Busing

In 1970, U.S. President Richard Nixon declared courtordered busing to be a violation of the doctrine of neighborhood schools and a futile effort at achieving a multiracial society. Two years later, Alabama governor George Wallace lambasted busing as, among other epithets, “asinine” and “mean.” As the antibusing backlash spread across the nation, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights warned that the United States faced a stark choice between living up to the promise of equal educational opportunity in the 1954 Brown decision or retreating to the 1968 Kerner Commission's forecast of separate and unequal black and white societies.

Battles over courtordered busing to overcome residential segregation—a school desegregation technique often labeled “mandatory busing,” “forced busing,” or “busing for racial balance”—exploded across metropolitan America in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. But the origins of the busing conflict can be traced to the immediate aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, when urban school districts in the South began to adopt Northernstyle desegregation plans that revolved around the allegedly raceneutral assignment of students to “neighborhood schools.” According to the pervasive regional distinction, enshrined in constitutional law and popular discourse, educational patterns in the South resulted from segregation in law (de jure), while schooling and housing patterns outside the South represented segregation in fact but not enforced by law (de facto). During the first half of the 1960s, the NAACP filed hundreds of desegregation lawsuits against Southern school districts and simultaneously initiated dozens of legal and administrative challenges to de facto segregation in the cities and suburbs of the North and West. The federal courts rejected almost all of the initial NAACP lawsuits against de facto segregation outside the South on the grounds that school districts were not responsible for racial imbalances that resulted from the housing market. The U.S. Congress endorsed this constitutional interpretation in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which specifically excluded from the scope of federal desegregation policy the transportation of students outside of their neighborhoods for the purpose of racial integration.

In a 1968 case involving a rural county in Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court charged localities that had operated legally segregated school systems with taking all necessary steps to eliminate racial discrimination. The NAACP responded with a comprehensive assault on the constitutional distinction between de jure and de facto segregation in metropolitan school districts, including exposure of the government policies that had produced and reinforced residential segregation in all parts of the nation, not just in the Jim Crow South. The spatial development of the postwar metropolitan landscape depended upon generous subsidies for suburban sprawl and efficient implementation of housing segregation, including discriminatory home mortgage financing by federal agencies, urban renewal and highway construction programs that concentrated minorities in inner city ghettoes, and exclusionary municipal zoning policies that sorted neighborhoods by race and class. In 1969, the NAACP's effort to link discriminatory housing policies to school desegregation litigation achieved its first major breakthrough in a case involving Charlotte, North Carolina, a consolidated district that included the surrounding suburbs of Mecklenburg County. In a landmark decision, District Judge James B. McMillan ordered the comprehensive integration of the countywide school system, including twoway busing that exchanged white students from the outlying suburbs and black students from the inner city.

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