Desegregation busing in the United States (also known as simply busing) is the practice of assigning and transporting students to schools so as to redress prior racial segregation of schools, or to overcome the effects of residential segregation on local school demographics.
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education declared racial segregation in public schools
unconstitutional. The process of integrating public schools met fierce
resistance in the South where segregation laws took hold after the American Civil War and the Reconstruction Era of the United States. In Northern and Western states, de facto
segregation was the customary practice. Due to patterns of residential
segregation, a principal tool for racial integration was the use of
busing. In the 1971 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education
ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal courts had the
discretion to include busing as a desegregation tool to achieve racial
balance. While the Swann decision addressed de jure segregation in the South, it failed to address de facto segregation which persisted elsewhere in the country. In Georgia, Governor Jimmy Carter saw that Swann was "clearly a one-sided decision; the Court is still talking about the South, the North is still going free". In the 1974 Milliken v. Bradley decision, the U.S. Supreme Court placed an important limitation on Swann when they ruled that students could be bused across district lines only when evidence of de jure segregation across multiple school districts existed.
In the 1970s and 1980s, under federal court supervision, many school districts implemented mandatory busing plans within their district. A few of these plans are still in use today. An example of stiff resistance to desegregation busing was the Restore Our Alienated Rights movement in Boston.
Since the 1980s, desegregation busing has been in decline due to fierce opposition from white voters despite the success of the initiative at narrowing the achievement gap between white and black students. Even though school districts provided zero-fare bus transportation to and from students' assigned schools, those schools were in some cases many miles away from students' homes, which often presented problems to them and their families. In addition, many white families were angry about having to send their children miles to another school in an unfamiliar neighborhood when there was an available school a short distance away. The movement of large numbers of white families to suburbs of large cities, so-called white flight, reduced the effectiveness of the policy. Many whites who stayed moved their children into private or parochial schools; these effects combined to make many urban school districts predominantly nonwhite, reducing any effectiveness mandatory busing may have had. In addition, school districts started using magnet schools, new school construction, and more detailed computer-generated information to refine their school assignment plans.
In the 1970s and 1980s, under federal court supervision, many school districts implemented mandatory busing plans within their district. A few of these plans are still in use today. An example of stiff resistance to desegregation busing was the Restore Our Alienated Rights movement in Boston.
Since the 1980s, desegregation busing has been in decline due to fierce opposition from white voters despite the success of the initiative at narrowing the achievement gap between white and black students. Even though school districts provided zero-fare bus transportation to and from students' assigned schools, those schools were in some cases many miles away from students' homes, which often presented problems to them and their families. In addition, many white families were angry about having to send their children miles to another school in an unfamiliar neighborhood when there was an available school a short distance away. The movement of large numbers of white families to suburbs of large cities, so-called white flight, reduced the effectiveness of the policy. Many whites who stayed moved their children into private or parochial schools; these effects combined to make many urban school districts predominantly nonwhite, reducing any effectiveness mandatory busing may have had. In addition, school districts started using magnet schools, new school construction, and more detailed computer-generated information to refine their school assignment plans.
History
Before World War II
Prior to World War II, most public schools in the country were de jure or de facto segregated. All Southern states had Jim Crow laws
mandating racial segregation of schools. Northern states and some
border states were primarily white (as of 1940, populations of Detroit
and Chicago were more than 90% white) and, furthermore, existing black
populations were concentrated in urban ghettos partly as the result of
restrictive covenants.
After World War II
The
origins of desegregation busing can be traced back to two major
developments that occurred in the United States during the 1940s and
1950s.
Black population shift
Starting in 1940, the Second Great Migration
brought five million blacks from the agrarian South to the urban and
manufacturing centers in Northern and Western cities to fill in the
labor shortages during the industrial buildup of World War II and for better opportunities during the post-war economic boom. Shelley v. Kraemer
(1948) allowed them to settle in formerly white neighborhoods,
contributing to racial tension. Meanwhile, the post-war housing boom and
the rise of suburbia
allowed whites to migrate into the suburbs. By 1960, all major Northern
and Western cities had sizable black populations (e.g., 23% in Chicago,
29% in Detroit, and 32% in Los Angeles). Blacks tended to be
concentrated in inner cities, whereas newer suburbs of most cities were almost exclusively white.
