Chapter 1 from Matthew F. Delmont’s Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation focuses on “antibusing” protests and the opposition to desegregation efforts. In March of 1964, over ten thousand white parents, more than seventy percent women, marched as “Parents and Taxpayers” to oppose busing as a means of desegregation in New York City public schools. By calling themselves “Parents and Taxpayers,” these white parents were trying to justify their protests. The name itself implies a certain superiority the protestors believed they had over their non-white counterparts. They were marching because they believed desegregation was violating their rights as taxpayers. However, in reality, “school officials and politicians structured housing and school policies around the expectations of white citizens” (26). These white protestors were afraid and upset that their self-imposed higher social status was being threatened.
An interesting point Delmont brings up is how the media affects public perceptions, an issue still seen today. When discussing the school boycotts in 1964, the New York Times “raised the specter of ‘busing’ to explain why the civil rights demands were ‘unreasonable and unjustified’” (43). The editorial piece argued that the Board of Education in New York City can lessen the racial imbalance in the schools, but anything more “ignore the facts and figures of school population and pupil distribution” (43-44). It also claimed that more teachers could be hired over bus drivers, and that these children are not learning anything on these sometimes hour-long bus rides. This Times editorial illustrated more moral ambiguity over desegregation efforts in the North than typical reports about literal black-vs-white segregation in the South.
When I previously would hear the term “busing” as it related to desegregation, I would automatically associate it with efforts happening down South. But in reality, the New York “antibusing” protests were one of the largest of its kind. Moreover, these protests were also used as support for southern senators opposing the Civil Rights Act. These senators argued that the New York protests “highlighted what they saw as the hypocrisy of the Civil Rights Act’s different treatment of school segregation in different regions” (27). Schools in the South were de jure segregated schools, while most of the schools in the North were de facto segregated schools, and the desegregation efforts were different for these two types of schools. Southern senators were outraged that “antibusing” efforts in de facto segregated schools were “accorded more political respect than similar efforts in the South” (28). Northern senators wanted to exempt northern schools from desegregation provisions in the Civil Rights Act.
I agree with your comment about the label the ten thousand white parents placed on themselves in their movement against busing in New York City. Many of these protesters, a majority of these mothers, marched under the label of “parents and taxpayers” with the intent of establishing a certain kind of superiority and claim of legitimacy to their protest. Essentially, these parents engaged in a very similar protest as the Civil Rights Movement did when they protested against school segregation (which resulted in a vastly different outcome). Many of the protesters in the Civil Rights Movement were also parents as well as taxpayers, just like their white counterparts, yet the white protesters were able to achieve their desired outcomes for several reasons. As a result of these ten thousand protesters, they were able to shift school policy in their favor before the undesired busing policy was even implemented to affect them.
I was also caught by surprise just how much influence the media had on shaping the perception of the general public. In an editorial in the New York Times from 1964, a claim was mad that rather than hiring more bus drivers, the funding and the focus should be more on hiring teachers. They also claimed that children were just having their times wasted sitting on long bus rides when they could be commute to closer schools in their neighborhood. In the midst of all these conflicts, it was not uncommon for high level policy makers to bend information to fit their own personal agenda. James Donovan, the president of the New York City School Board “conveniently” overstated the number of children that were bused to be one million. In reality, it was closer ten thousand students, all of which, were majority black and Puerto Rican. This leads me to my next point how common it was to manipulate facts to help influence public perception.
When the parents in New York City marched, Southern governors and policy makers were very quick to capitalize on this event. When it came to school segregation, the South had always been seen as “hot spots” of segregation. Heavy scrutiny was always on the south in regards to desegregating the school systems. But when ten thousands parents marched against school busing, the South took the opportunity to publicize this irony and shift the focus back to the North. Essentially, they believed that the South was constantly the focus of school segregation and yet, the more progressive and liberal North was facing just as much inequality in their own schooling systems. Because of the accumulation of public pressure, busing ultimately came to an end in New York City and was considered to “not work”.
Thanks for your posts. People tell me all the time that “desegregation” didn’t work, and when I ask them what they mean, they’ll tell me how busing caused more problems than it fixed. There are some reasonable critiques of a busing program that put the burden of desegregation on kids of color, which certainly happened in some districts. But that’s not usually what people mean when they say that busing didn’t work. I wonder if anti-busing protests in places like New York City had been portrayed differently in the media if it would have made a difference.