Collection
Busing for School Desegregation
Busing as a tool for desegregation involves enrolling Black students in majority white schools, and enrolling white students in majority Black schools. Backlash to busing became most nationally prominent in the mid-1970s when white parents and students violently resisted school desegregation in Boston. But busing has a much longer and more complex history. It was first used as a means of enforcing segregated schools. Activists pushed for its use as a tool of desegregation in the 1960s, and a handful of voluntary busing programs have run successfully for over fifty years. The articles in this collection examine the roots of the controversy, how the issue of busing became a proxy for massive resistance to desegregation in the north after the civil rights movement, and how the issue still shapes political debates over the persistence of residential and school segregation and structural racism today.
This website, a companion to Matt Delmont's book of the same name, offers twelve ways to think about the issue of busing, its origins, and its consequences. For starters, begin in the 1950s, when busing was a tool to enforce segregation in schools. Next, understand that the term "busing" itself was developed as a tool to oppose school desegregation.
The Senate during the creation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the news media covering the civil rights movement, framed segregation as a regional Southern issue, rather than a nationwide problem. Matt Delmont and Jeanne Theoharis show how this disingenuous narrative enabled northerners to avoid implementing Brown v. Board -- and allows liberal leadership to continue to perpetuate structural inequality today.
Joe Biden's staunch opposition to busing as a Delaware senator in 1974 became an issue in his 2019 presidential campaign. This article discusses the busing debate in Delaware, the government's role in the residential segregation that undergirded it, and Biden's role in policies that perpetuated the segregated status quo.
Legal history of busing as a means to desegregate schools. After Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg (1971) confirmed that busing across town lines in North Carolina was legal, the NAACP sued Michigan to use busing to desegregate Detroit area schools. In Milliken v. Bradley (1974) the court ruled that busing could not be ordered if the the segregation was caused by anything other than an explicit Jim Crow law. Thus, northern suburbs could use structural racism to perpetuate segregation.
This essay argues against the narrative that busing failed because conservative justices rolled back integration efforts. Instead, Tanner Colby argues that busing failed due to the geography of northern residential segregation, liberals' misunderstanding of the difference between desegregation and integration, the complexity of Black public opinion about busing, and the backlash to the decision to bus white students to Black schools.
A busing program in Boston, begun in 1966 before the famous controversy, is still in operation. Alana Samuels recounts the experiences of herself and her best friend, an African American student who attended her suburban school through the METCO program. She concludes that despite its challenges and limitations, busing was — and still is — a successful model to combat school segregation and a pathway of opportunity for many individual students.
Even though it is well-documented that government policies deliberately caused residential segregation, the court has since claimed that existing residential segregation makes busing an injustice to whites. Matthew D. Lassiter argues that by refusing to address the government's role in residential segregation, the Supreme Court has closed off avenues for implementing the desegregation required in Brown v. Board, and has sanctioned continued school segregation.