A YEAR BEFORE BOSTON’S “BUSING CRISIS” became a national story, Stephen Horn, United States Commission on Civil Rights vice chair and president of California State University Long Beach, expressed frustration with how “busing” had come to define school desegregation in America. “Somehow the busing for desegregation debate has become clouded in its own language and expressions in which the word busing is always preceded by such labels as massive and forced, and the defenders of busing are pictured as wanting children bused simply for the experience of being bused,” Horn said. “People have been misled and they are confused.” Reverend Theodore Hesburgh, Civil Rights Commission chair and president of the University of Notre Dame, shared these concerns. “In contrast to the newspaper headlines and television newscasts, our [Commission on Civil Rights] investigators did not find parents blocking the entrances, or teachers resigning in masses, or pupils engaged in continuous disorders,” Hesburgh argued. “On the contrary, we found schools being conducted in an atmosphere of relative peace, harmony and efficiency and in an atmosphere consistent with the nation’s ideals.”1 Horn and Hesburgh spoke to the findings of Civil Rights Commission reports on Charlotte, Las Vegas, Pasadena, Pontiac, Tampa, and other cities, which found that “school desegregation is working, that most of the fears and anxieties, such as those concerning busing, have proven groundless.”2 The Civil Rights Commission’s thorough studies of best practices in school desegregation received a fraction of the attention garnered by “antibusing” protests. Fifteen months after the Civil Rights Commission argued, “Busing is not an insurmountable problem,” television and print news media descended on Boston and told a very different story. For millions of viewers and readers across the county, Boston’s “busing crisis” cemented the popular view that “busing” was a failed and misguided policy.
“Busing” continued in dozens of cities after 1974, but Boston’s “busing crisis,” the Supreme Court’s Milliken decision, and the Reagan administration’s opposition to mandatory school integration ensured that “busing” would not lead to widespread and sustainable school desegregation. After the 1974 Milliken decision, only school districts in Indianapolis, Saint Louis, and Wilmington, Delaware, were compelled to create metropolitan school desegregation plans after findings of discrimination across city and suburban lines.3 The majority of suburban districts remained untouched by the nation’s school desegregation battles. By the 1990s, a series of the Supreme Court rulings made it easier for school districts to be released from court supervision. In Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell (1991), the Supreme Court ruled that school boards could be released from court supervision if “vestiges of past de jure segregation had been eliminated to the extent practicable.”4 The next year, the court ruled in Freeman v. Pitts (1992) that “a district court has the authority to relinquish supervision and control of a school district in incremental stages, before full compliance has been achieved in every area of school operations,” with the goal of “returning schools to the control of local authorities at the earliest practicable date.”5 In Missouri v. Jenkins (1995), the court ended eighteen years of court supervision in Kansas City and found that, once de jure segregation has been fixed, state officials have no constitutional duty to fund efforts to promote minority student achievement, such as teacher salary increases and compensatory education programs.6 In the wake of these cases, a number of school districts successfully appealed to be released from judicial oversight, including Boston, Buffalo, Cleveland, Denver, Jacksonville, Las Vegas, Miami, Minneapolis, Mobile, Nashville, San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle.7
More recently, in Parents Involved v. Seattle (2007), the Supreme Court ruled against voluntary school desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts argued, “For schools that never segregated on the basis of race, such as Seattle, or that have removed the vestiges of past segregation, such as Jefferson County . . . the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”8 The court’s majority drew a sharp distinction between de jure and de facto segregation, a framework that developed its political and cultural power during the battles over “busing.” In his dissenting opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer called this de jure–de facto framework into question. “The histories [of these school districts] also make clear the futility of looking simply to whether earlier school segregation was de jure or de facto in order to draw firm lines separating the constitutionally permissible from the constitutionally forbidden use of ‘race-conscious’ criteria,” Breyer argued. “No one here disputes that Louisville’s segregation was de jure. But what about Seattle’s? Was it de facto? De jure? A mixture? Opinions differed. Or is it that a prior federal court had not adjudicated the matter? Does that make a difference? Is Seattle free on remand to say that its schools were de jure segregated, just as in 1956 a memo for the School Board admitted?”9 Despite the large body of scholarship which demonstrates that residential and school segregation developed from government polices—that it was not accidental or innocent—the Parents Involved decision reinforced the myth of de facto segregation. For their part, school officials and parents in Louisville (Jefferson County) remained committed to integrated education and brought in desegregation expert Gary Orfield to help design a plan for integration that would meet the court’s criteria.10
As the courts turned away from school desegregation, the Reagan administration also sought to curtail the government’s role in school desegregation. Even more than during the Nixon administration, during President Reagan’s administration the Justice Department stopped filing school desegregation lawsuits and sided with school districts that sought to be released from court orders.11 William Bradford Reynolds, the assistant attorney general for civil rights who directed the Justice Department, told a congressional committee in 1981 that “compulsory busing of students in order to achieve racial balance in the public schools is not an acceptable remedy” and that this position “has been endorsed by the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of Education, and me.”12 The Reagan administration also weakened school desegregation through budget cuts to federal education programs. Funding reductions eliminated three-fourths of the Desegregation Assistance Centers, which provided technical assistance to school districts in developing and implementing desegregation plans. More importantly, Reagan won congressional support to end the Emergency School Aid Act of 1972, which had provided funding for school districts undergoing school desegregation (this Nixon-era legislation already prohibited using funds for “busing”).13 While some funds remained available for “magnet schools,” the elimination of the Emergency School Aid Act of 1972 effectively ended federal financial support for school desegregation in most districts.
Scholars have shown that school desegregation was an educational success in that it provided opportunities to black students without diminishing opportunities for white students.14 These potential gains were limited, however, because “busing” came to dominate the national debate on school desegregation. While “busing” is commonly associated with the 1970s, organized opposition to “busing” started in the mid-1950s in response to small-scale, voluntary, one-way programs to reduce school overcrowding in black and Puerto Rican schools. Parents and politicians rallied against “busing,” and the news media helped establish “busing” as the common-sense way to debate and oppose school desegregation. The battle over “busing” was never primarily a debate over which policy would lead to the best educational outcomes but rather a debate about how school desegregation would be defined in public discourse, and about how much actual desegregation would take place in the nation’s schools, especially in schools outside the South. Framing school desegregation as being about “busing” rather than unconstitutional racial discrimination privileged white parents’ fears over legal evidence. Ultimately, “busing” failed to more fully desegregate public schools because school officials, politicians, courts, and the news media valued the desires of white parents more than the rights of black students.
My goal in writing this book is to change how we talk about and teach the history of “busing” for school desegregation. Rather than starting the story in the 1970s, we need to understand that the battles over “busing” started two decades earlier in the wake of the Brown decision and in the context of civil rights activism in the North. Rather than focusing exclusively on Boston or seeing South Boston’s Irish residents as uniquely prejudiced, we need to understand how white parents and politicians in cities across the country rallied to defend racially segregated schools. And rather than using busing as a politically neutral word, we need to understand that this term developed as a selective way to label and oppose school desegregation. The long history of “busing” for school desegregation is more nuanced, complicated, and important than any one city’s “busing crisis.” My hope is that by seeing the history of “busing” clearly and speaking honestly about the history of civil rights, people who care about educational equality can chart a more just future.