Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (4 page)

They had good reason to be somber, for conflicts over racial issues in the public schools rocked many American communities in the 1970s. Some of these controversies featured the efforts of public schools in the South, which were finally forced to desegregate following federal pressure and court rulings between 1968 and 1971, to delay or evade the law. Nixon, while sympathetic to such delays and evasions, counseled southern whites to obey the federal courts, most of which in the 1970s remained firm in their opposition to state-sponsored segregation. As a result, most southern schools capitulated: As of the late 1970s, public schools in the South had become the least segregated in the nation. They remained so, along with schools in the West, for the remainder of the century.
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Given the potential in the early 1970s for the resumption of the angry massive resistance that had stymied implementation of the
Brown
decision between 1954 and 1968, this was a welcome change.

No such movement toward more racially balanced schools (or toward inclusive racial relations of any kind) took place in many areas of the North, where de facto residential and school segregation, sometimes enforced in intimidating and violent ways, had long flourished. Though private decisions (parents moving their families to predominantly white neighborhoods) generated a good deal of this segregation, public actions (zoning ordinances, the placement of new schools, decisions about bus routes) solidified it.
¹⁹
Brown v. Board of Education
had not challenged such practices; it targeted only state-mandated (de jure) segregation where it existed, in the South, the border states, and portions of other states. Foes of court-ordered directives for greater integration in other areas cheered a bitterly contested Supreme Court ruling of 1974,
Milliken v. Bradley
, which determined, five to four, that mostly white suburbs had no constitutional obligation to merge with predominantly black cities (such as Detroit, focus of the case) in order to create metropolitan school districts within which white and black students might be bused to achieve better racial balance. Justice Marshall dissented, observing, “Unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together.” He added prophetically, “In the short run, it may seem to be the easier course to allow our great metropolitan areas to be divided up each into two cities—one white and one black—but it is a course, I predict, our people will ultimately regret.”
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Strife in Boston, where court-ordered busing to overcome deliberate racial segregation in the public schools started in 1974, stunned liberals who had hoped for peaceful accommodation in America’s “cradle of liberty.” Three days before the schools were scheduled to open, a crowd of white activists belonging to ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Schools) marched on the Federal Building in Boston. When Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy, a liberal backer of the court order whose own children attended private schools, appeared at the scene, the crowd set after him, chased him inside, and banged on barricaded glass doors until they shattered.

On the first day of school in September, only 13 of some 550 white students from South Boston, a heavily Irish American, economically troubled, blue-collar area, showed up in Roxbury, a predominantly black neighborhood to which they had been assigned. Only 100 or so of the 1,300 blacks from the Roxbury area who had been directed to attend South Boston High, a previously white school, dared appear. Whites jeered and pelted them with rocks and bottles, injuring nine black students and damaging eighteen buses. Scattered violence continued: In December, a black student at South Boston was stabbed, forcing the school to shut down for a month. Police had to guard many schools. Shots zinged into the lobby of the
Boston Globe
, which supported the busing, whereupon newspaper managers felt obliged to station sharpshooters on its roof. Large numbers of white students boycotted these schools throughout the year.
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Though the violence in Boston, long a cauldron of racial, class, and ethnic furies, dominated the headlines, interracial hostilities gripped hundreds of other towns and cities in the late 1970s, the peak years of angry standoffs over court-ordered busing. By 1979, it was estimated that 1,505 American school districts educating more than 12 million students were operating under orders to achieve better racial balance. These orders affected nearly 30 percent of all public school children.
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Many other districts hurried “voluntary” busing plans into service in order to avert litigation. While a few cities managed to cope fairly well with busing orders—Charlotte, Seattle, and Austin were often mentioned in this respect—most did not. Emboldened by the
Milliken
decision, many white parents seized the first opportunity they could to move to white suburbs. Though widespread out-of-the-city migration had long preceded the advent of court-ordered busing—suburbanization has a long history—the racial controversies surrounding schools in the 1970s clearly accelerated the process. In Boston, the number of white students in the public schools dropped from 45,000 in 1974 to roughly 16,000 by 1987.
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“White flight” vividly demonstrated the enduring power of racist fears and misunderstandings. These controversies quickly clouded the political arena, provoking widespread unease about court-ordered busing, from blacks and whites alike. A considerable minority of black parents, questioning the supposed virtues of greater racial balance in schools—who could say that blacks achieved better just because they went to the same school building with whites?—resisted sending their children off on buses to distant schools, the more so because it often seemed that the bus routes for blacks were longer. Neighborhood schools, they added, enabled their children to participate in afternoon activities, such as sports, and parents to take part in PTAs and other school-related organizations. Because of white flight, they said, bus routes and school assignments kept changing, weakening the identification of parents and children with particular schools. School administrators who echoed these complaints grumbled that this never-ending process of remapping bloated transportation budgets.

A substantial majority of white parents, many of them working-class people whose children were the most affected by busing, loudly backed these arguments. They emphasized that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been color-blind. Its key clause regarding schools, Title IV, stated that desegregation “shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance.” Whites of this persuasion demanded to know how and why officials in non-elected, “elite” institutions—notably the ever more intrusive courts—had been allowed to “hijack” the statute and to run away with public policy. This, they said, was “liberal social engineering” of the worst sort. It turned innocent children into “guinea pigs,” subjecting them to the travails of long bus rides, schooling in faraway neighborhoods, and frightening interracial tensions.

