The Daily - The Myth That Busing Failed

Episode Date: July 18, 2019

The first Democratic debate brought renewed attention to busing as a tool of school desegregation. We spoke to a colleague about what the conversation has been missing. Guest: Nikole Hannah-Jones, who writes about racial injustice for The New York Times Magazine. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: “The school bus, treasured when it was serving as a tool of segregation, became reviled only when it transformed into a tool of integration,” Nikole Hannah-Jones writes in a news analysis.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Do you agree today that you were wrong to oppose busing in America? No. Do you agree? I did not oppose busing in America. The first Democratic debate brought renewed attention to busing as a tool of school desegregation. My colleague Nicole Hannah-Jones on what the conversation since then has been missing. It's Thursday, July 18th.

Nicole, I want to start by going back a couple of weeks to the first Democratic primary debate. What's on your mind as that debate comes to an end? I'm just really surprised that Kamala Harris goes so directly at Joe Biden about the issue of busing and school segregation. It was very unexpected. And I'm kind of watching the conversation on Twitter, and almost universally, people were saying busing was a failed policy. You want to talk about busing? I was up here in Boston. It was a failure.

He should have been against busing. We should have been against busing. Busing was super unpopular, and busing was a failure. People didn't like busing. Black people, white people, nobody liked busing. It wasn't the right solution. And what did you make of that? Because I have to admit, my sense is that busing was something that failed to achieve its goals.

It wasn't surprising to me. I've been writing about school segregation for more than 15 years, and this is a very common narrative. And if you study the history of the policy and if you study the results of the policy, where it was implemented intentionally, it actually was dramatically successful. So let's go back to that history. Where in your mind does that start? I mean, to go back, you have to go back to the Supreme Court ruling in 1954 in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling. in 1954 in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling. In a unanimous decision, the nine Supreme Court justices ruled racial segregation in publicly supported schools to be unconstitutional, declaring that it denied equal opportunity. I think we sometimes forget how radical of a ruling that was. All of a sudden, we are told by the Supreme Court that the whole basis for our society in the South

has not only been wrong, but 100% wrong. That overnight, nine unelected judges who served for life decided that the racial caste system that had been accepted in law was no longer constitutional. Southerners had wakened one morning to find themselves labeled villains, living outside the law. And of course, there is resistance to the ruling.

I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever. And the resistance is very substantial. Within the South, we must organize every county, every city, and every community. A group of Southern senators, most of them Democrats, get together, and they decide that they are going to implement a policy of massive resistance. get together and they decide that they're going to implement a policy of massive resistance. When groups can control the Supreme Court and control the president of the United States,

I don't have to tell you that they must be reckoned with. They just reject the Supreme Court's ruling. Outright. So they get together and they draft what's called the Southern Manifesto. It was without legal force, but it dramatically proclaimed the determination to resist desegregation and expressed the South's anger at what it considered outside interference. Fully one-fifth of the men serving in Congress at that time, and they were all men, signed that Southern Manifesto. The court was saying, the way that you have lived, what the law has allowed is actually not constitutional.

And they were arguing, yes, it is, and the court does not have the right to say that it's not. The resistance that follows that is, in many places, violent. We want segregated schools at any cost. And when I say any cost, I mean any cost, cost of life if necessary. Just with a single Black child getting ready to integrate a school, we saw schools being bombed, buses being bombed.

We saw children being beaten, closing down schools. And rather than see the children of the white people of Georgia surrendered to the Supreme Court and Atlanta newspapers, I would prefer abolishing public education forever and eternal. And did they close down schools? Yes, in some places, absolutely. Kind of the most infamous place is Prince Edward's County in Virginia. They closed down the schools in that county for five years. For five years, there was no public school system in Prince Edwards County.

The white children got private vouchers that were paid with public tax dollars to attend private academies. And black children got no schools whatsoever. Because the schools had been closed. Because the schools had been closed and they were not given vouchers to attend private schools. That ends finally when the Supreme Court gets serious and orders the schools back open. And that's the only reason public schools open back up in Prince Edward's County. So these battles are very much out in the open in the South. Politicians are saying we don't want to integrate.

And the government is saying that's too bad, but you have to. What's happening at this time in the northern states? Well, in the northern states, it's interesting because the northern white communities initially applaud the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. The north has long liked to separate itself as not being racially backwards like the south. And so they saw the ruling as forcing the South to treat its Black citizens like citizens. But that's because most white Northern communities did not actually believe Brown v. Board of Education applied to them. They considered that Brown v. Board was only about segregation that was explicitly written into the law. And, of course, by the 1950s, segregation in the North was largely happening through other official policies, such as school boards that were gerrymandering attendance zones to maintain white and black schools or housing policy that ensured that schools reflected residential segregation.

