FOUR

Standing against “Busing”

BIPARTISAN AND NATIONAL POLITICAL OPPOSITION TO SCHOOL DESEGREGATION

If it was wrong in 1954 to assign a black child to a particular school on the basis of race, it is just as wrong to do the same thing to other children in 1972. This is “Jim Crowism” in reverse.

—U.S. REPRESENTATIVE NORMAN LENT, 1972

SPEAKING IN NEW YORK’S Madison Square Garden in late October 1964, Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater told the crowd, “If you ever hear me quoted as promising to make you free by forcibly busing your children from your chosen neighborhood school to some other one just to meet an arbitrary racial quota—look again because somebody is kidding you!” To cheers and shouts of encouragement from the boisterous audience, Goldwater continued, “I believe in our system of neighborhood schools, and I want to see them preserved and improved. I don’t want to see them destroyed or be sacrificed by a futile exercise in sociology which will accomplish nothing—but lose much.”1 Goldwater’s speech drew a twenty-eight-minute ovation from the crowd of over eighteen thousand, while another five thousand people listened to the speech over loudspeakers outside the arena.² Goldwater’s message resonated in New York City, where “busing” had been debated and feared for almost a decade and where thousands of white parents had organized as Parents and Taxpayers (PAT) in resistance to the school board’s desegregation plans. Several signs in the audience read, “PAT Backs Barry.” New York Amsterdam News journalist and executive editor James Booker covered the rally for the city’s leading black newspaper and described what it was like to be “one dark spot of high visibility in a prejudiced gutter of screaming Goldwater supporters at Madison Square Garden.” “As I slowly began marching back up the steps [to the upper press row],” Booker said, “the eyes began to stare at you throughout the crowd. The same kind I got from Southern cops when I have covered racial incidents there.” When Goldwater hit “busing,” Booker continued, “bedlam almost broke out . . . and Goldwater knew he had hit their soft spot.”3

Goldwater’s attack on “busing” in Madison Square Garden expanded on a speech he had made at a GOP fund-raiser at the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago earlier that month. In the Chicago speech, penned by Goldwater speechwriter Henry Jaffa and Phoenix attorney (and future Supreme Court chief justice) William Rehnquist, Goldwater told the 2,500 supporters, “To me it is wrong to take some children out of some of the schools they normally would attend and bus them to others just to get a mixture of ethnic and racial groups that somebody thinks is desirable. This forced integration is just as wrong as forced segregation. It has been well said that the Constitution is colorblind. And so it is just as wrong to compel children to attend certain schools for the sake of so-called integration as for the sake of segregation.”⁴ While Goldwater was a vocal opponent of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Chicago and New York speeches, delivered in the last month of the campaign, were his most explicit statements on racial issues as a presidential candidate. With President Lyndon Johnson holding a significant lead in the campaign’s final days, the Goldwater campaign paid to broadcast the video of the Madison Square Garden speech over a nationwide CBS television hookup, bringing Goldwater’s “busing” critique to hundreds of thousands of viewers.⁵

Resistance to “busing” was one of the few issues on which Goldwater and Democrats found common ground. President John Kennedy, replying to a question in September 1963 about whether he thought “as a parent” it was “right to wrench children away from their neighborhood family area and cart them off to strange faraway schools to force racial balance,” cautiously said, “In the final analysis [this] must be decided by the local school board. This is a local question. If you’re asking me my opinion—faraway strange places and all the rest—I would not agree with it.”⁶ Speaking in Buffalo, New York, in September 1964 as a senatorial candidate, Robert F. Kennedy stated his opposition to “long-distance busing” and echoed his late brother’s sentiments regarding local control: “My feeling is strongly in favor of local control over education. The school boards have had a difficult time dealing with this problem, and I think they deserve our gratitude.”⁷ James Donovan, president of the board of education in New York City, replied that Kennedy must “be talking about programs in other cities. In the program for New York there is no long-distance busing involved.”⁸ Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic vice presidential candidate who championed the Civil Rights Act, also spoke out against “long-distance” “busing” in September 1964. Replying to a question about the school boycott in New York against “busing,” Humphrey said, “So that that the record will be straight, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not ask for busing of students; in fact, to the contrary. There is a proviso in the act saying that the act shall not be applied for the purpose of busing students from one district to another. . . . My own personal view is that we should improve the quality of our neighborhoods. I personally do not feel that we ought to be giving students long-distance rides at the expense of families and students.”9 While Democrats expressed their concerns in more measured tones than Goldwater or George Wallace, they were no more likely to publicly endorse “busing” for school desegregation. And Democratic legislators, joined by moderate Republicans like New York’s Jacob Javits and Ohio’s William McCulloch, played a more important role than Goldwater or Wallace in ensuring that the Civil Rights Act included an “antibusing” amendment to protect “racially imbalanced” school districts outside the South.

