Busing Debacle: The Rout of Equal Opportunity Schooling

Craig Uffman -
“In recent years, what I think is important progress, and this project is a beautiful embodiment of this progress, and that’s the talk that we have finally begun in this country about the questions of structural racism.” -Dr. Kevin Boyle

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In this eye-opening episode, we welcome back Dr. Kevin Boyle. In the previous episode, Dr. Boyle reminded us of important parts of the 20th century Civil Rights Movement regarding, in particular, how housing policies and private practices sculpted the racial topography with which we struggle today.

Dr. Boyle is a professor at Northwestern University, specializing in the history of the 20th century United States. He has a particular focus on modern American social movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. Boyle has a long list of publications and honors including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew Carnegie Corporation. He is the highly acclaimed author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and received the National Book Award for Nonfiction and many others.

In today’s episode, we pick up where we left off as a segue into our discussion on education and schools’ desegregation. What progress did we make in the 60s and 70s, and how has that progress impacted us today? Dr. Boyle connects the housing regulations we discussed in the last episode to the problems the country faced in schools during that time. Although Dr. Boyle shares that our progress continues to be painfully slow, he gives us grounds for hope as we continue to try to move forward in understanding the structural racism of the past and present.

Questions for Clergy and Other Group Leaders

  1. What was schooling like for persons of color?  What de facto public policies did we sustain that distinguished what was possible for whites and persons of color in both the South and the North?
  2. What constitutional crisis did the Little Rock Nine provoke when the Arkansas governor ordered the National Guard to prevent them from attending a White school? What federal policy arose from that crisis?
  3. What educational crisis did President Nixon inherit and how was it resolved?
  4. How did busing seek to desegregate the schools and how was it received by Whites and Blacks? What crucial limitation did the Supreme Court of the United States place on busing that resulted in a hardening of the color lines in our cities, strengthening structural racism?

Show Notes

  • [3:07] - Dr. Boyle starts today by reminding us about housing and the accessibility of housing in the 1950s and 1960s.
  • [4:22] - In Dr. Boyle’s book, he demonstrates how Blacks pushed back against the system from the 1920s onward.
  • [5:01] - Three times, the United States Congress tried to pass legislation that would make housing practices of the 50s and 60s illegal. It failed twice but passed in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • [5:50] - Although the Fair Housing Act of 1968 passed, many discriminatory practices continued due to lack of enforcement.
  • [6:23] - Dr. Boyle illustrates current segregation in housing with the 2010 census data. Housing is still to this day the most enduring form of segregation.
  • [8:54] - Shifting to the topic of education, Dr. Boyle and Dr. Uffman discuss the NAACP’s long legal campaign against the legal segregation of schools.
  • [9:50] - Brown v. Board of Education is a landmark case, but Dr. Boyle points out that it only applied to those states where school segregation was legal. The ruling was ambiguous, and not much changed.
  • [10:55] - The school board in Little Rock, Arkansas, decided to work with the NAACP and the federal court to desegregate their schools by bringing nine black students into their all-white schools.
  • [11:52] - Bringing in nine students of color created a considerable backlash from the community’s Whites. At the last minute, the governor of Arkansas called the National Guard to prevent them from entering the school.
  • [12:41] - Dr. Boyle explains why the Arkansas governor’s actions caused a constitutional crisis and how the Little Rock Nine insisted on their rights to enter the school.
  • [14:31] - Dr. Uffman points out that this problem lasted weeks, and the world witnessed America’s contradictions.
  • [15:57] - Eisenhower was known not to support desegregation, but Dr. Uffman points out that he pushed his own beliefs aside to uphold the law.
  • [17:27] - Little Rock became infamous, but it was a local case. As courageous Blacks insisted on their right to attend desegregated schools, similar scenarios unfolded across the United States in the 1960s.
  • [18:23] - Reminding us that Brown v. Board of Education only affected those states in which segregated schools were legal, Dr. Boyle explains how schools in states that were stalling this process were forced to make changes immediately when the Supreme Court clarified previously ambiguous language in their ruling.
  • [19:03] - When Nixon came into office in 1969, he faces the situation of northern schools resisting desegregation directives as well.
  • [19:40] - The problem states were now faced with was how to desegregate schools since neighborhoods remained segregated.
  • [20:03] - The most common solution to this was busing, and as the federal government directed busing Blacks to formerly white schools and Whites to formerly black schools, parents hated it.
  • [21:44] - Dr. Boyle explains that busing was a critical and radical moment in the Civil Rights movement because it forced millions of Whites into having a personal stake in civil rights.
  • [22:18] - Reminding us of the White flight they discussed in the previous episode, Dr. Boyle explains how the courts required these segregated suburbs to bus students to different schools as well.
  • [23:40] - Dr. Boyle uses Detroit’s example to illustrate cross-district busing as there were so few Whites in Detroit following White Flight.
  • [24:18] - The Supreme Court ruled that cross-district busing was not constitutionally necessary, creating color lines between suburbs and cities. Once that ruling gets handed down in 1974, schools’ integration stops and schools become increasingly segregated again.
  • [26:16] - Dr. Uffman describes the limitations of American federalism starting in the Reconstruction era and the effects of said limitations during the Civil Rights Movement of the 20th century.
  • [28:34] - The federal government in the 60s and 70s made it clear that no state or local entity had the right to segregate. The government used Little Rock as an example of the federal government’s will to use force, if necessary, to ensure the desegregation of schools.
  • [29:22] - Dr. Boyle describes the attempts of enraged Whites across the nation to claim that they have rights to segregated schools.
  • [30:20] - The fear of and anger at federal intervention still run deep in politics today.
  • [32:54] - Dr. Boyle explains what he thinks is the significant progress we are making in finally talking about the question of structural racism.
  • [34:45] - Dr. Boyle shares his immigrant father’s personal story building his career in a bank through hard work. He is very proud of this, but as a historian, he knows that there was not a single bank in 1953 when his father got his teller job that would hire Blacks. His anecdote illustrates how his father benefitted from structural racism.

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