Legal rulings
At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs Board of Education (1954) overturned racial segregation laws for public schools that had been in place in a number of states since the late 19th century, and ruled that separate but equal schools were "inherently unequal". Although the Brown decision affirmed principles of equality and justice, it did not specify how its ruling would promote equality in education. Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP
wanted a speedy process for desegregating the school districts, but the
Court waited until the following year to make its recommendations.
Reasons for delaying had to do with the changes in the Court and with
Chief Justice Earl Warren steering a careful course given the expected opposition from Southern states. In May 1955, the Court ruled in Brown II
that the school districts desegregate "with all deliberate speed".
Public school administrators had to begin the process of desegregating
the schools through the development of policies that would promote
racial mixing. A backlash of resistance and violence ensued. Even
members of Congress refused to abide by the decision. In 1956 over a
hundred congressmen signed the Southern Manifesto, promising to use all legal means to undermine and reverse the Court's ruling.
The momentum continued with two additional Supreme Court decisions aimed at implementation. In 1968, the Warren Court in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County,
rejected a freedom of choice plan. The Court ordered the county to
desegregate immediately and eliminate racial discrimination "root and
branch". Then in 1971, the Burger Court in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education
ruled that the school district must achieve racial balance even if it
meant redrawing school boundaries and the use of busing as a legal tool.
The impact of Green and Swann served to end all remnants of de jure segregation in the South. However, the consequence of the Swann decision ushered in new forms of resistance in subsequent decades. The decision failed to address de facto segregation.
Consequently, despite being found "inherently unequal" in Brown v. Board of Education, by the late 1960s public schools remained de facto
segregated in many cities because of demographic patterns, school
district lines being intentionally drawn to segregate the schools
racially, and, in some cases, due to conscious efforts to send black
children to inferior schools. Thus, for example, by 1969, more than nine of every ten black students in Nashville still attended all-black schools.
Evidence of such de facto segregation motivated early proponents of
plans to engage in conscious "integration" of public schools, by busing
schoolchildren to schools other than their neighborhood schools, with an
objective to equalize racial imbalances. Proponents of such plans
argued that with the schools integrated, minority students would have
equal access to equipment, facilities, and resources that the cities'
white students had, thus giving all students in the city equal
educational opportunities.
A federal court found that in Boston,
schools were constructed and school district lines drawn intentionally
to segregate the schools racially. In the early 1970s, a series of court
decisions found that the racially imbalanced schools trampled the
rights of minority students. As a remedy, courts ordered the racial integration
of school districts within individual cities, sometimes requiring the
racial composition of each individual school in the district to reflect
the composition of the district as a whole. This was generally achieved
by transporting children by school bus to a school in a different area of the district.
The judge who instituted the Detroit busing plan said that busing
"is a considerably safer, more reliable, healthful and efficient means
of getting children to school than either carpools or walking, and this
is especially true for younger children". He, therefore, included kindergarten
children in the busing scheme: "Transportation of kindergarten children
for upwards of forty-five minutes, one-way, does not appear
unreasonable, harmful, or unsafe in any way." The resultant Supreme Court case, Milliken v. Bradley,
imposed limits on busing. The key issue was whether a district court
could order a metropolitan-wide desegregation plan between urban Detroit
and suburban school districts. Busing would play a key role in the
implementation phase. The Court essentially declared that federal courts
did not have the authority to order inter-district desegregation unless
it could be proven that suburban school districts intentionally
mandated segregation policies. The implication of the decision was that
suburban school districts in the North were not affected by the
principles established by Brown. De facto segregation was
allowed to persist in the North. The courts could order desegregation
where segregation patterns existed, but only within municipalities, not
suburban areas. The lasting consequence of the Milliken decision
is that it opened the door for whites to flee to the suburbs and not be
concerned about compliance with mandatory integration policies.
With waning public support, the courts began relaxing judicial
supervision of school districts during the 1990s and 2000s, calling for
voluntary efforts to achieve racial balance. In the early 1990s, the Rehnquist Court ruled in three cases coming from Oklahoma City, Kansas City, and DeKalb County
in Georgia that federal judges could ease their supervision of school
districts "once legally enforced segregation had been eliminated to the
extent practicable".