This bipartisan and interregional political opposition to “busing” and school desegregation expanded over the next decade. Democratic and Republican members of Congress from every region looked for legislative ways to limit or stop “busing.” Opposition to “busing” created unusual political alliances that found Democrats who had previously supported civil rights legislation, like Edith Green (Oregon) and James O’Hara (Michigan), on the same side of the issue with conservative Republicans like John Ashbrook (Ohio) and Norman Lent (New York), as well as southern segregationists like John Stennis (Mississippi) and Jamie Whitten (Mississippi). At the state level, several governors voiced opposition to “busing.” Most notably, Florida governor Claude Kirk protested court-ordered “busing” by suspending a local school board in Manatee County (Bradenton, Florida) and appointing himself school superintendent. For politicians who aspired to the national stage, “busing” offered a recognizable issue on which to take a stand, and in his school standoff Kirk appealed not only to Florida voters but also to television viewers in cities like Nashville, Saint Louis, and Seattle, many of whom wrote to convey their support.

While staking out “antibusing” positions did not always lead to political success (much of the proposed “antibusing” legislation failed to pass or was watered down by subcommittees, and Kirk lost the 1970 gubernatorial election to Reubin Askew, who supported “busing”), the widespread opposition to “busing” by elected officials sowed confusion and led many Americans to believe that school desegregation was moving much faster than it actually was. Politicians helped make “busing” appear to be a “massive” issue, even though only a small percentage of students were ever bused for school desegregation. Bipartisan and interregional opposition to “busing” also helped justify resistance to school desegregation across the country and established a common-sense view that, through “busing,” the rights of parents and homeowners were being violated by activist judges and federal bureaucrats. Finally, in their carefully worded opposition to “busing,” northern Democrats and moderate Republicans enforced the distinction between unconstitutional de jure segregation and innocent de facto segregation, even as courts revealed this distinction to be largely illusory. Like Humphrey, New York senator Jacob Javits repeatedly reminded his colleagues that the Civil Rights Act did not allow “busing” to correct “racial imbalance” and that de facto segregation was not against the law. “We have no right to deal with anything that does not break the law,” he argued.10 The chorus of politicians who opposed “busing” overwhelmed the voices of public officials, parents, and scholars who urged compliance with school desegregation law or made it clear that northern school segregation was not the result of natural market forces. Reflecting and feeding their constituents’ fears of school desegregation, politicians helped make “busing” into a recognizable issue that was easily vilified.

ANTI-HEW PROVISIONS

The controversy over the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s (HEW) brief withholding of federal funds from Chicago was still fresh in the minds of members of Congress when President Johnson introduced his Model Cities legislation in early 1966. Legislators introduced measures to prevent HEW from acting against “racial imbalance” in the North and to make it more difficult for the agency to withhold funds in the South. The goal of these anti-HEW measures was to keep federal authorities away from northern cities like Chicago and to ensure that HEW could not require “busing” for “racial balance” in any part of the country.

In the debates over the Model Cities legislation, Democratic congressman Abraham Multer of Brooklyn proposed an “antibusing” amendment that was included in the final Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act of 1966. Multer’s amendment proposed that “nothing in this section shall authorize the Secretary [of Housing and Urban Development] to require . . . the adoption by any community of a program to achieve a racial balance or to eliminate racial imbalance within school districts within the metropolitanwide area.”11 A week earlier, Democratic congressman James O’Hara, who represented metropolitan Detroit, offered a successful amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act specifying that HEW could not “require the assignment or transportation of students or teachers in order to overcome racial imbalance.”¹² “I believe that is about as clear as we can make it,” O’Hara told his colleagues. “Title VI of the Civil Rights Act deals with segregation and in no way deals with any so-called racial imbalance. It deals with racial discrimination and racial segregation. It gives no warrant or authority to deal with so-called racial imbalance.”¹³ In the ensuing discussion, Minnesota Republican Albert Quie asked O’Hara to clarify what the amendment would limit: “So what we would prohibit here, then, is they would be prohibited from busing from one school to another in order to achieve racial balance in another school which is a neighborhood school.” “That is correct,” O’Hara replied.¹⁴ Bronx congressman Paul Fino worried that neither Multer’s nor O’Hara’s amendments were clear enough about limiting “busing,” and proposed another amendment (ultimately unsuccessful) so “that there is no question in anyone’s mind that it is strictly an antibusing amendment.”¹⁵ Fino also warned his colleague that the Model Cities legislation would provide “supplemental grants to school districts to eliminate neighborhood schools and create metropolitanwide school districts.”¹⁶

