The New York Times, July 12, 2019: It was never about busing
When Senator Kamala Harris confronted former Vice President Joe Biden at the second Democratic presidential debate about his support of bills to ban busing for school desegregation during the 1970s and early ’80s, he gave a sort of denial. “I did not oppose busing in America,” he said. “What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education. That’s what I opposed.”
This quickly became one of the most talked-about moments of the debate. Many pundits suggested it was unwise for Harris to dredge up the racial hurts of a decades-old “failed” policy at a time when the Trump administration is caging children along the border and when Democrats are seeking to retake the White House.
But tellingly, there was little discussion about busing’s efficacy, at least not with facts, or about whether or not busing served its purpose of breaking apart the educational caste system.
That we even use the word “busing” to describe what was in fact court-ordered school desegregation, and that Americans of all stripes believe that the brief period in which we actually tried to desegregate our schools was a failure, speaks to one of the most successful propaganda campaigns of the last half-century. Further, it explains how we have come to be largely silent — and accepting — of the fact that 65 years after the Supreme Court struck down school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, black children are as segregated from white students as they were in the mid-1970s when Biden was working with Southern white supremacist legislators to curtail court-ordered busing.
When the Supreme Court handed down its radical ruling for racial justice, the white South began a systematic anti-integration campaign known as Massive Resistance. Senator James Eastland of Mississippi joined about one-fifth of the men serving in Congress when he signed the Southern Manifesto, a document sanctioning explicit white Southern resistance to the Supreme Court decision in Brown. Eastland was one of the segregationists whom Biden recently praised for practicing “civility” by working across political differences (he has since apologized for that comment). One of the issues Eastland worked with Biden on: banning busing for integration.