With these decisions, the Rehnquist Court opened the door for school
districts throughout the country to get away from under judicial
supervision once they had achieved unitary status. Unitary Status
meant that a school district had successfully eliminated segregation in
dual school systems and thus was no longer bound to court-ordered
desegregation policies.
Then in 2002, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision in Belk v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education
which declared that the school system had achieved desegregation status
and that the method to achieve integration, like busing, was
unnecessary. The refusal of the Court to hear the challenges to the
lower court decision effectively overturned the earlier 1971 Swann ruling.
Finally, in 2007, the Roberts Court produced a contentious 5–4 ruling in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1
(PICS). The decision prohibited the use of racial classifications in
student assignment plans to maintain racial balance. Whereas the Brown
case ruled that racial segregation violated the Constitution, now the
use of racial classifications violated the equal protection clause of
the 14th Amendment. Writing for the minority, Justice Breyer said the
"ruling contradicted previous decisions upholding race-conscious pupil
assignments and would hamper local school boards' efforts to prevent
'resegregation' in individual schools".
Civil rights movement
The struggle to desegregate the schools received impetus from the Civil Rights Movement, whose goal was to dismantle legal segregation in all public places. The movement's efforts culminated in Congress passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Signed by President Lyndon Johnson,
the two laws signaled the end of discriminatory voting practices and
segregation of public accommodations. The importance of these two laws
was the injection of both the legislative and executive
branches joining the judiciary to promote racial integration. In
addition, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 authorized the federal government
to cut off funding if Southern school districts did not comply and also
to bring lawsuits against school officials who resisted.
One argument against the Civil Rights Act of 1964
that opponents of the proposed legislation found particularly
compelling was that the bill would require forced busing to achieve
certain racial quotas in schools. Proponents of the bill, such as Emanuel Celler and Jacob Javits, said that the bill would not authorize such measures. Leading sponsor Sen. Hubert Humphrey wrote two amendments specifically designed to outlaw busing.
Humphrey said "if the bill were to compel it, it would be a violation
[of the Constitution], because it would be handling the matter on the
basis of race and we would be transporting children because of race".
While Javits said any government official who sought to use the bill
for busing purposes "would be making a fool of himself", two years later
the Department of Health, Education and Welfare said that Southern school districts would be required to meet mathematical ratios of students by busing.
Sociological study
Another catalyst for the development of busing was an influential sociological
report on educational equality commissioned by the U.S. government in
the 1960s. It was one of the largest studies in history, with more than
150,000 students in the sample. The result was a massive report of over
700 pages. That 1966 report—titled "Equality of Educational Opportunity"
(or often simply called the "Coleman Report" after its author James Coleman)—contained many controversial findings.
One conclusion from the study was that, while black schools in the
South were not significantly underfunded as compared to white schools,
and while per-pupil funding did not contribute significantly to
differences in educational outcomes, socially disadvantaged black
children still benefited significantly from learning in mixed-race
classrooms. Thus, it was argued that busing (as opposed to simply
increasing funding to segregated schools) was necessary for achieving
racial equality.
Reaction
Before 2007
The impact of the Brown v. Board of Education
ruling was limited because whites and blacks tended to live in
all-white or all-black communities. Initial integration in the South
tended to be symbolic: for example, the integration of Clinton High School,
the first public school in Tennessee to be integrated, amounted to the
admission of twelve black students to a formerly all-white school.
"Forced busing" was a term used by many to describe the mandates
that generally came from the courts. Court-ordered busing to achieve
school desegregation was used mainly in large, ethnically segregated
school systems, including Boston, Massachusetts; Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio; Kansas City, Missouri; Pasadena and San Francisco, California; Richmond, Virginia; Detroit, Michigan; and Wilmington, Delaware.
From 1972 to 1980, despite busing, the percentage of blacks attending
mostly-black schools barely changed, moving from 63.6 percent to 63.3
percent.
In some southern states in the 1960s and 1970s, parents opposed to busing created new private schools. The schools, called segregation academies, were sometimes organized with the support of the local White Citizen's Council.
For the 1975–76 school year, the Louisville, Kentucky school district, which was not integrated due to whites largely moving to the suburbs, was forced to start a busing program. The first day, 1,000 protestors rallied against the busing, and a few days into the process, 8,000 to 10,000 whites from Jefferson County, Kentucky, many teenagers, rallied at the district's high schools and fought with police trying to break up the crowds.