These issues reemerged in June 1968, when Congress considered the annual HEW appropriations bill. In an attempt to prevent HEW from upsetting southern “freedom of choice” plans that nominally complied with Brown but resulted in little if any actual school desegregation, Mississippi congressman Jamie Whitten introduced an amendment that stated, “No part of the funds contained in this Act, may be used to force busing of students, abolishment of any school, or to force any student attending any elementary or secondary school to attend a particular school against the choice of his or her parents or parent.” Whitten also proposed that the “force[d] busing of students” could not be used as a requirement to “obtain Federal funds otherwise available to any State, school district, or school.” These amendments, Whitten argued, “would prohibit HEW from requiring busing indirectly, by abolishing schools or forcing students to change schools against the will of their parents.”17 After the House passed the HEW appropriations bill, the Senate added the phrase “in order to overcome racial imbalance” to the Whitten amendments. While this language weakened the Whitten amendments and ensured that HEW could still pursue cases of de jure segregation, it further cemented the distinction between de jure segregation and racial imbalance. The Senate’s adoption of Whitten’s proposed language also established a pattern for future HEW appropriations bills, where the Whitten amendments were regularly included.

The Senate also went beyond the Whitten amendments in calling for HEW to enforce its guidelines uniformly across the country. The Senate-approved HEW appropriations language called for HEW to “assign as many persons to the investigation and compliance activities of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 . . . in the other States as are assigned to the seventeen Southern and border States to assure that this law is administered and enforced on a national basis.”¹⁸ If the Senate’s addition of “racial imbalance” weakened the Whitten amendments, Whitten saw the Senate’s move toward national enforcement of HEW guidelines as a positive step that would increase resistance to school desegregation nationally. “Freedom of choice is one thing; but forcing attendance at a particular school against the wishes of the parent is something else,” Whitten told his colleagues. “We all know the Federal Government, including the Attorney General, the Department of Education and the Federal courts are not going to carry out the Senate directive in the rest of the country. . . . Federal judges are going to learn that the American people are tired of being run over by the Department of Education and the Federal courts, and the people can stop it.”¹⁹

Whitten’s fellow Mississippian, Senator John Stennis, made the call for a uniform national policy on school desegregation the centerpiece of his effort to slow school desegregation in 1969 and 1970. In the summer of 1969, Stennis sent Senate Appropriations Committee investigators to talk with school administrators and gather statistics on school segregation in cities in the North and West. Stennis also tasked a staffer with researching the legislative history of Title IV of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, focusing on the “racial imbalance” language.²⁰ Stennis railed against the hypocrisy of his northern colleagues in the 1964 Civil Rights Act debate, and he reprised many of these points in a series of speeches at the end of 1969, in which he highlighted how the federal government ignored segregation in northern schools. “Let me state what has happened outside the South, very briefly, about this busing,” Stennis said. “Look to New York . . . what have they done about busing? I say to New York, ‘You can integrate those schools in Harlem, if you really want to.’ The Federal Government can do it, or the State government can do it. Just put enough manpower and womanpower in there to do it, haul those children out to the areas where the white schools are, and bring a like number of the white students in, and you will have them integrated.” Stennis used this hypothetical “busing” plan to desegregate New York’s schools to set up his next point. “But what has New York done about it? Have they tried? No. They passed a law this year—on May 2, 1969—a State law which prohibited busing of children on account of racial imbalance. . . . They absolutely prohibited busing.” Moments later, Stennis turned his attention from the nation’s biggest city to the second largest. “What happened in Chicago, in the great State of Illinois?” Stennis asked. “Three or four years ago, someone in HEW sent them some kind of communication about integrating their schools. . . . But here came a message back from Mayor Daly [sic]. As I remember, he came to Washington about it. . . . Anyway, they swept it under the rug somewhere, I do not know where, and that is the last that has been heard of that case.”21 Stennis made these points over and over again on the floor of the Senate before introducing an amendment in February 1970 calling for a nationally uniform policy on school desegregation.

With his litany of northern school segregation statistics and his call for a single national policy, Stennis believed, like Whitten and other southern politicians, that increased federal investigations and enforcement of school desegregation in the North would lead more white parents to protest, which would thwart school desegregation nationally. “Mothers who live outside the South . . . will be knowing a whole lot more about this in 1972 than they know now,” Stennis predicated.²² The Stennis amendment received unexpected support from Connecticut Democratic senator Abraham Ribicoff, who challenged his liberal colleagues to move proactively to address school segregation in the North. “The North is guilty of monumental hypocrisy in its treatment of the black man,” Ribicoff argued. “Without question, northern communities have been as systematic and as consistent as southern communities in denying the black man and his children the opportunities that exist for white people. . . . If Senator John Stennis of Mississippi wants to make honest men of northern liberals, I think we should help him. But first we must be honest with ourselves.”²³ Ribicoff’s passionate speech and his surprising alliance with Stennis made the debate over the Stennis amendment into front-page news across the country.²⁴

The Senate approved the Stennis amendment on February 18, 1970, but the House-Senate conference committee watered it down before approving the education bill a month later. The legislators limited the national uniformity aspect of the Stennis amendment to de jure segregation, again leaving de facto segregation and “racial imbalance” untouched.25 While legislators weakened the Stennis amendment, the debate and the media coverage it received promoted confusion about the pace and necessity of school desegregation. A Gallup poll conducted shortly after the Senate passed the Stennis amendment found that three of four Americans believed school integration was proceeding “too fast.”²⁶ More broadly, the widespread congressional support for “antibusing” legislation made school desegregation seem to be a question of popular opinion rather than constitutional rights, which emboldened more parents and politicians to resist “busing.”

