins to install some much-needed educational reforms, including upgraded, "individualized" curriculums that let children proceed pretty much at their own pace.
Partly because Mobile's community pride determined that integration was going to work, it seems to have done so. There are occasional fistfights between blacks and whites in high schools, and some disgruntled whites have withdrawn their children to enter them in private academies. Basically, though, the chips are mostly gone from shoulders. At a recent post-football-game dance, a black boy danced with the daughter of one of Mobile's wealthiest whites, and everybody else tried to follow his new and so far unnamed dance.
The experiment, of course, could easily sour, but Mobile's white leaders have quietly discouraged Governor Wallace from trying to upset the plan. Says black Lawyer A.J. Cooper Jr.: "No doubt it is an imposition on many parents, black and white, to have their kids bused. But the question is, are we willing to accept impositions to make our Constitution work? I don't think the founding fathers ever meant that democracy was going to be easy."
By far the most massive and most complex busing program outside the South is taking place this fall in San Francisco. There the chief opposition has come from Chinese parents. Their concern is that the children will lose part of the close-knit community's ancient cultural heritage. "At least that's what they say to you," one Chinese-American teacher contends. "But if you could speak Chinese, you'd learn they just don't want their children going to school with blacks." As of last week, at least 3,000 Chinese children were still boycotting the schools.
Tears on the Face
There is still some white resentment in the city, but the tide of protest seems to be ebbing. One white family that has learned to live with the plan is that of Lawyer Donald Ungar, who lives in the middle-class district of West Portal. Ungar's son Kenneth now spends 15 to 20 minutes traveling to a 44-year-old school in a heavily Spanish-speaking area. Its playground is perpetually littered with broken glass. "We'd talk about that school this summer and tears would literally roll down my face." says Carol Ungar. "But my husband feels very strongly about integration. He'd say, 'Look, we believe in it. Let's give it a try.' Now I can't tell you how happy Kenneth is. He's in the fifth grade, but taking sixth grade math and reading."
Mrs. Doris Phillips, who is black, sends her son and daughter to the same school. She regrets that busing means that her kids and their schoolmates cannot play together after school, but thinks that it is "the best solution" available now for desegregation. "So many neighborhoods in this city are lily-white," says Mrs. Phillips. "A Negro couldn't possibly buy a house there. Then when busing came they started to scream. Well, if they'd wanted their kids kept near them, they should have thought ahead. They were so conscious of preserving property values that they forgot everything else. So now they've got busing."
The key question now worrying Northern white parents is: What are the results of busing? The answer is not totally comforting. A study of 700 high schools conducted last year by the Syracuse University Research Corporation showed that classroom disruption was "positively related" to integration especially in schools with a higher proportion of black students than black teachers. Experience has shown that where strong discipline does not go hand in hand with respect for minority cultures, the common scuffles of school life can easily explode into violence. In Pontiac, the number of robberies reported in schools during the first three weeks of busing increased from one to 24, assaults from 13 to 84.
The tragic fact is that violence occurs all too often, especially in rundown, transitional neighborhoods. White parents on the South Side of Chicago see their kids being regularly rolled for their lunch money; in Annapolis Md white children are afraid to use school washrooms guarded by black toughs Detroit's Martin Luther King High School has a modern building, but the school is an island in the middle of a rotting ghetto. Heroin is openly dispensed from a "shooting gallery" a block away: drunks loll on the sidewalks, bottles of Thunderbird wine still in their hands.
Temporary Estrangement
Partially because violence is a threat instant brotherhood is hard to attain, particularly during the first months of integration. As school opened in Austin, Texas, this fall, anti-black slogans were painted on the walls of one building, and police confiscated pistols, hunting knives, and clubs crudely fashioned from pool cues with nails stuck in the end. Last year Harrisburg, Pa., undertook a citywide busing program involving 5,000 children. "I thought the purpose of busing was to integrate the schools," says one tenth-grader, but in the long run, the white kids sit m one part of the bus and the black kids in another part."
