American Patriotism, American Protest: Social Movements Since the Sixties

4. The Battles over Busing

C h a p t e r 4 The Battles over Busing Our cause is to retain freedom, just like George Washington. —Irene McCabe, anti-busing activist, Pontiac, Michigan The Anti-busers did not choose this issue. It came to us with our American heritage of liberty. —Sal Giarratani, Boston journalist and activist As the first of the bright yellow school buses rolled up outside South Boston High School on the morning of Thursday 12 September 1974 it was greeted by an angry mob. Chants of “Go home nigger,” and “Turn the bus over” erupted from the watching crowd of 500 or so whites. As a rock bounced off the side of the bus “a cheer arose from the youths on the sidewalks.” One bystander, described as a “pudgy man in a porkpie hat,” announced that “any white kid that goes to school out of his neighborhood should be shot, and any black kid that comes out of his neighborhood to school here should be shot.” As the buses continued to arrive, some of them containing only a handful of “neatly dressed, silent, often wide-eyed black students,” the crowd frequently burst into refrains from South Boston High’s football chant—“Here we go, Southie, here we go.”1 Meanwhile in the Hyde Park district—a “pleasant middle-class neighborhood of leafy streets lined with modest but attractive homes”— there was little violence.2 The local population, primarily “third and fourth generation Bostonians, many of Irish and Italian extraction,”3 preferred to support a boycott that saw local school attendance plum- 78 Chapter 4 met by 50 percent that opening day.4 Although the response in Hyde Park may have been more restrained, white resentment was still much in evidence: “Sullen groups of white parents watched from lawns and sidewalks and complained bitterly about losing their ‘freedoms’.” In 1968, fourteen years after its historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated schools were “inherently unconstitutional,” and aided by a Department of Health, Education and Welfare threatening to withhold funding from segregated school districts, the U.S. Supreme Court had finally moved to bring an end to the tokenism, obfuscation, and delay that had prevented meaningful integration from taking place.5 In Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, the nine justices ruled that school boards had an “affirmative duty” to take steps to ensure that segregation was “eliminated root and branch.” Moreover, they declared, school boards had to produce realistic plans for desegregation that promised to “work now.”6 In 1971, in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, the Supreme Court upheld large-scale busing as a means to achieve integration and stated that school boards would be judged on whether they had managed to achieve “the greatest possible degree of actual desegregation.”7 Beginning first in the South before moving north and west, busing— whether initiated by local school boards or mandated by the courts—was used as a means of desegregating the nation’s schools. Busing, and especially “two-way” busing (which involved the transfer of white children in addition to assigning black children to previously predominantly white schools), proved extremely controversial. Indeed, almost everywhere it was instigated whites (and some blacks) resisted it by marching, petitioning , withdrawing their children from the public schools, or moving to unaffected suburbs. Sometimes the protests became violent. In Lamar, South Carolina, in March 1970, a mob of 200 whites attacked two school buses that were transporting black students to a newly desegregated school. A Newsweek report described how “the whites broke through police lines and swarmed over the buses, smashing windows and ripping out ignition wires,” as the terrified black passengers “ducked behind seats and dived to the floor as rocks and clubs crashed through the windows.”8 In September 1975, anti-busing protesters attacked the police and set fire to school buses in Louisville, Kentucky.9 As J. Harvie Wilkinson, a circuit court judge and historian of school desegregation, has commented, the seemingly innocuous yellow school bus became the “flash point of domestic policy in the early 1970s” as busing “rubbed the raw nerve endings of American life.”10 Boston, with its tightly demarcated ethnic enclaves and fiercely parochial neighborhoods, generated the nation’s most virulent and most violent opposition to the busing of students to bring about school deseg- The Battles over Busing 79 regation.11 The city’s public school system...