GOVERNOR CLAUDE KIRK’S POLITICS OF CONFRONTATION

Like members of Congress, many governors staked out positions against “busing.” In 1969, New York Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller signed the nation’s first statewide “antibusing” legislation, which his more conservative party colleagues expected him to veto.²⁷ In California, Governor Ronald Reagan criticized Judge Alfred Gitelson’s initial 1970 ruling in the Crawford v. Los Angeles Board of Education case as “utterly ridiculous” and warned that “busing” would “shatter the concept of the neighborhood school.”²⁸ Reagan’s legal staff supported the Los Angeles School Board’s appeal of the Crawford ruling, which stayed the case for five years. In Georgia, Governor Lester Maddox encouraged white students to steal the tires from buses to prevent integration.²⁹ In a televised speech to the state school board convention in February 1970, Louisiana’s John McKeithen told delegates, “I will not allow my children to be bused.” The next day his office reported receiving 1,500 calls and telegrams supporting his position.³⁰ Like Maddox and McKeithen, Florida’s Claude Kirk was governor of a state that faced a court-ordered desegregation deadline of February 1, 1970. In a year when politicians were competing to prove their “antibusing” bona fides, no one received more media attention for their stand against “busing” than Kirk.

Claude Kirk, Florida’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction, became the focus of national attention in spring 1970, when, in defiance of a court order, he suspended the entire Manatee County School Board and appointed himself school superintendent. “Not since George Wallace’s ‘stand in the schoolhouse door’ in 1963,” the New York Times noted, “had a Southern Governor used his office in open defiance of the law.”31 Kirk argued that a single judicial standard on school desegregation should be applied consistently both within and outside the South, an argument that southern segregationists used against federal policies they felt were unduly critical of the South, ignoring so-called de facto segregation in other regions. Kirk’s defiance echoed complaints from other southern leaders, but unlike most legal and legislative arguments, Kirk’s organized his “antibusing” opposition to garner the maximum media attention. For example, he delivered a speech condemning “busing” from a maternity ward following the birth of his second child, “surrounded by blushing nurses, gurgling babies and television cameras.”³² These stunts vexed the Nixon administration, which moved cautiously to enforce school desegregation orders in the South, while also trying to broaden the Republican Party’s electoral appeal to white Southerners. The administration’s carefully worded opposition to “busing” drew a sharp distinction between de jure (legal) segregation and de facto segregation, understood to be a product of market forces and private decisions that government had no legal responsibility to address. In practice, the Nixon administration oversaw desegregation gains among southern school districts that maintained dual systems, but did not use the power of the federal government to tackle the deeply entrenched segregation that resulted from state and federal housing policies and school zoning policies in the South or other regions. Kirk’s ongoing “busing” battle in Florida was close at hand when Nixon issued his first major statement on school “busing” in March 1970, endorsing the “neighborhood school,” criticizing “massive busing,” and arguing that “the law [on de jure school segregation] should be applied equally, North and South, East and West.”³³ Like Nixon’s appeal to citizens and viewers, “North and South, East and West,” Kirk’s protests and the television coverage he garnered helped propel “busing” for school desegregation into an issue that resonated nationally.