Police cars were vandalized, 200 were arrested, and people were hurt in
the melee, but despite further rallies being banned the next day by
Louisville's mayor, demonstrators showed up to the schools the following
day. Kentucky Governor Julian Carroll sent 1,800 members of the Kentucky National Guard and stationed them on every bus. On September 26, 1975, 400 protestors held a rally at Southern High School, which was broken up by police tear gas, followed by a rally of 8,000 the next day, who marched led by a woman in a wheelchair to prevent police reprisals while cameras were running.[4] Despite the protests, Louisville's busing program continued.
After 2007
Civil
rights advocates see the 2007 ruling of the Roberts court as the
inevitable consequence of gradual court decisions dating back to the
early 1970s to ease judicial supervision and limit important tools to
achieve integrated schools. Even those school districts that voluntarily
created race-conscious programs are under pressure to abandon these
efforts as the white parents are refusing to participate in any pupil
assignment programs. In some cases, white parents filed reverse discrimination
lawsuits in court. Wherever the courts have backed away from mandating
school districts to implement desegregation plans, resegregation of
Blacks and Latinos has increased dramatically.
In 1988, 44 percent of southern black students were attending
majority-white schools. In 2005, 27 percent of black students were
attending majority white schools. By restricting the tools by which
schools can address school segregation, many fear that the PICS decision
will continue to accelerate this trend.
The ruling reflects the culmination of the conservatives' central
message on education that "race should be ignored, inequalities should
be blamed on individuals and schools, and existing civil rights remedies
should be dismantled". In 2001 Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) which was promptly signed by President George W. Bush.
The law put a premium on student testing, not integration, to measure
academic progress. Financial penalties were incurred on schools if
students did not demonstrate adequate academic performance. While
initially supported by Democrats, critics say, the law has failed to
adequately address the achievement gap between whites and minorities and
that there are problems with implementation and inflexible provisions.
Criticism
Support for the practice is influenced by the methodology of the study conducted. In a Gallup poll
taken in the early 1970s, very low percentages of whites (4 percent)
and blacks (9 percent) supported busing outside of local neighborhoods.
However, a longitudinal study has shown that support for desegregation
busing among black respondents has only dropped below 50% once from
1972-1976 while support among white respondents has steadily increased
suggesting that the Gallup poll numbers may be skewed. This increased support may be due the diminished impact of desegregation policies over time. A 1978 study by the RAND Corporation set out to find why whites were opposed to busing and concluded that it was not because they held racist attitudes, but because they believed it destroyed neighborhood schools and camaraderie and increased discipline problems. It is said that busing eroded the community pride and support that neighborhoods had for their local schools.
However, this seems unlikely as other studies indicated that almost 40%
of respondents favored laws against intermarriage and the right to
segregated neighbourhoods. After busing, 60 percent of Boston parents, both black and white, reported more discipline problems in schools. In the 1968, 1972, and 1976
presidential elections, candidates opposed to busing were elected each
time, and Congress voted repeatedly to end court-mandated busing.
Critics point out that children in the Northeast were often bused from integrated schools to less integrated schools.
The percentage of Northeastern black children who attended a
predominantly black school increased from 67 percent in 1968 to 80
percent in 1980 (a higher percentage than in 1954).
Busing is claimed to have accelerated a trend of middle-class relocation to the suburbs of metropolitan areas. Many opponents of busing claimed the existence of "white flight" based on the court decisions to integrate schools.
Such stresses led white middle-class families in many communities to
desert the public schools and create a network of private schools.
Ultimately, many black leaders, from Wisconsin State Rep. Annette Polly Williams, a Milwaukee Democrat, to Cleveland Mayor Michael R. White,
have come to the conclusion that it is patronizing to think that
minority students need to sit next to a white student to learn, and as
such led efforts to end busing.
In 1978, a proponent of busing, Nancy St. John, studied 100 cases
of urban busing from the North and did not find what she had been
looking for;
she found no cases in which significant black academic improvement
occurred, but many cases where race relations suffered due to busing, as
those in forced-integrated schools had worse relations with those of
the opposite race than those in non-integrated schools.