More generally, policies such as busing convinced many Americans that “big government” and “liberalism” had to be challenged. Backlash such as this was hardly new at the time; during the supposedly liberal 1960s, conservative complaints such as these had become attractive to millions of people, thereby helping Nixon to become president. But controversies over busing surely sharpened such antagonisms in the 1970s. Then and in the future, Americans continued to have profoundly ambivalent feelings about policy-making in Washington. On the one hand, they demanded a range of rights and entitlements. On the other, they denounced the evils of big government.

Mobilizing politically, white voters sparked near unanimous opposition by white officeholders to court-ordered busing. In 1974, the Democratic Congress passed, and Nixon signed, a law that among other things prohibited the use of federal aid to pay for court-ordered busing. In 1975, reinforcing
Milliken,
Congress approved legislation that prohibited the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from requiring school systems to transport students beyond their neighborhood schools for purposes of racial balance. President Ford signed it.
²⁴
In 1976, Jimmy Carter of Georgia, the Democratic presidential nominee, and Ford, his opponent, addressed the controversies caused by court-ordered busing. Ford said in July 1976: “It is a tragic reality that . . . busing under court order has brought fear to both black students and white students—and to their parents. No child can learn in an atmosphere of fear. Better remedies to right constitutional wrongs must be found.”
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By the late 1970s, some of the popular anger aroused by court-ordered busing was subsiding, in part because many urban leaders were seeking other ways, such as magnet schools, of attacking racial discrimination, and in part because many white parents who stayed put—mostly working-class and poor people who could not afford to move—decided that busing was not always so horrible as they had first imagined. Resenting middle-class suburbanites who called them racists, they learned to live with it. But a key reason for the slow easing of tensions over busing was that a great many white parents had sent their children to private schools or had moved to predominantly white suburbs, where they no longer had to confront the issue.

By then, Marshall’s prophecy that a chasm would divide large metropolitan areas (many of them growing blacker) from suburbs (many of them heavily white) had come to pass in a number of places. Blacks talked about a “white noose” that was choking the life out of the cities, and about “chocolate” cities and “vanilla” suburbs. In 1978, twenty-one of the nation’s twenty-nine largest school districts had a black majority of students, and three more were about to join them. Eight of these twenty-one majority-black districts had gone that way between 1968, when the threat of court-ordered busing had become real, and 1976.
²⁶
Thanks to demographic changes like these, and to overall population growth, the
number
(as opposed to the percentage) of black public school students who attended predominantly black schools was higher in 1980 than it had been in 1954.
²⁷
Meanwhile, white flight continued: By 2003, minorities were 86 percent of Boston’s public school students.

So it was that on the twenty-fifth anniversary of
Brown v. Board of Education
in 1979, the
New York Times
deplored the “glacial pace at which school integration is taking place in big-city school systems.” It added, “Those supporting integration are becoming increasingly lonely as black and Hispanic parents and leaders express mounting doubt about whether the little desegregation that can be achieved in the big cities is worth the cost and the effort.”
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This loneliness was to intensify in later years, when increasing numbers of blacks, like many whites, came to wonder if achieving “racial balance” in schools was worth all the fighting, or if such balance was effective in promoting educational progress or interracial toleration.

As battles over court-ordered busing began to subside, fights over affirmative action and minority “set-asides” rushed to the center of the political arena. Most of the framers of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had not anticipated such issues. Seeking to eliminate intentional discrimination, they had assumed that the law, notably Title VII concerning employment, would advance color-blind (and gender-blind) hiring and contracting. Democratic senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, the ardently liberal floor leader for the bill, had stood up in the Senate at the time to denounce the accusation by opponents that the legislation might sanction racial quotas. If that happened, he said, he would eat the pages of the bill “one page after another.”
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Humphrey, like others in the early 1960s, failed to perceive the extraordinary force of rights-consciousness, which was to produce a host of unintended consequences. Beginning in the late 1960s, liberal activists—many of them officials in new federal agencies such as the EEOC—broadened the reach of civil rights laws: to advance the rights of elderly workers in 1967, of non-English-speaking students in 1970, of women in 1972, of the physically and mentally handicapped in 1973, and of handicapped school-children in 1975. Moving beyond the color-blind principle—and gliding over the fact that the historical experience of African Americans (and Native Americans) had been uniquely brutal—they gradually expanded affirmative action and other anti-discrimination efforts so that in various ways these might include other minority groups of color.

The enforcement of affirmative action for women was relatively noncontroversial—and of considerable import for women in some areas of life, especially higher education. But the expansion of such programs to cover a range of minorities alarmed many observers at the time. Meg Greenfield, a columnist for
Newsweek
, wrote that America was creating an “ethnic bath, an affirmative-action program gone mad.”
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A host of voices seconded her, charging that such expansion promoted “reverse discrimination,” “Balkanization,” and “retribalization,” all of which endangered universalistic American values of equal treatment for all.
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White ethnics, a leading scholar later wrote, were getting a “raw deal.”
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