From his first days as governor, Kirk sought and received national attention. He averaged ten out-of-state appearances each month in 1967 and continued to travel extensively during his term.³⁴ Kirk’s national ambitions were supported by William Safire, a New York–based public relations executive who served as Kirk’s special political consultant (Safire also worked as a speechwriter for Nixon and Agnew). Journalist David Halberstam, in one of several profiles of Kirk in national magazines and newspapers, described Safire’s role: “For $90,000 a year, he promotes Florida as well as Kirk, producing a salable substance on the national market and in the action-hungry televised politics of the 1960s.”35 Much of this national travel and promotion was in the service of Kirk’s ill-fated campaign for the vice presidential nomination in the 1968 election. Kirk billed himself as a southern governor who could successfully prevent George Wallace’s third-party campaign from hurting the Republicans in the presidential election.³⁶ While this vice presidential gambit backfired—Kirk’s endorsement of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller put him at odds with the Nixon administration and much of the Republican Party for the rest of his career—Kirk established himself as one of the most media-savvy politicians to emerge from a transitional moment in southern politics. While Kirk’s challenge to the integration order recalled earlier protests by southern governors like Orval Faubus, Ross Barnett, or George Wallace, Kirk insisted that he was a new breed of southern politician. He declined to attend a 1967 southern governors meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, calling it “divisive and unwise.”³⁷ “I’m not one of these red-necked governors like Lester Maddox. I’m the only good guy in the South,” Kirk told the Saturday Evening Post.³⁸ Kirk also wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times in which he disagreed with an editorial that described him (alongside Strom Thurmond and others) as “hardshell conservatives” who were “notably unsympathetic to the Negro drive for increased political participation.”³⁹ “There really is a new South,” Kirk argued. “We have not solved all our problems, but at least we are willing to try. One-party government with its old racist appeal is finished, whether it knows it or not.”⁴⁰ Halberstam described Kirk’s “New South” approach as a “politics of confrontation—seeming action and seeming motion, issues seeming to be resolved. . . . [T]he Governor seems to be standing up to them; or it. That there is often little substance in the issue, that the problems will be the same tomorrow does not matter, for something dramatic has happened, and the Governor is credited with an unusual action.”⁴¹ Kirk’s “politics of confrontation” was particularly well suited to television news, which favored flamboyant individuals and fresh developments over staid politicians and complex continuing stories. For his part, Kirk grasped the power of television and worked to make himself comfortable in front of television cameras, repeating his press statements separately for each of the four local television teams that covered the state capitol in Tallahassee.⁴² Kirk’s “busing” protest put his “politics of confrontation” on national display.

A NEW SOUTHERN STRATEGY

School segregation in Florida long preceded Claude Kirk’s election in 1966. Ten years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ruling against “separate but equal” schools, less than 3 percent of Florida’s black students attended integrated schools. In Manatee County, which became the focus of the “busing” standoff, only 170 of 3,900 black students attended integrated schools in 1965.43 Like many southern school districts, the Manatee County School Board implemented only token desegregation throughout the 1960s, with their attorneys fending off regular legal challenges from the NAACP. Manatee County ran out of legal options after Green v. County School Board of New Kent County (1968), where the U.S. Supreme Court found “freedom of choice” plans like those in Manatee to be insufficient tools for desegregation, and Alexander v. Holmes (1969), which denied further delays in southern desegregation and replaced “all deliberate speed” with a new standard that the “obligation of every school district is to terminate dual school systems at once and to operate now and hereafter only unitary schools.”⁴⁴ The Supreme Court, overturning the Fifth Circuit Court and refusing a requested delay from the Justice Department, set the “at once” deadline for Florida and five other southern states as February 1, 1970.⁴⁵

Kirk joined southern politicians like Strom Thurmond, Lester Maddox, and George Wallace in attacking this desegregation deadline, but he received most of the media attention. Kirk traveled to Washington, DC, twice in late January 1970, each time appearing at the Supreme Court and on ABC and CBS newscasts. In their reports on Kirk’s first visit, where he hand-delivered a request for a delay in the desegregation order, both stations quoted the governor’s statement that it would be “financially and physically impossible” for Florida to meet the deadline.⁴⁶ ABC’s Stephen Geer noted that Kirk came to the Supreme Court to “dramatize his extraordinary action.”⁴⁷ Kirk returned to the Supreme Court four days later, to ask the court to declare that all school systems be held to the same school desegregation standards. “The February 1 deadline will cause forced busing, which is unconstitutional, which is against the Civil Rights Act, which would cause fiscal irresponsibility, and therefore I will stand against forced busing now and in the future,” Kirk told the reporters and camera crews gathered outside the high court.⁴⁸ Kirk promised to go to jail to stop “busing” if necessary. “I would feel I am going to jail for a philosophical cause,” he argued, “just as our prisoners in Vietnam are in jail for a philosophical cause.”⁴⁹ CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite described Kirk’s plea for a uniform national policy as part of a “new southern school strategy.”50 Indeed, Kirk was not alone in calling for the North and South to be treated alike with respect to school desegregation policy. On the same day as Kirk made his second appearance at the Supreme Court, the attorneys general of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama announced plans to intervene as friends of the court in the Pasadena, California, school desegregation case, with the stated goal of making sure that the same desegregation rules applied to Pasadena as to the southern states.⁵¹ The following month, U.S. senator John Stennis of Mississippi introduced an amendment to a federal education bill calling for common desegregation policies in both North and South. Stennis’s motivation, historian Joseph Crespino argues, “was the hope that accelerated desegregation in the North would spark a broader, national backlash against school desegregation.”⁵² While he did not comment publicly on the Stennis amendment, Kirk’s call for a uniform policy regarding desegregation also worked to make “busing” an issue that resonated nationally, before “busing” orders affected most cities. The important difference was that, as a governor, Kirk was closer to the front lines of the “busing” battle and in a better position to plead that he and his state were the victims of unfair judicial orders and federal policies. And unlike President Nixon, who sought to avoid flare-ups on the “busing” issue, Kirk was well positioned to benefit from such controversies. As Nixon told his advisers in February 1970, “There is no mileage in doing the right thing here, there’s only mileage for demagogues. There’s mileage for anybody who wants to be Governor, no mileage for somebody who has to be President. . . . Kirk down in Florida . . . can emphasize the negative . . . maybe it’s okay for a candidate, not a President.”⁵³ Television news cameras were eager to broadcast Kirk’s regular acts of defiance, in the process establishing “busing” as a national issue and Kirk as a key voice in this debate.