Researcher David Armour, also looking for hopeful signs, found that
busing "heightens racial identity" and "reduces opportunities for actual
contact between the races".
A 1992 study led by Harvard University Professor Gary Orfield,
who supports busing, found black and Hispanic students lacked "even
modest overall improvement" as a result of court-ordered busing.
Another mystery was why Asian students, segregated in some school systems, nevertheless thrived academically.
During the 1970s, 60 Minutes
reported that some members of Congress, government, and the press who
supported busing most vociferously sent their own children to private
schools, including Senator Edward Kennedy, George McGovern, Thurgood Marshall, Phil Hart, Ben Bradlee, Senator Birch Bayh, Tom Wicker, Philip Geyelin, and Donald Fraser. Many of the judges who ordered busing also sent their children to private schools.
Effects
Busing integrated school age ethnic minorities with the larger community. The Milliken v. Bradley
Supreme Court decision that busing children across districts is
unconstitutional limited the extent of busing to within metropolitan
areas. This decision made suburbs attractive to those who wished to
evade busing.
Some metropolitan areas in which land values and property-tax
structures were less favorable to relocation saw significant declines in
enrollment of whites in public schools as white parents chose to enroll
their children in private schools. Currently, most segregation occurs
across school districts as large cities have moved significantly toward
racial balance among their schools.
Recent research by Eric Hanushek,
John Kain, and Steven Rivkin has shown that the level of achievement by
black students is adversely affected by higher concentrations of black
students in their schools. Additionally, the impact of racial concentration appears to be greatest for high-achieving black students.
Historical examples
Boston, Massachusetts
In 1965 Massachusetts passed into law the Racial Imbalance Act, which
ordered school districts to desegregate or risk losing state
educational funding. The first law of its kind in the nation, it was
opposed by many in Boston, especially less-well-off white ethnic areas,
such as the Irish-American neighborhoods of South Boston & Charlestown, Boston.
Springfield, Massachusetts
Unlike Boston, which experienced a large degree of racial violence following Judge Arthur Garrity's
decision to desegregate the city's public schools in 1974, Springfield
quietly enacted its own desegregation busing plans. Although not as
well-documented as Boston's crisis, Springfield's situation centered on
the city's elementary schools. Much of the primary evidence for
Springfield's busing plans stemmed from a March 1976 report by a
committee for the Massachusetts Commission on Civil Rights (MCCR).
According to the report, 30 of the city's 36 elementary schools were
grouped into six separate districts during the 1974–75 school year, and
each district contained at least one racially imbalanced school. The
basic idea behind the "six-district" plan was to preserve a neighborhood
feeling for school children while busing them locally to improve not
only racial imbalances, but also educational opportunities in the school
system.
Kansas City, Missouri
In 1985, a federal court took partial control of the Kansas City, Missouri School District (KCMSD). Since the district and the state had been found severally liable
for the lack of integration, the state was responsible for making sure
that money was available for the program. It was one of the most
expensive desegregation efforts attempted and included busing, a magnet
school program, and an extensive plan to improve the quality of inner city
schools. The entire program was built on the premise that extremely
good schools in the inner-city area combined with paid busing would be
enough to achieve integration.
Las Vegas, Nevada
In May 1968, the Southern Nevada chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) filed a lawsuit against the Clark County School District (CCSD). The NAACP wanted the CCSD to acknowledge publicly, and likewise, act against the de facto segregation that existed in six elementary schools located on the city's Westside. This area of Las Vegas had traditionally been a black neighborhood.
Therefore, the CCSD did not see the need to desegregate the schools, as
the cause of segregation appeared to result from factors outside of its
immediate control.
The case initially entered the Eighth Judicial District Court of Nevada, but quickly found its way to the Nevada Supreme Court. According to Brown II,
all school desegregation cases had to be heard at the federal level if
they reached a state's highest court. As a result, the Las Vegas case,
which became known as Kelly v. Clark County School District, was eventually heard by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
On May 10, 1972, the Ninth Circuit handed down its decision in favor of
the NAACP, which therefore required the CCSD to implement a plan for
integration. The CCSD then instituted its Sixth Grade Center Plan,
which converted the Westside's six elementary schools into sixth-grade
classrooms where nearly all of the school district's sixth graders
(black and white alike) would be bused for the 1972–73 school year.