The estrangement is not necessarily permanent; not only in Mobile, but in the integrated school systems of Riverside and Berkeley, Calif., blacks and whites have learned to work and play together without incident. Most schools report that once children of both races Develop self-confidence with one anther, interracial friendships, while not necessarily widespread, do develop In Harrisburg one small boy told his teacher: "I didn't realize there were so many white people before." At the very least students develop a certain canniness. Says Jerome Kretchmer, New York City's environmental protection administrator, whose children attend integrated schools: "As far as safety is concerned, the mugging problem is a social problem. Unfortunately, we have to make our children aware of the possibility that it's going to happen to them."
While the social results of busing may be uncertain, the academic ones --at least for black students--are not. Choosing his words with scholarly care Massachusetts Education Commissioner Neil Sullivan contends: "The weight of available evidence gives credence to the hypothesis that students from minority groups or from a lower socioeconomic class, both black and white, achieve more when educated in mixed student bodies than they do when segregated."
The major evidence comes from the so-called Coleman report, a study prepared in 1966 with Government financing by Johns Hopkins Sociologist James Coleman. Appallingly, it is the only nationwide study of education and race, but its findings have since been corroborated by research on individual school systems. The report found that the achievement scores of black children did improve in racially mixed classes. Coleman added an important corollary: achievement improved chiefly because blacks from poor backgrounds picked up conventional middle-class academic skills by mixing with middle-class whites. Most educators now agree that such learning is less likely when poor children in a school make up more than 60% of the enrollment.
When such a "tipping point" can be avoided and schools are relatively calm, the achievement of whites does not decline and that of minorities improves. In Hartford's Project Concern tests have shown that black children gam up to 1.2 years' worth of reading skills in four months, while control groups of children left in the ghetto fall farther and farther below national averages. Since integration, reading scores have gone up for Berkeley primary children of all races, although not as rapidly for blacks and Chicanos as for whites and Asians. The problem for the slower students seems to be time. Says Dr. Arthur D. Dambacher of Berkeley's office of research: "The younger the youngster involved, the more positive the results--they don't have to unlearn habits picked up in a segregated setting."
Is there a creative alternative to busing for improving minority education? The only one that has been seriously proposed is "compensatory education" --spending disproportionate amounts on ghetto schools in hopes of making them "separate but better." But there is sad evidence that the mere application of money and manpower to such programs does not always work out. According to a recent publication of the Washington-based Council for Basic Education, the District of Columbia has not brought its pupils close to national norms, even though recently it has been spending $1,089 yearly per pupil--$235 more than the national average.
Balancing Big Cities
What is really needed, many educators now say, is ways to help teachers cope with the special problems that ghetto children have in learning skills for survival in the nation's middle-class mainstream. The experts feel that a basic shortcoming of the American educational system is that--particularly in the ghetto--it has not faced up to the challenges of coping with students from widely divergent cultural backgrounds. "The schools of this country have traditionally been geared to meeting the needs of middle-class children," says California's Superintendent of Public Instruction Wilson Riles.
For all that, the odds are that a poor black child will get a better education at the end of a bus ride than at home. Although the logistics of busing are formidable, the experience of Mobile and San Francisco shows that geography can be overcome in many areas. Things are back to normal too in Savannah, Ga., where antibusing mothers hanged School Board President Julian Halligan in effigy early in September. Of the nation's 51 largest cities, only 15 have a student population that is more than 50% black and Spanish-speaking. The major skepticism about busing involves big cities whose racial makeup allows no possibility of balance. Washington, D.C.'s schools are now 95% black, Newark's 72%, and Detroit's 64%. For years, black and white educators have written integration off as a realistic option for these communities. Now, though. Judge Roth's insistence on an integration plan for the Detroit metropolitan area raises the possibility that other areas may be forced to consider a formal linking of city and suburban schools.
No details of the Detroit plan have been announced, but the attorneys who brought the original suit favor one scheme that would draw a twelve-mile circle around Detroit and cut it into five to eight zones shaped like slices of a pie. The narrow end of each wedge would be in the center city. Some suburbanites are worried that their children might be bused as far as 16 miles to a downtown school. The answer of one city administrator is that "after all, suburbanites with inner-city jobs drive this far every day and they don't think anything about it." Conceding that such distances would be onerous for children, however, officials are also considering a cross-busing plan between existing school districts. Since many black areas are just across municipal boundaries from white ones, such a plan might actually require less busing than now occurs within the city and the various suburbs. Moreover, says Martha Jean "the Queen," a black Detroit radio commentator: "When the white folks start sending their kids into the ghetto, they won't put up with the kind of education they're giving our kids. They'll demand a better education, and blacks will get it too."
