Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation by Matthew F. Delmont challenges us to rethink the history of busing, which I previously associated with the non-violence protests that took place in South during the 1960s. Prior to 1954 Brown decision, riding the school bus has always been a white privilege in the rural South. But as the school integration movement spread from North to South in the 1960s and 1970s, white parents and politician resisted such movement by realizing their objections through the crisis like “busing” and “neighborhood schools”. In this way, white supremacists advanced their own agenda and pushed black communities’ moral and legal claims off the political stage, while avoiding explicit racist remark.
One significant event happened in March of 1964, when more than ten thousand white parents protested under the name of “Parents and Taxpayers” in New York City, holding signs like “We oppose voluntary transfers,” “Keep our children in neighborhood schools,” “I will not put my children on a bus,” and “We will not be bused,” (23). They claimed that they were taking advantage of their civil right and “hoped to persuade the school board to abandon a school paring plan that called for students to be transferred between predominantly black and Puerto Rican schools and white schools” (23).
Delmont also discusses in detail how the media, in the meantime, failed to comprehend the protest and simply put a framework for these stories. It took white protestors’ emphasis on busing as an attack on taxpayers’ rights to control their own schools and neighborhood, while completely ignoring the fact that African American were also taxpayers in this country. White protestors received such a high media coverage simply because they were white and they adopted the tactics of Martin Luther King. The ignorance and bias from the media left no place for black activists to express their opinions publicly and intensify that battle between communities.
It is interesting to see how literally anything when used by bigoted people can be turned into a method to spread oppression and segregation. Before reading this article, the only context I ever thought of bussing was the big yellow buses that take kids to school (apparent ‘cheese buses’) and public transit buses which I have very little experience with since I typically ride the train underground. In my mind, a buses is just a basic public service anyone can use to get from point A to point B with the automatic mental image for me being the big yellow buses that carry children to public school. This article, Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation by Matthew F. Delmont, however, enlightened me to how even public bussing was used to try and segregate schools in New York City and how the problem was ignored for so long. While some complaints tried to avoid the issue of race and simply were anti-bussing, some protests were very on the nose with aiming to “persuade the school board to abandon a school paring plan that called for students to be transferred between predominantly black and Puerto Rican schools and white schools”. It is also interesting how the author notes that the media completely misinterpreted or possibly intentionally misbranded the issue as the city disallowing tax payer from choosing the schools of their children, even though African American citizens were also tax payers. The fact that the media both sided with the white oppressors and fundamentally misinterpreted the issue left Black activist little opportunity to publicly counter their methods. I think this reading stands out from other previously assigned ones in how it explains the how the media worsened the issue as well as how it provides insight on an area of segregation that we had not previously looked into.
I personally agree with both of the statements from my fellow peers. Growing up as a child, the yellow bus or the cheese bus always seemed as a mode of transportation for me to get to school. All the neighborhood kids would wait outside at the bus stop before getting picked up all with the intention of going from one point to another. It never occurred to me that the concept of busing was tied with segregation. Much of the claims made by the white parents who proclaimed themselves to be “Parents and Taxpayers” in New York City stemmed from the idea that they were white. They believed that their identity of being white gave them more power which in result allowed them to argue for certain rights that other races could not have done. These white taxpayers completely disregarded black tax payers who also paid taxes but were just a different race. This movement shadowed black people’s efforts in any movement to segregate schools. One thing that is concerning is that more media coverage was shown in this protest that has far less protestors compared to prior protests advocated by blacks. Because of the deeply rooted white supremacist ideology that America was founded upon, certain races believed they had more power.
Thanks for these posts (although some of them were a little short!). I appreciate that you all focused on the media’s role in this story. I’m sure the reporters, editors and publishers believed themselves to be objective. And yet it is clear that they privileged one narrative over another.