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Desegregation busing



Desegregation busing in the United States (also known as simply busing) is the practice of assigning and transporting students to schools within or outside their local school districts in an effort to reduce the racial segregation in schools. While the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, many American schools continued to remain largely segregated due to housing inequality. In an effort to address the ongoing de facto segregation in schools, the 1971 Supreme Court decision, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, ruled that the federal courts could use busing as a desegregation tool to achieve racial balance.

Starting in 1940, the Second Great Migration brought five million blacks from the agrarian South to the urban and manufacturing centers in Northern and Western cities to fill in the labor shortages during the industrial buildup of World War II and for better opportunities during the post-war economic boom. Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) allowed them to settle in formerly white neighborhoods, contributing to racial tension. Meanwhile, the post-war housing boom and the rise of suburbia allowed whites to migrate into the suburbs. By 1960, all major Northern and Western cities had sizable black populations (e.g., 23% in Chicago, 29% in Detroit, and 32% in Los Angeles). Blacks tended to be concentrated in inner cities, whereas newer suburbs of most cities were almost exclusively white.

In the early 1990s, the Rehnquist Court ruled in three cases coming from Oklahoma City (in 1991), DeKalb County in Georgia (in 1992), and Kansas City (in 1995) that federal judges could ease their supervision of school districts "once legally enforced segregation had been eliminated to the extent practicable". With these decisions, the Rehnquist Court opened the door for school districts throughout the country to get away from under judicial supervision once they had achieved unitary status. Unitary Status meant that a school district had successfully eliminated segregation in dual school systems and thus was no longer bound to court-ordered desegregation policies.

The struggle to desegregate the schools received impetus from the Civil Rights Movement, whose goal was to dismantle legal segregation in all public places. The movement's efforts culminated in Congress passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Signed by President Lyndon Johnson, the two laws signaled the end of discriminatory voting practices and segregation of public accommodations. The importance of these two laws was the injection of both the legislative and executive branches joining the judiciary to promote racial integration. In addition, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 authorized the federal government to cut off funding if Southern school districts did not comply and also to bring lawsuits against school officials who resisted.

The impact of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling was limited because whites and blacks tended to live in all-white or all-black communities. Initial integration in the South tended to be symbolic: for example, the integration of Clinton High School, the first public school in Tennessee to be integrated, amounted to the admission of twelve black students to a formerly all-white school.

In 1978, a proponent of busing, Nancy St. John, studied 100 cases of urban busing from the North and did not find what she had been looking for; she found no cases in which significant black academic improvement occurred, but many cases where race relations suffered due to busing, as those in forced-integrated schools had worse relations with those of the opposite race than those in non-integrated schools. Researcher David Armour, also looking for hopeful signs, found that busing "heightens racial identity" and "reduces opportunities for actual contact between the races". A 1992 study led by Harvard University Professor Gary Orfield, who supports busing, found black and Hispanic students lacked "even modest overall improvement" as a result of court-ordered busing.

Some metropolitan areas in which land values and property-tax structures were less favorable to relocation saw significant declines in enrollment of whites in public schools as white parents chose to enroll their children in private schools. Currently, most segregation occurs across school districts as large cities have moved significantly toward racial balance among their schools.

In 1965 Massachusetts passed into law the Racial Imbalance Act, which ordered school districts to desegregate or risk losing state educational funding. The first law of its kind in the nation, it was opposed by many in Boston, especially less-well-off white ethnic areas, such as the Irish-American neighborhoods of South Boston & Charlestown, Boston.

In comparison with many other cities in the nation, Nashville was not a hotbed of racial violence or massive protest during the civil rights era. In fact, the city was a leader of school desegregation in the South, even housing a few small schools that were minimally integrated before the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. Despite this initial breakthrough, however, full desegregation of the schools was a far cry from reality in Nashville in the mid-1950s, and thus 22 plaintiffs, including black student Robert Kelley, filed suit against the Nashville Board of Education in 1955.

After a decade of this gradual integration strategy, it became evident that the schools still lacked full integration. Many argued that Housing Segregation was the true culprit in the matter. In 1970 the Kelley case was reintroduced to the courts. Ruling on the case was Judge Leland Clure Morton, who, after seeking advice from consultants from the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, decided the following year that to correct the problem, forced busing of the children was to be mandated, among the many parts to a new plan that was finally decided on. This was a similar plan to that enacted in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in Charlotte, North Carolina, the same year.

The transition was very traumatic as the court ordered that the plan be administered with "all due haste". This happened during the middle of the school term, and students, except those in their senior year in high school, were transferred to different schools to achieve racial balance. Many high school sports teams' seasons and other typical school activities were disrupted. Life in general for families in the county was disrupted by things such as the changes in daily times to get children ready and receive them after school, transportation logistics for extracurricular activities, and parental participation activities such as volunteer work in the schools and PTA meetings.






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