TRUTH -AND SHAME -ABOUT BUSING
Caplan, Marvin
Fur years ago, when he wrote on busing for Dissent,' William Taylor cited as evidence for blacks still wanting integration the loud cheers with which an audience of black educators and leaders...
...There, in the course of ruling on a desegregation plan for Charlotte, North Carolina, the Court upheld busing as "a normal and accepted tool of educational policy" and underscored this by saying a "desegregation plan cannot be limited to the walk-in school...
...His bill was developed by the late Alexander Bickel...
...If despite this array of problems we still accept the proposition that integrated schools constitute an important, desirable, even "crucial" goal, as Derrick Bell once said, then where do we turn to for guidance and solutions...
...There and in a growing number of communities we see significant and heartening successes...
...When white middle-class parents, for instance, express their fear of the beatings and ripoffs their children may run into if they are sent to previously all-black city 383 schools—or when a liberal like Governor Philip Noel of Rhode Island injudiciously suggests that there can be little benefit in desegregation for the ghetto youngster who spends four hours in a suburban class room and 18 "in that sweathole with the drunken father and the mother who's out peddling her...
...In 1972 more than 71 percent of the black students in the North continued to attend predominantly black schools...
...The amendment that Majority Whip Robert C. Byrd succeeded in adding to the HEW appropriations bill for fiscal 1976 instructs the Department not to deny funds to a school district that refuses to transport students beyond the schools nearest their homes, even if more busing is needed to desegregate a system...
...If they do not draw the media attention that a Ford statement against busing does, they mean more...
...No doubt, public sentiment in support of desegregation had begun to wane by the time he took office...
...The heart of the 1964 law is Title VI, which empowers the federal government to cut off funds from any federally financed program administered in a discriminatory manner...
...This would simply make $2.25 billion available over the next three fiscal years to encourage development of "innovative desegregation programs and procedures...
...These methods are not to be despised...
...And his admonition to announced candidates to speak out on busing came with poor grace when one remembers how he himself waffled on the issue in 1972...
...Perhaps it is most striking and disheartening in those bastions of power where law is made and administered—in federal agencies, Congress, and the courts...
...For McGovern had nothing to lose...
...One need not look to polls to become aware of changing attitudes...
...only a rule of law which has told the lower federal courts to use their common sense to work out solutions to school segregation problems, and that the way to evaluate desegregation plans is to observe whether or not they really worked to bring about integration, has broken through the miasma of calculated analytical confusion which is used to defend segregation laws and practices...
...Robert Finch, his first HEW secretary, whose liberal credentials were always overestimated, wasted little time in tampering with the compliance apparatus HEW had established...
...There have been some hopeful signs since the Detroit decision...
...Surely not because they are pointy-headed radicals and "social experimenters...
...Civil Rights Commission conference last year, observed...
...For the fight to impose a restraint was begun not by Senator Byrd but by Senator Joseph Biden, generally considered to be a liberal Democrat...
...The Senate, which for more than a decade has turned back irresponsible onslaughts on school desegregation, did a turnabout last year...
...Representative Preyer speaks for many politicians and waverers when he talks of "reducing the emphasis on court-ordered busing and increasing the reliance on alternative methods chosen and developed locally...
...Then Nixon came to power, and in 1969 things began to fall apart...
...In his book on the Brown case, Simple Justice, Richard Kluger notes: "In 1944, the seventeen segregating states spent a total of $42 million busing white children to their schools...
...The right of black children to attend integrated public schools....," Bell said, "is a right that is crucial not only to black success but to black survival in this country...
...His pronouncements as president are in the same vein...
...Legislative plans for effecting desegregation on a nationwide basis have been introduced in both the House and Senate...
...Civil Rights Commission estimates that "if busing were increased only three percent and school attendance areas rearranged to promote integration, even in the largest cities, the number of black students attending majority-white schools would increase to over 70 percent...
...Among other current legislative proposals, one being offered by Senator John Glenn (D., Ohio), seems the least objectionable...
...James Collins (R., Tex...
...While some are well-intentioned, the net effect of almost all would be to hamper the courts...
...Last year, for instance, Rep...
