TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century

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<text> <title> (1970s) School Integration </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1970s Highlights </history> <link 07814> <link 06666> <link 05437> <link 00555> <link 00133><link 00156><link 00158><article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> School Integration </hdr> <body> [In previous decades, "civil rights" had stood for the quest of black Americans for political, economic and social equality and the revolutionary, nonviolent campaigns black leaders employed to gain the passage of the landmark civil rights and voting rights acts of the 1960s. The 1970s saw the continued struggle of blacks to gain equality of education and opportunity. At the same time, there occurred the spread of these ends and means to other disadvantaged U.S. minorities. The first group to make significant gains could be said to be a leftover from the 1960s: the young.] (July 12, 1971) One of the shrillest cries of the disaffected young has revolved around a lack of legal avenues to change the System. No more. Last Wednesday in an extraordinary evening session, the Ohio house of representatives, by a vote of 81 to 9, made Ohio the 38th state to approve the 26th Amendment to the Constitution. That was sufficient for ratification, which means that 18- to 20-year-olds will be able to vote in all elections, local and state as well as federal. The states moved with astonishing alacrity, taking only three months and seven days from the time the amendment was first sent out for ratification. Said President Nixon: "Some 11 million young men and women who have participated in the life of our nation through their work, their studies and their sacrifices for its defense are not fully included in the electoral process of our country. I urge them to honor this right by exercising it." [While blacks continued to make gains in the South, the greatest racial challenge of the 1970s was the effort to extend equality of education and opportunity to blacks in the northern U.S., where fewer black children actually attended integrated schools than in the South--not because of racist law or Jim Crow traditions, but because of geography and class.] (May 3, 1971) No single word in all the arguments over school integration has inspired as much fear and anger as busing. The idea of taking a child out of his own neighborhood to help integrate a school elsewhere outrages many parents. Yet as a practical matter, the bus is an indispensable tool in cities where large areas are predominantly white or black. Thus when President Nixon last year praised the ideal of the neighborhood school and attacked busing, he was in effect suggesting a slow-down of integration--and Southern holdouts acquired new hope for delay. That hope dissolved last week. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed unanimously that transporting pupils to remedy school board- imposed segregation does not violate anyone's constitutional rights. Judges may demand the redrawing of school-district boundaries, even creating gerrymandered districts in which children from noncontiguous areas may be assigned to the same schools; they may pair or group schools from racially different neighborhoods and require transfers of students among those schools. They may establish racial quotas for schools, at least as a starting point to remedy past segregation. All of those methods may involve the transportation of children. Ruled the court: "Desegregation plans cannot be limited to the walk-in school." (November 15, 1971) To millions of white Americans, there is a new "yellow peril" on the nation's streets and highways this fall. It consists of caravans of that familiar homey vehicle, the yellow school bus. This year, however, the school bus has become a symbol of one of the most controversial developments in American life: the forced transportation of children away from the neighborhood schools to distant classrooms, in obedience to court-ordered desegregation plans. Some of the protests are clearly motivated by racism and unreason. Other objections, though, stem from parents' not unfounded fears that the buses will bring the corrosive problems of the ghettos to "their" schools, or take their children into the midst of the ghettos' often violent, crime-ridden culture. White parents fear that their children will be exposed to what blacks have learned to hate--the rapes, rip-offs, robberies and dope addiction that have turned all too many inner-city schools into blackboard jungles where learning is less important than learning how to survive. Beyond that, whites who have moved to a suburb for the sake of its school system resent the fact that courts they have never seen and judges they did not elect are telling them that their children cannot use those schools. Clearly, busing is beginning to emerge as one of the major political issues of 1972. It has already had its impact in the nation's capital, where President Nixon has made it plain that he strongly opposes "busing of children for the sake of busing." Inspired in part by mountains of angry constituent mail, more than 100 Congressmen have announced their support of a proposed constitutional amendment to prohibit busing. Just how deep feelings run on the subject was apparent last week when the House of Representatives took up the administration's $1.5 billion measure to assist in desegregating school districts. Northerners and Southerners united to insert in the bill a ban on any use of the money for busing; they also added a rider encouraging districts not to comply with court busing orders until all legal appeals have been exhausted--a process that could take years. [No northern city was more ravaged by racial violence resulting from court-ordered school integration than seemingly placid, patrician Boston.] (October 21, 1974) The front-page picture showed a terrified black man clinging to a railing as whites clawed at his shirt. Headlines summarized the sorry situation: SCHOOL SITUATION WORSENS, VIOLENCE SPREADS, BLACKS URGE FEDERAL ACTION. It might have been Birmingham or Biloxi in the 1960s--but it was Boston, last week. As the court-ordered desegregation of Boston's public schools went into its fourth week, an