Los Angeles, California
In 1963, a lawsuit, Crawford v. Board of Education of the City of Los Angeles, was filed to end segregation in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The California Supreme Court
required the district to come up with a plan in 1977. The board
returned to court with what the court of appeal years later would
describe as "one of if not the most drastic plan of mandatory student
reassignment in the nation".
A desegregation busing plan was developed, to be implemented in the
1978 school year. Two suits to stop the enforced busing plan, both
titled Bustop, Inc. v. Los Angeles Board of Education, were filed by the group Bustop Inc., and were petitioned to the United States Supreme Court. The petitions to stop the busing plan were subsequently denied by Justice Rehnquist and Justice Powell. California Constitutional Proposition 1, which mandated that busing follow the Equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution, passed in 1979 with 70 percent of the vote. The Crawford v. Board of Education of the City of Los Angeles lawsuit was heard in the Supreme Court in 1982.
The Supreme Court upheld the decision that Proposition 1 was
constitutional, and that, therefore, mandatory busing was not
permissible.
Nashville, Tennessee
In comparison with many other cities in the nation, Nashville
was not a hotbed of racial violence or massive protest during the civil
rights era. In fact, the city was a leader of school desegregation in
the South, even housing a few small schools that were minimally
integrated before the Brown v. Board of Education decision in
1954. Despite this initial breakthrough, however, full desegregation of
the schools was a far cry from reality in Nashville in the mid-1950s,
and thus 22 plaintiffs, including black student Robert Kelley, filed
suit against the Nashville Board of Education in 1955.
The result of that lawsuit was what came to be known as the "Nashville Plan", an attempt to integrate the public schools of Nashville (and later all of Davidson County
when the district was consolidated in 1963). The plan, beginning in
1957, involved the gradual integration of schools by working up through
the grades each year starting in the fall of 1957 with first graders.
Very few black children who had been zoned for white schools showed up
at their assigned campus on the first day of school, and those who did
met with angry mobs outside several city elementary schools. No white
children assigned to black schools showed up to their assigned campuses.
After a decade of this gradual integration strategy, it became
evident that the schools still lacked full integration. Many argued that
Housing Segregation was the true culprit in the matter. In 1970 the Kelley case was reintroduced to the courts. Ruling on the case was Judge Leland Clure Morton, who, after seeking advice from consultants from the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare,
decided the following year that to correct the problem, forced busing
of the children was to be mandated, among the many parts to a new plan
that was finally decided on. This was a similar plan to that enacted in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in Charlotte, North Carolina, the same year.
What followed were mixed emotions from both the black and white
communities. Many whites did not want their children to share schools
with black children, arguing that it would decrease the quality of their
education. While a triumph for some, many blacks believed that the new
plan would enforce the closure of neighborhood schools such as Pearl
High School, which brought the community together. Parents from both
sides did not like the plan because they had no control over where their
children were going to be sent to school, a problem that many other
cities had during the 1970s when busing was mandated across the country.
Despite the judge's decision and the subsequent implementation of the
new busing plan, the city stood divided.
As in many other cities across the country at this time, many
white citizens took action against the desegregation laws. Organized
protests against the busing plan began before the order was even
official, led by future mayoral candidate Casey Jenkins. While some
protested, many other white parents began pulling their children out of
the public schools and enrolling them in the numerous private schools
that began to spring up almost overnight in Nashville in the 1960s and
1970s. Many of these schools continued to be segregated through the
1970s. Other white parents moved outside of the city limits and
eventually outside the Davidson County line so as not to be part of the
Metropolitan District and thus not part of the busing plan.
In 1979 and 1980, the Kelley case was again brought back to the courts because of the busing plan's failure to fully integrate the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools
(MNPS). The plan was reexamined and reconfigured to include some
concessions made by the school board and the Kelley plaintiffs and in
1983 the new plan, which still included busing, was introduced. However,
problems with "white flight" and private schools continued to segregate MNPS to a certain degree, a problem that has never fully been solved.
Pasadena, California
In 1970 a federal court ordered the desegregation of the public schools in Pasadena, California.