So many folks in the North just didn't think it applied. But black people thought differently. But Black people thought differently. So Black people see the Brown v. Board of Education ruling and immediately begin to call out the hypocrisy of white Northerners and say, have you been to the schools in our neighborhoods? Have you seen the schools in Chicago, in Detroit? They looked and they are just as segregated as those in Mississippi and those in Alabama. And so they began to challenge and say that they believe they also had constitutional rights to integration under Brown v. Board. Well, what does it actually look like in one of those northern cities like New York City, for example? So New York City at that time is

actually one of the most residentially segregated cities in the country. The New York City School Board, at the behest of white parents, is gerrymandering attendance zones so that white kids can remain in white schools and Black kids will be funneled to Black schools. And there is a distinct difference between the schools that Black and white kids attend. So the schools in New York City for Black children are receiving sometimes half the funding of schools that white children attend to. You're already starting to see the white population in New York City declining. So to keep schools white, you have to keep white schools partially empty. Meanwhile, the Black population is rising.

And so they are stuffing Black kids into Black schools. And some of the schools in Black neighborhoods become so crowded that they begin to send Black kids to schools in shifts. Even though there are empty white schools not far away. That's right. So in some cases, they're getting half the education of white kids. And what activists in New York City are arguing is that the conditions that Black children are facing in New York City actually look very similar to the conditions that Black children are facing in a place like Alabama. And achievement tests are also reflecting that.

So Black children's test scores in New York City are sometimes worse than test scores in parts of the South. And when does this all come to a head? So it comes to a head in 1964. The Black and Puerto Rican communities in New York City have had enough, and they stage, the children stage a walkout. We're coming down here today for a peaceful, peaceful. We're not going to be violent.

We're going to try not to as much as possible. They do a one-day boycott where about 460,000 black and Puerto Rican students do not show up to school that day. All we want is equal education. That's all. Equal education. It's actually the largest demonstration for civil rights in the history of the United States, but one almost no one has heard of. And what comes of that day of protest in New York? It's kind of amazing the backlash that those activists and those students faced for daring just not to show up for a day.

So the editorial board of the New York Times basically calls them, you know, a bunch of scofflaws, truants who are skipping school by adult sanction. And a lot of the white supporters get very angry. They feel like the Black and Puerto Rican communities are pushing too hard, that this was a sign of them getting out of control and not being practical. The New York City Public Schools, however, responds by deciding to implement a very small, very limited busing program for desegregation between 30 Black and Puerto Rican schools and 30 white schools. And how does that go?

All hell breaks loose. The white parents do not respond well to this idea of even a very minor busing plan. And they come together and stage a protest of their own. They do a march. or protest of their own. They do a march, and what's fascinating about this is they, at this time, had studied what wasn't working with white resistance in the South. And they decide that they are actually going to model their protest after the civil rights movement and the tactics of the civil rights movement.

Well, we feel that we can prove as much as our opponents who use the same tactics. We feel that we have as much right as they. These are our civil rights and we're taking advantage of them. Black children coming into their schools or their children going into Black schools. So they picked this race-neutral term of busing, and they're saying, we have a right for our children to go to neighborhood schools. This is our civil right. We won't bus, no! We won't bus, no! You see, then, white communities across the country,

particularly in the Northeast and the Midwest, also saying, this is how we are going to protest. I wouldn't care if they were green or purple. It's the idea of putting my kid on a bus when I have a school right across the street from where they should go. It's a playbook that becomes adopted in white communities all across the Midwest and the Northeast. Just because I'm white doesn't mean that the 14th Amendment doesn't, doesn't be fighting me either. I am white and I want my rights. Protesters against busing, quote unquote, stage a march on Washington.

A group of mothers from Michigan today completed a 44-day walk to Washington to protest school busing. Which, of course, follows the march on Washington that Dr. King had. We've labored long and we've been through a great deal of pain, but it's worth it because we have given birth now to the rekindling of the government of the people, by the people and for the people. Look, you're here. So it becomes very, very successful. So their explicit argument is mostly about convenience. We're not racist, but this is inconvenient and it's wrong. Yes.

