Category: Response 5

It’s clear that “busing” is just an excuse white parents gave so they can reject school desegregation. They argued that they didn’t want their children to have to be bused to in integrated schools, despite the fact that buses were already commonly used in most cities to maintain segregation in schools. The protests against busing took place before courts ordered to use buses to desegregate schools (29). The busing protests gave the North time to “postpone desegregating until ordered to do so by a federal court” (29).

“Busing” was a concern white parents could hide behind when they were really opposed to their children attending school alongside Black children, and it was effective. 15,000 white mothers protested in March 1964 against “busing,” and the protest shaped federal policies about school integration. Because they weren’t claiming to be against integration like the South, Northern states were able to claim issues with side effects of school integration, like busing, as an excuse not to integrate their schools. What the 1964 protest did was increase tension and fear among white people about desegregation coming to other city school systems, and it gave these cities a united excuse. Media like newspapers and television broadcasts spread this fear throughout the country, and limited attempts to desegregate schools.

We see again that the issue of “segregation” is more centered about the use of the word “segregation” rather than the segregation itself. Arguments presented about school segregation are met with literary critiques about “preferring words like separation and racial imbalance” (32). The dispute over “busing” is another example of diction being used as a tool to avoid a critical element of an argument. “Busing” clearly is a synonym for “segregation” in these protests. Superintendent Jansen used an argument of “extremists on both sides” to “present official inaction as a fair middle ground rather than as the maintenance of an educational status quo that benefitted white students and harmed black students” (36). Because of these twisted words, Jansen was able to listen to demands of white parents calling for “busing” rather than seeing it as an issue of segregation.

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.

My understanding of the notion of “busing” in relation to school desegregation changed after reading Delmont’s chapter in many ways. My original perspective was that busing was a positive alternative for New York City public schools to provide for African American students who were seeking admittance to better-funded schools that provided better opportunities. What I did not know was the extent of the “white backlash” to this alternative. Additionally, I did not realize that the argument involving this “busing” policy dominated the debate of integrating schools rather than the original protest of African American families calling for better-funded schools and equal opportunities in the New York City public education system.

I was really surprised to learn in Delmont’s chapter the extent of backlash this policy received from white families and even how it was portrayed to the public. Through this reading, I gained the understanding that this policy was only a small provision provided by the Board of Education, but the issue was interpreted as a policy that would affect all New York City students resulting in students commuting for an hour or longer. Additionally, many discouraged parents from partaking in “bussing.” Even the “open enrollment policy,” while it portrayed the Board of Education as compliant and in agreement with efforts to integrate schools, this option was not widely accessible and led to little integration.

A large part of this is due to the way it was portrayed in the media. “Busing” dominated a lot of articles in various media outlets such as in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Additionally, the coverage of the Harlem protests in comparison to the white family protests was filmed in such a way that created  “point-counterpoint interview segments.” This insinuates the equivalency between the protests of civil rights activists and the demands of white parents who opposed school desegregation.  Delmont stated, “Instead of seeing school segregation as an issue that necessarily involved changing structures of racial discrimination, “busing” enable parents, schools’ officials, politicians, and the media to frame the story around the preferences and demands of white parents.” Ultimately this diverted the attention towards better education opportunities and instead made integration a focal point.

I believe that this was the crux of this article, the idea that busing became the focal point of white families, masking the true demand of African American parent’s protest for better schooling options.

Reading this chapter from Matthew F. Delmont’s Why Busing Failed, has changed my view and understanding of the notion of busing. White mothers in the early 1960s protested against busing and held signs reading “I will not put my children on a bus” and “keep our children in neighborhood schools” (23). White mothers were going against the “pairing plan” of transferring students between black, Puerto Rican and white schools because of the bus ride there. The bus ride reasoning is clearly not the reason behind these mothers’ protests, but a gateway excuse to show that they were opposed to desegregation.

Some parents were more forward with their intentions of the protest and sent the Board of Education unambiguous letters complaining about the distance their children would travel to get to school and some letters were explicitly racist. In Dr. Kenneth Clark’s Commission on Integration’s zoning report, Clark dismisses the rumors from the white parents stating that their kids would be brought into black neighborhoods since those rumors were planted. Reports have shown that white parents would put their children on buses to take them a very far distance to get to a white school, so in a way, they are contradicted themselves.

Aside from this, the white mothers protest of three mile walk received so much publicity and media attention just because they were white. On the contrary,  it took years for black families to get attention and a ton of more walking, or at least more time and effort. Similar to the Harlem Nine and the Gary Plan families, a group was formed for the white anti-busing families called the Parents and Taxpayers. In a way, the white parents do not see themselves as equal to black families who are also parents and taxpayers. The white mothers and families protesting saw themselves as superior to the black families and the thought of desegregation as an inconvenience to them based on their racist beliefs.

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.

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.