CLAUDE KIRK’S TELEVISED STAND IN THE SCHOOLHOUSE DOOR

While the Supreme Court declined to answer Kirk’s appeals for delay, federal judge Ben Krentzman extended the deadline for all but one of the Florida school districts under court order to September 1, 1970. The remaining school district, Manatee County, was given until April 1, 1970 to desegregate. Kirk issued an executive order announcing that the Manatee School Board and superintendent would face suspension if they complied with the order, and he made good on this promise when he took over the school district in early April and directed students to ignore the integration plan.54

FIGURE 14. Florida governor Claude Kirk addresses media during his takeover of the Manatee County school administration building. Associated Press photo, April 9, 1970.

The school takeover propelled Kirk back onto the nightly news broadcasts and the front pages of national newspapers. “Probably not since George Wallace made his stand in the school house doorway in Alabama in 1963,” ABC anchor Frank Reynolds noted, “has a state governor placed himself in such direct conflict with the federal government.”⁵⁵ The following report showed Kirk speaking to reporters from the superintendent’s office, which he and his staff had occupied. “We’re involved here in forced busing,” Kirk said. “Now that’s the clearest-cut, most violent circumstance in the nation’s and world’s history.” CBS broadcast a different part of the news conference, with Kirk arguing that “[Judge Krentzman] is in defiance of my constitutional rights as an individual and governor.”⁵⁶ Television news reports framed Kirk’s school takeover as a conflict between Kirk and federal authority or between Kirk and “busing,” rather than an instance of opposition to school integration as such. Referring to Kirk’s outsize role in the case, Judge Krentzman commented, “I have to keep reminding myself that Manatee schools are a party to this case.”57 Unlike the earlier southern school protests to which Kirk was frequently compared, there were no specific black students, like Elizabeth Eckford and the Little Rock Nine, Vivian Malone Jones and James Hood at the University of Alabama, or James Meredith at the University of Mississippi, whose rights seemed to be at stake in these reports. Manatee therefore received extended media coverage as a new southern integration crisis without Kirk being framed as a racist demagogue.

Kirk’s successful management of television news coverage was most clearly on display as the school showdown stretched into its fourth day and federal marshals tried unsuccessfully to remove Kirk’s men from the school building, while Kirk answered reporters’ questions from the maternity ward of a Tallahassee hospital where his wife had recently given birth. ABC broadcast a tense exchange between Kirk and reporter Gregory Jackson. “Confrontation has been turned 180 degrees,” Kirk contended. “The Federal government is the violator and I am the man who asks for law. I am the man who asks for his day in court. I am the man who pleads for hearing of my grievance.” In response to Jackson’s question, “Then why don’t you follow the federal law which ordered desegregation?” Kirk raised his voice and pointed his finger at Jackson: “Oh, you’re a fool. This is the number one compliance state in the nation. . . . You can tell your broadcasters in New York that as soon as they comply as much as Florida has, as the number one state in the nation in compliance, that’s the whole difference.”⁵⁸ Kirk’s contrast of Florida and New York reiterated his call for a uniform national policy on desegregation and the widespread feeling among southern politicians that New York and the North got a free pass on de facto segregation from federal officials. Less obviously, Kirk’s pointed reference to “your broadcasters in New York” echoed Spiro Agnew’s attack on television news’ geographical bias: “Of the men who produce and direct the network news, the nation knows practically nothing. . . . We do know that to a man these commentators and producers live and work in the geographical and intellectual confines of Washington, D.C., or New York City, the latter of which James Reston terms the most unrepresentative community in the entire United States.”⁵⁹ Here again, Kirk positioned himself as defending Florida from a barrage of unjust external powers.