The problem is when busing is being ordered in the North, when Black kids are being bused into white neighborhoods, which means white kids are still in their neighborhood schools, those Black kids are being met with violence. I think that makes it clear that it was not just about wanting your kids to stay close to home. It was really about not wanting your kids to be in schools with large numbers of Black kids. And the Supreme Court addresses this in 1971 when it takes up busing for the first time in a case known as Swan v. Mecklenburg County. And in that case, the court upholds busing as a tool for desegregation. And it says that, yes, you should be able to attend your neighborhood school, but absent a constitutional violation, there would be

no basis for judicially ordering assignment of students on a racial basis. All things being equal, with no history of discrimination, it might well be desirable to assign pupils to schools nearest their homes. But all things are not equal in a system that has been deliberately constructed and maintained

to enforce racial segregation. This is like one of my favorite passages of all the rulings on school segregation that the court made. Because it's so rare that you see the Supreme Court so starkly laying out that the segregation we see was intentional.

And we have to be just as intentional about undoing the segregation. You have to move bodies around. You actually have to undo what they call the dual system of black schools and white schools. Integration means one can look across the school system and not see black schools or white schools, but simply schools. We'll be right back. Okay, so despite these anti-bussing movements, bussing is the law of the land. Take us back to the South.

What are the results of this policy there? It's kind of remarkable. I think it's been a beneficial experience for all of them, without exception. You see the South going from, in 1964, a full decade after Brown, just 2% of black children were attending a desegregated school. Within eight years, you had the majority of black children attending desegregated schools. So very, very quickly, the dominoes fall in the South when the South is being blanketed with desegregation orders, and when the court says you actually have to move bodies,

the South moves bodies. And what I've generally seen is that they have left one secluded part of the city and become a part of this nation. And black and white kids are attending schools together. Last year when I rode the bus well, I thought people were going to make fun of me, but it wasn't bad at all, and now I ride the bus every day. The South goes from complete apartheid

to being the most integrated region of the country in a matter of 10 years. If this isn't a valuable thing for a child, and if this isn't part of a child's education, and a part of his becoming a citizen, then I don't really know what is. Bussing can work, but it has to work under certain conditions.

It's a very brief moment in time where all three branches of the federal government actually work together to secure the civil rights of Black children in the South. And when we put our minds to it moment in time where all three branches of the federal government actually worked together to secure the civil rights of Black children in the South. And when we put our minds to it and we decided that this is what we were going to do, it actually was extremely effective. And amazingly, most white people in the South, once they were forced to, simply dealt with it. And what about the North? So the North is always a different story. What happens in the North is judges are also ordering busing for desegregation.

But the North is geographically organized in a very different way than the South. The South was organized around these countywide districts because it was simply much more agrarian. And you didn't have multiple large population centers. So they just made one big school district that would cover usually a single big city and then all of its suburbs and its rural areas. The North, of course, was much more densely populated and developed in a very different way. So you had multiple school districts in a single county, which meant if you were going to get desegregation, you would have to cover every single school district in that county. And most times you would have a

city and a judge would say this city schools are very segregated and it would order busing within that city. And then white people would just leave. Why wouldn't judges in the North order these metropolitan style desegregations like we saw in the South and just disregard these broken up school districts? Well, a judge in the North did attempt to do that. So in the late 1960s, Black parents in Detroit filed a lawsuit and they sued the city of Detroit for unconstitutionally segregating their kids. The case lands in the court of Judge Roth, and he orders a metropolitan desegregation order, a busing plan that would bus white kids from the suburbs into the black city of Detroit. And he orders that because he becomes convinced by the case that the NAACP puts on that housing segregation was making it

impossible to integrate black kids, but also that that housing segregation was also intentional and therefore unconstitutional. So he orders this plan, and that plan is struck down by the Supreme Court. To approve the remedy ordered by the court in these circumstances would impose on the 53 outlying districts not shown to have committed any constitutional violation, a wholly impermissible remedy. It says that you cannot bus students across school district lines for integration unless you show that every one of those white suburbs had discriminated against black students too. It is clear that the case was decided before these 53 districts

were given any chance to show that they had committed no violations of anyone's constitutional rights. But that, of course, is very impossible because if you are a white suburb that did not allow black people to settle there, there's no record that you discriminated against black students. And it also sends a very powerful message to white people in the North that if you want to avoid integration, all you have to do is move a couple miles up the road to an all-white community with its all-white schools. Because the busing will not require you to leave. Exactly. The busing will not penetrate that invisible municipal line. So a lot of times we hear that busing is to blame for white flight. I would argue really, though, it's that ruling that allows white families to know we can just move and we can avoid this, which you could not do in the South. That really accelerates white flight. The court is largely responsible for that.

