White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation

Freedom of Choice — Yes! Busing — Never!

24 Freedom of Choice—Yes! Busing—Never! In the spring of 1970, my fourth grade year, I was playing Monopoly with Annemarie in her basement when I came across a red bumper sticker next to a punching bag. “Freedom of Choice—Yes! Busing—Never!” it read. “What’s this?” I asked. Annemarie shrugged. “My father put that there.” I told my mother when I got home. I expected her to wave her hand and say, “Oh, it’s just something silly.” Instead, she put down the spoon she was using to stir the broccoli boiling on the stove. She wiped her hands on the dish towel and kept her back turned for a minute, her shoulders hunched in her blue cardigan. “What’s Freedom of Choice?” I asked. “That means people can choose any school they want to. They usually end up choosing the nearest one, so they can walk,” she said. “Like we walk to Mary Munford?” I said. She nodded, and then turned back to the stove. “Changes are coming,” she said finally. She explained that the city was trying to find a way for black and white children to go to school together, as we had in Chicago. “What’s the big deal?” I said. “Well, in Chicago, we all lived in the same neighborhood. It’s not like that here. Black children and white children usually live too far away from each other to walk to the same schools,” she said. “A lot of people don’t want things to change here.” Freedom of choice in Richmond was being challenged because of a 1968 Supreme Court decision, Green v. County School Board of New Kent County. The court ruled that freedom of choice was not an aggressive enough approach to desegregating the two schools in this rural Virginia county near Richmond. In 1967, despite freedom of choice, only about 115 black children had enrolled in the formerly all-white school; no white children had enrolled in the black school. 25 In its decision, the court called for a stronger, more forceful, and speedier plan to ensure integration in the two schools. Spurred by that decision, the NAACP filed a challenge to Richmond ’s freedom of choice plan. U.S. District Court judge Robert R. Merhige Jr. heard the case, and in the spring of 1970 he ruled that the Richmond School Board had to come up with a plan that would eliminate “racially identifiable” public schools. That year, there were approximately fifty-two thousand students in Richmond’s public schools. My elementary school was close to 100 percent white; other schools were close to 100 percent black. Busing was one of the plans for redistributing the racial mix. The editorial pages of the newspapers, the morning Richmond Times-Dispatch and the afternoon News Leader, opposed “forced busing.” The News Leader gathered thirty-seven thousand signatures on a petition opposing the “court-ordered abolition of Freedom of Choice.” In the 1950s, the News Leader had also supported the massive resistance movement. Through this movement, white politicians led by Senator Harry F. Byrd helped shut down schools in Charlottesville, Norfolk, and other Virginia cities rather than allow desegregation. The segregationists, which included Virginia’s governor and attorney general, opposed federal interference in local schools. Integration, they argued, would destroy public education and lead to immoral race mixing. Their sense of honor and cherished way of life was at stake, and they were determined to fight back. It took the federal courts, enforcing the Brown decision, to make the schools reopen. The last holdout was Prince Edward County, which managed to keep its public schools closed from 1959 to 1964. Once Judge Merhige’s desegregation ruling was announced, there was a buzz around Mary Munford about who would stay in the school, who would move to the suburbs, and who would try to go to private school. Annemarie told me that as soon as she got into a private school, she would go. The details of Richmond’s desegregation plan were still being negotiated, but it was clear that the start of the next school year would bring changes. When Mom came to pick me up from playing at Annemarie’s house a few days later, Annemarie’s father met her at the door. 26 He stood stiffly, his haircut so bristly it looked like he was in the military. “You’re not thinking of trying to...