...Fur years ago, when he wrote on busing for Dissent,' William Taylor cited as evidence for blacks still wanting integration the loud cheers with which an audience of black educators and leaders greeted a statement by Derrick Bell, a black professor of law at Harvard...
...The conventional notion that, on the issue of desegregation, he was trying to "put himself to the right of Ronald Reagan," is false...
...Those opportunities will come again—perhaps through legislation but more likely through some as yet unforeseen breakthrough in the courts...
...Three groups are in contention there: those embattled liberals who are opposed to any congressional intervention, those who seek to stop desegregation, and those few who are making an effort, sometimes even a genuine effort, to formulate a national plan...
...It will be raised again in other school cases now moving up to the Supreme Court...
...The Democratic party plank on the subject is a fairly good one, and perhaps the most we can expect is Carter's support of it...
...The Ford bill was accompanied by what has become a genre piece for all such 387 legislation—a statement professing the sponsor's commitment to "equality of education" for all Americans...
...There is, at such times, a pervasive sense of people in retreat...
...Indeed if we abandoned the goal of integration, if we tried to be separate but become equal, we would have to reduce spending for each student in the suburbs—or we would have to raise those who now have the least to the level of the most expensive public education...
...Their big gun—a constitutional amendment that would foreclose busing as one of the means available for desegregating schools—appears to be spiked...
...Even so, how can the commitment to equality be less than absolute...
...Last year, in the Wilmington case, the Court 389 affirmed a lower court decision leading to metropolitan desegregation...
...He drew back from that position in the face of the outcry he provoked...
...In almost every session since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, there have been moves to thwart desegregation, usually by putting curbs on HEW's power to enforce Title VI...
...It doesn't work in the North, either...
...Staffed in the '60s with people committed to integration, HEW was able to achieve notable gains in school desegregation, mostly in the South...
...Why do federal judges who impose busing plans on angry communities rule as they do...
...school cases, those coming from the South, the differences between white and black schools were stark enough to convince all but the most myopic judges that separate but equal does not work...
...There is a strong suspicion among civil rights lobbyists that, while there may be majorities in the House and Senate for antibusing riders, the two-thirds necessary to amend the Constitution would not be forthcoming...
...Farley's conclusion is bleak: "Residential segregation makes school integration more difficult to accomplish, and as the proportion of black students in large school districts increases, it will become necessary to bus more and more children longer distances to achieve integration of the schools...
...As Republican leader, he led the opposition to almost every major civil rights bill...
...It is encouraging, too, to note the Court's 7-to-2 ruling in June that private schools cannot deny admission to black applicants...
...It is the fear of the NAACP's Clarence Mitchell, who leads those of us who lobby for civil rights in Washington, that any bill would then become the vehicle for something worse...
...it sets forth guidelines for them to follow and provides funds to help them accomplish their plans...
...Only integration can effectively lessen that control...
...less than 4 percent of them are traveling to comply with school desegregation orders...
...This is a more thoughtful bill than Ford's but it, too, has defects...
...But even with the trimming dictated by politics, a system for desegregating schools evolved that worked pretty well...
...With Ford's prompting, the Department has drafted an "antibusing" bill that the President has sent to Congress...
...A small number of waverers among its liberal members helped adopt an "antibusing" amendment of doubtful constitutionality...
...Nixon's public statements on busing were all against desegregation...
...ESEA, for the first time, made federal funds available to public schools, a prospect so tempting that even southern school districts were ready to try complying with the law in order to get the money...
...Deploring the "rigidity" of such civil rights forces as the NAACP, Bell sees in Plessy a possible alternative to integration...
...To paraphrase Winston Churchill's remark about democracy, they are—until you compare them to the others...
...Preyer's bill is harder to dismiss...
...It is symptomatic of today's shifting views on school desegregation that Bell now looks back on Plessy with something close to favor...
...In spite of such embattled figures as Boston's District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity, Jr., and Richmond's Judge Robert R. Merhige, Jr., and the late Judge Stephen J. Roth of Detroit—men whose commitment to their constitutional obligations never wavered—it may be that the federal courts, or at least five members of the Supreme Court, have reached the limit of what they are willing to do to accomplish desegregation...
...The courts continue to generate practically the only progress toward desegregation that we are making...