If Kirk successfully turned this verbal exchange to his advantage, he also benefited from the less than optimal filming conditions offered by the maternity ward. The footage broadcast on both ABC and CBS is cramped and a bit chaotic. The ABC cameraperson struggles to keep track of Kirk, producing a medium shot that floats to Kirk’s right and left and focuses for several seconds on his right arm and hand at his side. CBS’s footage, shot behind Kirk’s left shoulder, is even less clear, with Kirk in profile and the side of his face barely visible. What is clear in both clips is that media personnel surrounded Kirk in an untraditional and unfamiliar filming environment. While this footage lacked the “good” images television news producers usually preferred (e.g., clearly framed subjects, steady cameras, and appropriate lighting), Kirk had by this point established a national profile that made the scene newsworthy. The chaotic filming conditions and close proximity (off camera) of his wife and newborn daughter also helped Kirk, who was six feet two inches tall and weighed over two hundred pounds, seem less like a physically imposing bully than like someone whose personal and familial space was being violated by the news personnel. The subtext that “busing” opponents frequently invoked parents’ rights to defend their children could not have been lost on Kirk or television viewers. With this televised maternity ward confrontation, Kirk made visible what millions of Americans felt was at stake in the battle over “busing.”

FIGURE 15. Florida Governor Claude Kirk affirms his opposition to “busing” to media outside hospital maternity ward in Tallahassee where his wife had just given birth. Associated Press photo, April 9, 1970.

THE SILENT MAJORITY WATCHES KIRK

While it is difficult to gauge how people judged Kirk’s protests, the governor’s office received (and archived) over 1,500 letters and telegrams, which offer insight into how citizens and viewers made sense of Kirk’s defiance. Over 95 percent of the mail Kirk received regarding “busing” in these months was positive, with most of the negative letters coming from his Florida constituents.60 What is striking in this correspondence is how many people outside the South supported Kirk’s protests and how many explicitly identified themselves as members of the “silent majority.” “I saw on the news tonight the stand you took on the schools,” a telegram from Cleveland said. “Please stand firm on it I am 100% behind you.” A writer in Youngstown noted, “Many of us, here up North, wish to commend you, for your stand on ‘bussing’ students,” while “A Concerned Senior Citizen” from Syracuse suggested, “There are many Northerners opposed to busing but you do not hear about them.” A mother from Detroit expressed concern that Kirk’s call for a uniform policy would hurt the North: “I speak for everyone of us white middle income suburban parents . . . we are completely in sympathy with you. . . . But for heaven’s sake, don’t attack us, help us to work together to protect our children. Certainly if hundreds of millions of white parents stick together we are a greater force than some supreme court judges.” A mother from Seattle thanked Kirk “for speaking out and supporting the sometimes too silent majority who oppose the forced integration policy in our public schools,” and a letter signed “Silent Majority” from South Bend predicted, “If you need funds, make a request, and I’m sure the Silent Majority will come thru.”⁶¹ Kirk’s “busing” protests would not have reached as large a national audience—from Syracuse to Seattle and South Bend to San Antonio—without television news. Television news made a local integration dispute in Bradenton, Florida, meaningful for people across the country and helped establish “busing” as a national issue. Ultimately, Kirk was more successful at rallying support and fueling the emotions of these national “busing” opponents than he was at stopping “busing” in Florida.

THE END OF THE RIDE AND PARENTS AGAINST FORCED BUSING

Faced with a contempt of court ruling from Judge Krentzman, the threat of a $10,000 per day fine, continuing pressure from the Nixon administration to stop his protest, and the lack of further legal options, Kirk ended his standoff and removed his personnel from the school board building on April 12. In a statewide television address, Kirk downplayed the conflict: “Basically, Florida and the Department of Justice are in agreement. We believe we must obey and carry out our Constitutional mandate. We agree the solutions to our problems must lie in the duly constituted courts.”62 Despite Kirk’s extended protest, “busing” started days later in Manatee County without violence and with limited absenteeism.⁶³ Jack Davidson, the reinstated school superintendent, described the start of integration as “really going very smoothly. . . . The people still don’t like forced busing. I don’t like it either, but the great majority of our people agree that the place to settle the question is in the courts, not the streets.”⁶⁴

Kirk initiated the “busing” standoff because he was sincerely opposed to the court order and, most historians and Kirk’s contemporaries agree, because he thought it would help him in a difficult reelection campaign later in the year. Kirk’s lieutenant governor, Ray Osborne, recalled that Kirk “wanted to stand in the schoolhouse door and have a confrontation. No one could turn him around on that. . . . He was trying to hit the home run which would bring him back.”⁶⁵ Reubin Askew, who defeated Kirk in the 1970 gubernatorial election and was one of the few politicians to urge compliance with “busing” orders, remarked, “I don’t think Governor Kirk was a racist, I think he just exploited the issue as many politicians did. In fact, it was almost the normal thing to exploit the issue. . . . He was exploiting it because he thought it would really put him in a good position.”⁶⁶ In interviews decades after the controversy, Kirk remained convinced that his stand was sound. “I was right and I was proven right,” Kirk told his biographer, Edmund Kallina Jr. “The thesis of the Manatee school affair was that forced busing was not conducive to education. What was not fair or honest was to put a child in a bus and take him one hour from one inadequate education to another inadequate education.”⁶⁷ If anything, Kirk argued in the late 1990s, he was ahead of his time on the “busing” issue: “[Floridians] didn’t understand forced busing at the time. It hadn’t hit enough families. It is still a cancer today.”⁶⁸ While his protest might have been mistimed in Florida, the broad televisual reach of Kirk’s protests brought his campaign against “busing” to millions of families in cities and suburbs in every region. Kirk appeared at rallies across the country as a spokesman for Parents Against Forced Busing, a Florida-based group that worked to create a national coalition of “antibusing” organizations. While Kirk’s school standoff did not bring him the political success he sought, he became a hero to “antibusing” parents.

