Anti-Busing Efforts as a Means of Delaying Desegregation

The Delmont reading stresses the hypocrisy of forced efforts toward desegregation in the South and practically legalized segregation in the North. Often times the South is condemned for their racist and segregated ways. Although there is a reason for this, the North should not have been exempt from most desegregation efforts as they also have many racist policies pertaining to segregation, which still exist today. When over ten thousand New York mothers marched in protest against desegregation via busing on a snowy day in 1964, they demonstrated their refusal to end racism in the North. New York, which was being watched by the rest of the country through incessant media coverage, showed that whites would do everything in their power to postpone the efforts of desegregation. The most absurd part of their movement was the fact that they called themselves, “Parents and Taxpayers,” as if white families were the only ones who paid taxes in New York City.

I had not realized how large of an impact anti-busing movements had on the desegregation efforts in New York City. I could understand white parents’ anger if their children were to be shipped off to schools at extremely lengthy distances from their neighborhoods. However, instead Kenneth Clark, a member of the Commission on Integration, said that this was never an option or goal. He stated, “It was not long before we became aware of the fact that these distortions and rumors were not accidental. They seemed to have been planted and they received wide circulation throughout the city and the nation…. Systematic study of the report on zoning revealed that at no place in the report is there a suggestion that young children be “bused” any considerable distance in order to facilitate integration….” (35). Furthermore, in the past, white students had been bussed from black to non-black schools that were further away from their homes, but no protests had broken out about such busing efforts. This shows that the white rioters were not opposed to busing; they were opposed to giving equal educational rights to students of all races.

Due to a fear of the power of white families in New York City, Superintendent Jansen watered-down his zoning report in July 1957, much to the dismay of other members on the commission. Just like Chancellor Carmen Fariña’s recent Diversity Report which did not mention the word “segregation,” once, “Many other northern school officials, politicians, and parents shared Jansen’s distaste for the word segregation, preferring words like separation and racial imbalance” (32). Officials refused to acknowledge their racist policies, believing that they were morally-superior to that of the South, when in reality they were one in the same.

Moreover, northern whites’ protests of busing, which only represented one portion of the desegregation efforts, was an attempt to ensure that schools remained segregated. They used busing as a rallying cry for racist Americans everywhere. Their concerns were amplified through the efforts of the media. As a result, in terms of our segregated school system, we are no better off today than we were in the 1960s. Anti-busing efforts effectively stalled desegregation in New York.