Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation

• In Event: 14.033 - School Desegregation and Educational Equality in the 20th and 21st Centuries

Abstract

This presentation rethinks the history of busing in two ways. First, “busing,” as civil rights advocates continuously pointed out, was a fake issue. Students in the United States had long ridden buses to schools and in the South, as well as many Northern cities, students rode buses past closer neighborhood schools to more distant schools to maintain segregation. Describing opposition to busing as something other than resistance to school desegregation was a choice that obscured the histories of racial discrimination and legal contexts for desegregation orders. In covering school desegregation in Boston and other Northern cities, contemporary news media took up the busing frame and most histories of the era have followed suit. Our understanding of school desegregation in the North is skewed as a result, emphasizing white anger and resistance over years of civil rights organizing and protests. The “crisis” in Boston and in other cities that faced court ordered school desegregation was about unconstitutional racial discrimination in the public schools, not about busing.

Second, Why Busing Failed moves the history beyond “white backlash” to understand how preemptive resistance to school desegregation shaped antibusing legislation. One reason Boston’s “busing crisis” continues to resonate for so many readers and viewers is that is serves as a convenient end point for the history of civil rights, where it is juxtaposed with Brown v. Board of Education (1954) or the Little Rock school integration crisis (1957). In this telling, the civil rights movement, with the support by federal officials and judges, moved too fast in the North and encountered “white backlash.” The trouble with this story is that journalists and pundits identified a “white backlash” not only in 1974, but also in 1964. A more important issue with the “backlash” story is that the perspectives of white parents who opposed school desegregation figured prominently in the very civil rights legislation against which they later rebelled. In drafting the 1964 Civil Rights Act, for example, the bill’s Northern and Western sponsors drew a sharp distinction between segregation by law in the South and so-called “racial imbalance” (or de facto segregation) in the North. This antibusing language was designed to keep federal civil rights enforcement of school desegregation focused away from the North. Politicians across regional lines, including both Democrats and Republicans, reflected and fed their constituents fears of busing.

Author

• Matthew Delmont, Arizona State University