At that time, the proportion of white students in those schools
reflected the proportion of whites in the community, 54 percent and 53
percent, respectively. After the desegregation process began, large
numbers of whites in the upper and middle classes who could afford it
pulled their children from the integrated public school system and
placed them into private schools instead. As a result, by 2004 Pasadena
became home to 63 private schools, which educated one-third of all
school-aged children in the city, and the proportion of white students
in the public schools had fallen to 16 percent. In the meantime, the
proportion of whites in the community has declined somewhat as well, to
37 percent in 2006. The superintendent of Pasadena's public schools
characterized them as being to whites "like the bogey-man", and mounted
policy changes, including a curtailment of busing, and a publicity drive
to induce affluent whites to put their children back into public
schools.
Prince George's County, Maryland
In 1974, Prince George's County,
Maryland, became the largest school district in the United States
forced to adopt a busing plan. The county, a large suburban school
district east of Washington, D.C.,
was over 80 percent white in population and in the public schools. In
some county communities close to Washington, there was a higher
concentration of black residents than in more outlying areas. Through a
series of desegregation orders after the Brown decision, the county had a neighborhood-based system of school boundaries. However, the NAACP
argued that housing patterns in the county still reflected the vestiges
of segregation. Against the will of the Board of Education of Prince
George's County, the federal court ordered that a school busing plan be
set in place. A 1974 Gallup poll showed that 75 percent of county residents were against forced busing and that only 32 percent of blacks supported it.
The transition was very traumatic as the court ordered that the
plan be administered with "all due haste". This happened during the
middle of the school term, and students, except those in their senior
year in high school, were transferred to different schools to achieve
racial balance. Many high school sports teams' seasons and other typical
school activities were disrupted. Life in general for families in the
county was disrupted by things such as the changes in daily times to get
children ready and receive them after school, transportation logistics
for extracurricular activities, and parental participation activities
such as volunteer work in the schools and PTA meetings.
The federal case and the school busing order was officially ended
in 2001, as the "remaining vestiges of segregation" had been erased to
the court's satisfaction. Neighborhood-based school boundaries were
restored. The Prince George's County Public Schools was ordered to pay
the NAACP
more than $2 million in closing attorney fees and is estimated to have
paid the NAACP over $20 million over the course of the case.
Richmond, Virginia
In April 1971, in the case Bradley v. Richmond School Board, Federal District Judge Robert R. Merhige, Jr., ordered an extensive citywide busing program in Richmond,
Virginia. When the massive busing program began in the fall of 1971,
parents of all races complained about the long rides, hardships with
transportation for extracurricular activities, and the separation of
siblings when elementary schools at opposite sides of the city were
"paired", (i.e., splitting lower and upper elementary grades into
separate schools). The result was further white flight to private
schools and to suburbs in the neighboring counties of Henrico and Chesterfield
that were predominately white. In January 1972, Merhige ruled that
students in Henrico and Chesterfield counties would have to be bused
into the City of Richmond in order to decrease the high percentage of
black students in Richmond's schools. This order was overturned by the
Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals on June 6, 1972, barring forced busing
schemes that made students cross county/city boundaries. (Note: Since
1871, Virginia has had independent cities which are not politically
located within counties, although some are completely surrounded
geographically by a single county. This distinctive and unusual
arrangement was pivotal in the Court of Appeals decision overturning
Merhige's ruling). The percentage of white students in Richmond city
schools declined from 45 to 21 percent between 1960 and 1975 and
continued to decline over the next several decades. By 2010 white
students accounted for less than 9 percent of student enrollment in
Richmond. This so-called "white flight" prevented Richmond schools from ever becoming truly integrated.
A number of assignment plans were tried to address the non-racial
concerns, and eventually, most elementary schools were "unpaired".
Wilmington, Delaware
In Wilmington, Delaware, located in New Castle County, segregated schools were required by law until 1954, when, due to Belton v. Gebhart (which was later rolled into Brown v. Board of Education
on appeal), the school system was forced to desegregate. As a result,
the school districts in the Wilmington metropolitan area were split into
eleven districts covering the metropolitan area (Alfred I. duPont,
Alexis I. duPont, Claymont, Conrad, De La Warr, Marshallton-McKean,
Mount Pleasant, New Castle-Gunning Bedford, Newark, Stanton, and
Wilmington school districts). However, this reorganization did little to
address the issue of segregation, since the Wilmington schools
(Wilmington and De La Warr districts) remained predominantly black,
while the suburban schools in the county outside the city limits
remained predominantly white.