...Lately the opponents of desegregation seem to be winning—at least through the addition of "antibusing" amendments to pending bills...
...Faced with such defections, with rising doubts and reappraisals among expected allies, it is hard for anyone committed to an integrated society and to the schools as a principal instrument for integration to be sanguine...
...Separate but equal," he says, "may have been reoriented rather than overruled by Brown...
...Ford listened, thanked Mitchell—and, of course, continued to use the term...
...And there is little likelihood that the presidential candidates will discuss the issue in any calm or constructive way...
...In the absence of conclusive evidence that school desegregation has improved the academic performance of black children or race relations among the children who now are mixed—hardly surprising if one considers how brief our experience with desegregation has been, the waverers often suggest that integrated education may not be worth the effort...
...In the White House he continues to take the positions he took in the House...
...Last year's antibusing action by the Senate is probably more significant as a portent than as a matter of practical consequence...
...For these communities are becoming the laboratories for learning how to make integration work...
...and a growing number of cosponsors...
...Everywhere, they seek to find local alternatives and where they cannot, they order busing as a last resort...
...Given the prospect of such insulting changes in any bill, the best we can hope for are no bills at all...
...For in such areas, joining city and suburbs into a single system appears to offer the only effective way to counter white evasion...
...Wherever busing is an issue, there is evidence of eroding support among those who ought to be working for desegregation...
...Often forgotten, too, is that of the 18,000 school districts in this country, only a small fraction is involved in busing plans for desegregation...
...and in the Louisville case, it refused to review a decision calling for interdistrict desegregation...
...and now he's stuck with the strategy...
...The present strategy is to keep desegregation bills and antibusing amendments bottled up in committee and avoid a showdown...
...In the South there has been substantial progress...
...It is doubtful that this can be done...
...So much for ringing declarations...
...Under Attorney General Edward Levi, the Justice Department is considering a course of action that could do more to weaken desegregation efforts than anything attempted by his predecessors in the NixonFord administrations...
...6 The argument that opponents of desegregation sometimes make, that it is insulting to assume that blacks can learn only when they are seated next to whites, must be seen for what it is: diversionary nonsense...
...the growth of racially segregated private academies and parochial schools...
...Anyone who has witnessed the harrowing floor fights on antibusing amendments must recognize the accuracy of his apprehension...
...Things have not changed under Gerald Ford...
...A shift of one vote in the Supreme Court's ruling in the Detroit case would have sparked the formulation of metropolitanwide desegregation plans in large urban areas throughout the country...
...Initiated first by Dixiecrats, these moves have picked up northern supporters as desegregation suits have moved North...
...6The U.S...
...But during the primaries Carter ducked the issue, saying only that he was for "voluntary busing" of the sort they had back home, a plan that has caused much rancor in the black community in Atlanta and has generally been considered ineffective by the courts...
...Liberals like Jim O'Hara, Lucien Nedzi, and William Ford, all from Michigan, now work hand-in-glove with the segregationists...
...Surely not in the debates of an election year...
...Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal...
...Since there was very little money for education in the bill...
...The newest one was sent to Congress by the Administration on June 24...
...Wavering on desegregation is evident in Congress, too...
...One of those who shifted was Senator Henry Jackson, prompted, no doubt, by his presidential ambitions...
...What has meanwhile been obscured are the successes—in the communities where after some initial anguish people have come to terms with what the law requires of them...
...2"Waiting on the Promise of Brown," Duke University Law Review, Spring 1975...
...The best—or simplest—bill imaginable, once it hits the floor of the House or Senate, would be subject to amendment...
...the drop in white enrollment in 60 of the nation's 76 4 Duke University Law Review, Winter 1975...
...a rejection of racial discrimination and violence...
...that each advance may be offset, somewhere, by a defeat...
...But integration in this country has always had to be won against enormous odds...
...One hardly expected in 1971 that children from Charlotte would be coming north in 1975 to instruct Boston youngsters on how to live with busing...
...Judge Garrity ordered a desegregation plan involving busing for the schools of Boston because he found that "the defendents [the Boston School Committee and administration] have knowingly carried out a systematic program of segregation affecting all of the city's students, teachers, and school facilities and have intentionally brought about and maintained a dual school system...