And we do see larger numbers of white people leaving cities after that ruling. So in this case, busing within a district didn't work. But the kind of busing that could have been effective, that could have worked, was essentially made impossible. Absolutely. And that's what you see then occurring all across the Northeast and the Midwest, where judges are finding that black students' rights have been violated, but there's no remedy because there's no white kids left in the district and you can't bus out to the suburbs where all the white kids are. There's no white kids left in the district, and you can't bus out to the suburbs where all the white kids are. So with that in mind, I wonder if you could take us through the next decade or so of busing. What happens to not just make it less effective, but to actually put an end to it? So there's two stories that are happening at the same time. In the North, there's no real large-scale efforts to desegregate after that.

In the South, you see that desegregation is happening and it ends up peaking in 1988. So what does that look like? What does it look like at its best? So after, you know, 20 years of really trying, by 1988, almost half of Black kids are attending majority white schools. But that means that even at the peak of desegregation in this country, most black kids were still not in majority white schools. That was the best the country could do. That was the best the country did do. And you said that 1988 was a peak. What happened after 1988? Reagan gets elected and he wants to try to close out these court orders. So he turns his Justice Department to trying to end court orders, where before the Justice Department was fighting on

behalf of Black students and civil rights groups to expand integration. Now it's siding with school boards to close these orders out. So you see a wave of school desegregation orders being ended in the South. And once those orders are ended, school districts can pretty much do anything to resegregate schools as long as they don't explicitly do it for racist reasons. Hmm. Nicole, which part of this history do you think is most overlooked when people say things as they did after the debate, that busing failed? I think there are two things that are really overlooked. One, in order to argue that busing failed, you have to ignore the entire region of the South, which is where half of Black Americans live, because it was tremendously successful in the South. And the other thing that you have to look at is this belief that busing was not actually good for Black kids.

And as someone who has bused myself, I would never argue that it wasn't difficult. But strictly in terms of did busing break up racial caste in this country? And the answer is yes. That Black kids who got access to desegregated schools, not only did it close or help narrow the racial achievement gap, but also change the trajectory of their lives. They were less likely to live in poverty. They were more likely to graduate from college. They earned more money as adults. They were less likely to be involved in the criminal justice system.

And they even were healthier and lived longer. That's really what desegregation was designed to do. And that's how desegregation worked in the places where we actually tried. And why is that, do you think? The evidence is actually very clear on this. And I want to make sure that no one who listens to this takes away the message that something about sitting next to white kids makes black kids smart.

But what sitting next to white kids does for black kids is it ensures they get the education that we have always reserved for white kids in this country. If they want to get the same resources as white kids, unfortunately, they have to be in the same classrooms as white kids. And I think one of the most poignant examples of this is a story that Black people at one of the prominent Black high schools in Charlotte tell the day they knew the integration was coming to their school, which is a crew of maintenance people arrive at the high school in Charlotte,

and they fix that school up. And they put the things in the lab that were supposed to be there and the new textbooks in the school. And that's how they knew that integration was coming. Because suddenly, when white kids were going to be there, these facilities were not good enough anymore, even though they had been just fine for the Black kids attending there. That is unfortunately the way that race has always worked in this country, is we have never disentangled race from resources, and we've never shown that we believe that Black kids are deserving of the same resources as white kids. I would argue that when you look at all the other ways we could have attempted to integrate our schools, busing was actually the most effective tool. And it was the most effective because it was the most immediate.

Everything else that we could do and that we should do, integrate our housing, build new schools in areas that allow them to be more easily integrated, all of these things would have taken a very long time, decades even. But busing could happen tomorrow. And I think it was because it was so immediate and because it was so effective that that's why we fought against it so hard. Because we really didn't want to desegregate our schools. We just wanted to pretend that we wanted to. We killed busing because it worked too well. Yes, that's what I would argue. Busing did not fail. We failed.

Nicole, thank you very much. Thank you. I appreciate it. We'll be right back Here's what else you need to know today I seek recognition to give notice of my intent to raise a question of the privileges of the House The form of the resolution is as follows. Impeaching Donald John Trump, President of the United States, of high misdemeanors. On Wednesday, the House of Representatives blocked the first attempt to impeach President Trump since the Democrats took control of the House in January.

Resolved that Donald John Trump, President of the United States, is unfit to be President. Unfit to represent the American values of decency and morality, respectability and civility, honesty and propriety, reputability and integrity. The resolution to impeach, a response

to the president's attacks on four Democratic congresswomen, was introduced by Representative Al Green, a Democrat from Texas, but was opposed by the majority of his fellow Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. With all the respect in the world for Mr. Green, we have six committees that are working on following the facts in terms of any abuse of power, obstruction of justice, and the rest that the president may have engaged in, that is the serious path that we are on.

Not that Mr. Greene is not serious, but we'll deal with that on the floor. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bavaro. See you tomorrow.