Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South: Louisville, Kentucky, 1945-1980

8. The Busing Crisis

251 8 The Busing Crisis For two decades, the question of equal educational opportunity in the public schools had become a back-burner issue in Louisville. The city prided itself on having resolved that problem when it integrated the schools to great national acclaim in 1956. Yet in the mid-1970s, conflict over school desegregation sparked Louisville’s worst race relations crisis of the postwar era. When, in September 1975, court-ordered busing began bringing black and white students together on a large scale in the newly merged city and county system, white opponents of integration launched a school boycott and mass demonstrations, the latter devolving into vandalism and rioting that required the intervention of the National Guard and earned the city condemnation from the national press. The local antibusing movement—the largest, most organized, and most vocal opposition seen during the civil rights era in Louisville—revealed the extent of resistance to further change in the racial status quo, particularly among whites in the newly developed suburban subdivisions just outside the city. Moreover, the rhetoric of the antibusers linked them to the rising New Right and tide of antigovernment conservatism that contributed to the hostile climate for progressive social activism.1 The crisis created by the antibusing movement, however, also produced an outburst of prointegration and antiracist activity on the part of traditional civil rights leaders, African American parents, and faithbased and secular human relations advocates. Some people and groups cared most about black access to good education and equal treatment in the schools. Many others focused on the interrelatedness of segregation in housing and schools. More important, the constituent parts 252 Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South of this coalition responded to what they saw as a rising, and frightening , level of open racism in the community. But just as the antibusing movement revealed the limits of the acceptance of integration by large segments of the local population, the experience of these prointegration activists over the next year raised questions about the efficacy of the traditional civil rights tactics of demonstrations, boycotts, public persuasion, and politics. Thus, during the busing crisis, a wide variety of groups and individuals rallied in an increasingly hostile climate to try to overcome not only the opposition to school integration but the persistent problem of racism, searching as they did so for a new combination of tactics that could be effective against an old enemy. In the decade and a half after Louisville received fulsome praise for the peaceful integration of its public schools, evidence mounted that the job was not done after all. Throughout the early 1960s, school officials reported steady progress in the number of black teachers on previously all-white faculties and the rising percentage of students who attended “mixed” schools. Observers noted, however, that often that mixture included only “one or two [students] of the minority race.” After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 threatened to cut federal funding for segregated schools, token integration and the continued existence of single-race schools drew increasing attention. In a study conducted in response to the law, the Kentucky Board of Education declared four schools in the city in danger of losing their support. Not long after, the HRC criticized the “limited integration of teachers, and administrative and supervising personnel” in the system. The most sweeping and damning indictment, however, came in the 1971 Kentucky Commission on Human Rights report Louisville School System Retreats to Segregation, which concluded that, over the preceding decade, the city schools had become racially isolated—when at least 90 percent of the student body was of one race—and in fact the polarization of the schools was worse than at any time since 1956. The report charged bluntly that “the Louisville school system has failed—either by design or by lack of effort—to deliver on the promise of full student and faculty desegregation.”2 In response to this growing body of evidence, the NAACP began to push local officials to integrate remaining single-race facilities and to expand numbers beyond tokenism. After the Supreme Court ruled against “freedom of choice” plans in Green v. County School Board of The Busing Crisis 253 New Kent County in 1968, African Americans threatened legal action if the city did not drop the transfer option. The local NAACP received guidance from the national organization, which was devoting more energy to the school issue in anticipation of...