In 1976, the U.S. District Court, in Evans v. Buchanan,
ordered that the school districts of New Castle County all be combined
into a single district governed by the New Castle County Board of
Education.
The District Court ordered the Board to implement a desegregation plan
in which the students from the predominantly black Wilmington and De La
Warr districts were required to attend school in the predominantly white
suburb districts, while students from the predominantly white districts
were required to attend school in Wilmington or De La Warr districts
for three years (usually 4th through 6th grade). In many cases, this
required students to be bused a considerable distance (12–18 miles in
the Christina School District) because of the distance between Wilmington and some of the major communities of the suburban area (such as Newark).
However, the process of handling an entire metropolitan area as a
single school district resulted in a revision to the plan in 1981, in
which the New Castle County schools were again divided into four
separate districts (Brandywine, Christina, Colonial, and Red Clay).
However, unlike the 1954 districts, each of these districts was
racially balanced and encompassed inner city and suburban areas. Each of
the districts continued a desegregation plan based upon busing.
The requirements for maintaining racial balance in the schools of
each of the districts was ended by the District Court in 1994, but the
process of busing students to and from the suburbs for schooling
continued largely unchanged until 2001, when the Delaware state
government passed House Bill 300, mandating that the districts convert
to sending students to the schools closest to them, a process that
continues as of 2007. In the 1990s, Delaware schools would utilize the
Choice program, which would allow children to apply to schools in other
school districts based on space.
Wilmington High, which, many felt, was a victim of the busing
order, closed in 1998 due to dropping enrollment. The campus would
become home to Cab Calloway School of the Arts, a magnet school focused on the arts that was established in 1992. It would also house Charter School of Wilmington, which focuses on math and science, and opened up in 1996.
Delaware currently has some of the highest rates in the nation of
children who attend private schools, magnet schools, and charter
schools, due to the perceived weaknesses of the public school system.
Re-segregation
According to the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University,
the desegregation of U.S. public schools peaked in 1988; since then,
schools have become more segregated because of changes in demographic
residential patterns with continuing growth in suburbs and new
communities. Jonathan Kozol
has found that as of 2005, the proportion of black students at
majority-white schools was at "a level lower than in any year since
1968".
Changing population patterns, with dramatically increased growth in the
South and Southwest, decreases in old industrial cities, and much
increased immigration of new ethnic groups, have altered school
populations in many areas.
School districts continue to try various programs to improve
student and school performance, including magnet schools and special
programs related to the economic standing of families. Omaha proposed
incorporating some suburban districts within city limits to enlarge its
school-system catchment area. It wanted to create a "one tax, one
school" system that would also allow it to create magnet programs to
increase diversity in now predominately white schools. Ernest Chambers, a 34-year-serving black state senator from North Omaha,
Nebraska, believed a different solution was needed. Some observers said
that in practical terms, public schools in Omaha had been re-segregated
since the end of busing in 1999.
In 2006, Chambers offered an amendment to the Omaha school reform bill in the Nebraska State Legislature
which would provide for creation of three school districts in Omaha
according to current racial demographics: black, white, and Hispanic,
with local community control of each district. He believed this would
give the black community the chance to control a district in which their
children were the majority. Chambers' amendment was controversial.
Opponents to the measure described it as "state-sponsored segregation".
The authors of a 2003 Harvard study on re-segregation believe
current trends in the South of white teachers leaving predominately
black schools is an inevitable result of federal court decisions
limiting former methods of civil rights-era protections, such as busing
and affirmative action in school admissions. Teachers and principals
cite other issues, such as economic and cultural barriers in schools
with high rates of poverty, as well as teachers' choices to work closer
to home or in higher-performing schools. In some areas black teachers
are also leaving the profession, resulting in teacher shortages.
Education conservatives argue that any apparent separation of
races is due to patterns of residential demographics not due to court
decisions. They argue that the Brown decision has been achieved
and that there is no segregation in the way that existed before the
ruling. They further argue that employing race to impose desegregation
policies discriminates and violates Brown's central warning of using racial preferences.