Far-Reaching Decision
Integrationists have some unlikely allies in a Citizens Committee for Better Education, representing whites who still live in Detroit. Under citywide integration, the committee points out, white children would be a 35% minority; under a metropolitan plan, they would remain 80% of the school population. That, of course, is precisely the reason that some blacks oppose the plan: it could dilute their clout in P.T.A. meetings and with school boards.
Although metropolitan-area school integration is a new idea, it is far from unknown. Many Southern districts, including Miami, Nashville and Mobile, already bus between center cities and suburban areas. Resistance to metropolitan plans is often based on fear that the suburbs will have to share their economic resources--but that may be forced upon them by another potentially far-reaching court decision.
Last August the California Supreme Court ruled, in Serrano v. Priest, that California schools must be financed by a more equitable method than widely varying property taxes. A child's right to an equal chance for education, the court said, should not depend on the wealth of his parents or where he lives. Similar judgments are eventually expected in other states, and Minnesota's Supreme Court has already adopted such a ruling. If the drive to "equalize" school finance forced wealthy suburban communities to support schools in poor urban areas, parents might have less objection to busing their children to the city--and less incentive to leave it in the first place.
A parallel path to the future could be the enactment of a farsighted bill that has been proposed for the last two years by Connecticut's Senator Abraham Ribicoff. Although it has twice been defeated, on this year's vote it was supported by every potential Democratic presidential nominee in the Senate. After four years of pilot testing and planning, Ribicoff's plan would give every metropolitan area--North or South--a deadline of ten years to make minority representation in each of its schools equal to at least half the percentage of minority-group students in the area as a whole. In an area with a 20% black enrollment, for example, at least 10% of the student body in each school would be black. Cities would have flexibility to adopt whatever methods they choose, and to reject busing if they could make another technique work as well, but those that failed to show progress would lose all federal support. A companion Ribicoff bill would provide incentives for suburban communities to make room for low-and middle-income housing.
A Moral and Legal Right
Many cities in the South have managed to desegregate their schools, however reluctantly, without widespread violence and protest. Despite different traditions and attitudes, many Northern communities could also do so, if their citizens chose. But in the present political climate, the President or the Congress will certainly not do anything to encourage or assist metropolitan-area busing programs. Moreover, no one can be sure how the Supreme Court would rule on the new Northern busing plans, if it chooses to do so.
The rationale for busing plans is, simply, that busing is better than its alternatives. It seems for the moment to be the most effective and efficient method of providing minority groups with equal opportunities in education. No one--save possibly school-bus manufacturers--is in favor of "busing for the sake of busing," the chimera that Richard Nixon belabors. Blacks, after all, have as strong a sense of neighborhood schools as whites do. But as Nicholas Hood, a black city councilman in Detroit, puts it: "It's pragmatic. We don't have any desire to be close to white people just for the sake of being close to white people. We want the same thing everyone else wants so we can have the same opportunities for our kids to learn and grow."
Blacks have a moral right to those opportunities and, increasingly, a legal right as well. It is doubtful that white parents have so strong a right to choose a specific public school for their children, but it is even more doubtful that they should be forced by law to have their offspring bused where their safety is endangered or where they will demonstrably suffer along educational lines. That happens less often than alarmists contend. When it does, both whites and blacks have some justification for abandoning the public schools. A far better solution, obviously, would be to work together for better schools everywhere.
Large-scale busing for integration is not a long-range solution to the inequalities that still afflict American society. It is a transitional inconvenience, an interim, makeshift answer to an awkward social problem. Many of the protests against it, accompanied by all the anguish and apprehension it causes in many white families, have a claim to respect. Yet, until bad schools improve and neighborhoods integrate, to outlaw busing would be to run the risk that the dangerous gulf between two nations --one black, one white--could grow even wider.
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