FIGURE 16. Former Florida governor Claude Kirk speaks at a rally of Parents Against Forced Busing at Al Lang Field in Saint Petersburg, Florida. Associated Press photo, August 28, 1971.

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Among those who were inspired by Kirk and invited him to speak was Pontiac’s Irene McCabe, who led a 620-mile “mothers’ march” from Michigan to Washington, DC. The specific length of the march was selected to recall House Joint Resolution 620 (H.J. Res. 620), the “antibusing” amendment sponsored by Norman Lent. As a state senator representing Nassau County, Long Island, Lent had introduced a similar “antibusing” bill that passed the House and Senate in New York and was signed into law by Governor Nelson Rockefeller in 1969, before being found unconstitutional by a federal court the following year.69 The Lent-Kunzeman “neighborhood schools” bill generated national interest among integration opponents and became a model for similar “freedom of choice” school legislation in several southern states, including Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Alabama.70 New York’s “antibusing” bill also influenced U.S. senator John Stennis of Mississippi, who in 1970 introduced an amendment calling for a uniform national school desegregation policy, with the hope of sparking more national opposition to “busing” and desegregation.⁷¹ As Lent campaigned for H.J. Res. 620 in 1972, the Long Island Press noted that the support for “antibusing” legislation among northern congressional representatives had made a “prophet” out of Stennis.⁷² The H.J. Res. 620 amendment read, “No public school student shall, because of his race, creed, or color, be assigned to or required to attend a particular school” and “Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”⁷³ “I stole the language from the Federal Civil Rights Law of 1964,” Lent boasted, which “has liberals in Washington in a state of apoplectic disarray.”⁷⁴

Like supporters of southern “freedom of choice” plans, Lent’s amendment identified and sought to exploit the fact that Title IV, section 401b, of the federal Civil Rights Law of 1964 drew a sharp distinction between de jure and de facto segregation: “‘Desegregation’ means the assignment of students to public schools and within such schools without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin, but ‘desegregation’ shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance.” While Yale University Law School professor Alexander Bickel contended that H.J. Res. 620 “would justly be read as repudiating Brown v. Board of Education” and Reverend Theodore Hesburgh, chairman of the Commission on Civil Rights and president of Notre Dame University, criticized it as a “fundamentally antiblack amendment,” Lent contended that “House Joint Resolution 620 is intended to restore the rule of the Brown cases to our Constitution, our laws and our institutions and to reverse Swann and other departures from the Brown mandate of color-blindness.”⁷⁵ “If it was wrong in 1954 to assign a black child to a particular school on the basis of race, it is just as wrong to do the same thing to other children in 1972,” Lent argued. “This is ‘Jim Crowism’ in reverse.”⁷⁶ (Lent’s references to Brown anticipated later appeals to constitutional color blindness, such as Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in Parents Involved v. Seattle (2007): “What was wrong in 1954 cannot be right today.”)⁷⁷ Lent’s appeals to Brown and color blindness elided the fact that the school districts “threatened” with court-ordered “busing” had been found guilty of unconstitutional discrimination. Among nearly forty “antibusing” constitutional amendments proposed in 1971 and 1972, H.J. Res. 620 received the most attention because of Lent’s status as a northern “busing” opponent and because Lent’s amendment received grassroots support, most visibly from McCabe and Pontiac’s marching mothers.

FIGURE 17. Former Florida governor Claude Kirk joins Irene McCabe at a National Action Group Rally in Pontiac’s Hawthorne Park. Associated Press photo, September 26, 1971.

As the 1972 presidential campaign started to heat up, “antibusing” sentiment in Florida and H.J. Res. 620 figured prominently in how President Nixon’s administration approached the issue of school desegregation. The path Nixon charted on “busing” overlapped at different times with politicians from across the political spectrum. Like the southern politicians he and his party courted, Nixon sought to throttle the desegregation enforcement power of HEW and the Justice Department. Like moderates from both parties, he wanted to manage the “busing” issue and avoid violent incidents. And like many liberal Democrats, he drew a sharp distinction between de jure and de facto segregation and believed that the 1964 Civil Rights Act and subsequent legislation explicitly prevented “busing” to correct “racial imbalance.” Despite these similarities, Nixon differed from other politicians in a crucial respect: he was president during a pivotal six-year period that ultimately decided whether “busing” for school desegregation would work nationally or not.