explosion seemed imminent. "We can no longer maintain either the appearance or the reality of public safety," Mayor Kevin H. White said in a letter to Federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity, who had issued the desegregation ruling last June 21. Added White, who asked Garrity to send in federal marshals to help enforce the ruling: "Violence which once focused on the schools and buses is now engulfing the entire community in racial confrontation." About 45,000 of Boston's 94,000 pupils have now been assigned to schools they would not normally have attended. This involves busing more than 18,000 students, including 8,510 whites. Under the plan, the South Boston and Roxbury school districts have been combined; 1,271 white pupils from South Boston have been assigned to Roxbury or other neighborhoods and 1,746 nonwhites have been assigned to Southie's schools. (May 26, 1975) "It's the death knell of the city," predicts Boston City Council Member Louise Day Hicks. "People will not comply," says State Senator William Bulger. "They will leave the city." From Hyde Park to South Boston the doomsayers were in full cry last week, and their bombast was directed at Federal District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity. In a 104-page court order, Garrity produced his final plan for desegregating the city's troubled schools--a decision that promises, at the least, to keep Boston in turmoil for months to come. Garrity's new plan supersedes a temporary one that he had ordered the Boston School Committee to put into effect last fall. That order led to school boycotts by whites, unruly demonstrations, occasional bloodshed and massive use of police. At first glance, it appears likely that Garrity's Phase Two scheme will spawn more of the same. Garrity's aim is to bus enough students to ensure that the racial mixture at most Boston public schools conforms more or less to the citywide ratio of 51% white, 37% black and 12% other minorities. To help achieve that goal, he has ordered 20 schools to close their doors and has created nine new school districts. (September 22, 1975) The cruel dilemma over busing has caused parents, both black and white, to raise a series of legitimate questions to which there are no easy answers: Is forced busing to balance schools racially worth all the uproar? Does it produce better schooling for disadvantaged black youngsters and no loss for the white youngsters? Once, the answer to both was widely thought to be yes. But researchers have raised gnawing doubts about these propositions--without necessarily disproving them. Moreover, forced busing or the threat of it has accelerated the white flight to the suburbs, leaving the inner cities increasingly nonwhite. In this situation, urban desegregation may mean little more than spreading a dwindling white minority among overwhelmingly black and increasingly mediocre schools, with minimal benefit for either race. Urban school systems in both the South and the North are getting blacker, as white parents continue to transfer their children to private systems or move to the suburbs. Since court-ordered desegregation went into effect in Memphis in 1973, the white enrollment in the schools has declined from 50% to 30%. Schools in Inglewood, Calif., were 62% white when integrated in 1970; now they are 80% nonwhite, and a federal court agreed in May to let the city abandon crosstown busing since it no longer can accomplish desegregations. The most vehement objections to busing are raised by lower-class whites who regard blacks as an economic threat. Says Harvard Psychologist Robert Coles: "The ultimate reality is the reality of class. Having and not having is the real issue. To talk only in terms of racism is to miss the point. Lower-income whites and blacks are both competing for a very limited piece of pie." Blacks themselves are sharply divided over busing. Wilson Riles, superintendent of public instruction in California, argues: "If you have to have blacks sitting next to Caucasians to learn, we are in a mess, because two-thirds of the world is nonwhite, and we would not have enough whites to go around. If the schools are effective and children learn, that is the easiest way to achieve the ultimate goal of integration." Retorts Kenneth Clark: "There is no such thing as improvement in the schools while they are still segregated. As long as we have segregated schools, I see no alternative to busing. Integration is a painful job. It is social therapy, and like personal therapy it is not easy." (September 27, 1976) During the desegregation of Little Rock's Central High School in 1957, a local Catholic priest received a phone call from a Boston clergyman asking what steps the church was taking to cool the hostilities. The answer did not completely satisfy the Bostonian. Last fall the Little Rock priest dialed his Yankee colleague: "I'm returning your call," he said. The Bostonian hung up. Throughout the South, news of Northern and Border-state unrest over busing has been greeted with understanding and something more than a little regional hubris. For 22 years, since the Supreme Court's pathfinding decision against "separate but equal" education, the South has borne the brunt of federal court orders, HEW guidelines and financial sanctions, and national "holier-than-thou" attention. Now, perhaps, the South can teach other regions a few civil rights lessons. At least when it comes to compliance with federal directives, that may be so. Of the more than 2,600 school systems in the eleven Southern states, the overwhelming majority desegregated under HEW pressure, and roughly 650 by direct court order. By 1972, 18 years after Brown v. The Brown of Education of Topeka, 46.3% of all black pupils in the South attended schools that were predominantly white (compared to 31.8% in the Border states and 28.3% in the North and West). On the whole, desegregation has been most successfully achieved in small towns and rural districts, whereas problems remain in a number of city systems. As Journalist John Egerton writes in a report for the Southern Regional Council: "The South's report card in school desegregation is better than the North's but by no means outstanding. School desegregation in the South is in the main an unfinished task." </body> </article> </text>