...In defense of this slow, casebycase approach, Professor Norman Amker of Rutgers, at a U.S...
...and (3) limit the use of busing and other remedies to those schools that have become segregated through proven acts of unlawful discrimination...
...He and Bell and others now profess to have second thoughts about how far they are ready to go to achieve desegregation...
...the issue is and has been integration and whether we, as a nation, are willing to pay the heavy price, socially and financially, to achieve it...
...386 U III nquestionably, since 1954, the drive to dismantle the dual school system has lost momentum...
...and since most "busing" orders nowadays come from the courts and not the Department, it can be argued that the net effect of the Byrd Amendment is small, no matter how much political hay its sponsor made with it...
...And how did we reach this crisis in little more than 20 years...
...Nevertheless, it must be admitted that the busing controversy has put prointegration forces on the defensive...
...It is also heartening to note that the Court refused to review the Boston case...
...Complicating this unpromising situation are what sociologists call "second generation" desegregation problems: the possibility that the South is moving toward the northern pattern of residential segregation...
...It is simplistic and tempting to blame everything on Nixon...
...Ford's bill can be dismissed for what it is—an attempt to use the busing issue for political advantage...
...The proportion of black students attending predominantly white schools there has increased from less than 19 percent in 1968 to more than 44 percent in 1974...
...By 1968, it had become practically automatic: school districts that did not comply with HEW's directives or court desegregation orders knew that, under Title VI, the flow of federal money would simply stop...
...James Coleman said in a speech, "the courts are probably the worst instrument of social policy...
...While national attention focuses on the outcries and occasional violence, more and more communities are quietly accommodating to desegregation orders that require some transportation of students...
...and a recital of provisions that can only curtail or deny educational opportunity to minority youngsters...
...Two others were Senators Stuart Symington and Thomas Eagleton, responding to antibusing pressures in Missouri...
...In fact, the U.S...
...And in New Jersey, two state courts struck down restrictive zone ordinances designed to keep out the poor (blacks...
...This change should dismay anyone who shared the liberal jubilation back in 1954 when the Supreme Court, in the Brown decision, seemed at last to have overturned the pernicious Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine of 1896: that racially "separate but equal" facilities could still be constitutional...
...They have ordered a surprisingly small amount of it...
...There's not much other government action in support of desegregation...
...Civil Rights Commission, there is still a long way to go...
...James Coleman, sociologist at the University of Chicago and author of the 1966 study often cited in support of integration, who has now become a spokesman for those who fear that the desegregation of urban public schools is hastening a white flight from our cities...
...In arguing our position to doubters and the unconvinced, we should begin with the reminder that the issue is not "busing" and certainly not "forced busing," that foolish and deliberately misleading term...
...W V' here does that leave us, then, those of us still committed to the principles of the Brown decision...
...C IV onsider the situation in Congress...
...Perhaps the black students being bused to South Boston are going to schools no better than the ones they've left behind...
...The issue is not dead...
...How far have we progressed toward that goal and how far short are we of reaching it...
...If we cannot look to Congress for leadership and probably not to Jimmy Carter, and surely not to the Ford White House, we must come back to the courts...
...2 "Busing: Realities and Evasions," Dissent, Fall 1972...
...But contrary to the impression this creates, this is what the courts have always done...
...And now that the turmoil in Pontiac has died down and the protesters have stopped burning buses and launching petition campaigns to recall one of the bravest men in the U.S...
...Civil Rights Commission points out, desegregation has reduced busing in many areas of the South where it was once used to keep schools segregated,5 and many of the newly created segregated private schools are often dependent on busing...
...Yet with William 0. Douglas gone and the position of Judge John Paul Stevens as yet unknown, one cannot predict what the Court will do in upcoming school cases...
...He said: Busing is one way to pay the bill for the ancient regime of racism...
...Morris Udall is one of his cosponsors...
...What is disquieting, however, is the new alignment of forces...
...Perhaps this has the sound of accepting too little...
...Every now and then in such encounters with the new uncertainty—a very old one, actually—the darker side of doubt peeps out...
...Derrick Bell is not the first waverer in the ranks of those who once were committed without compromise to integrated education...
...The occasional violence that a busing order may evoke—Boston for instance— commands so much national attention, it obscures such facts as the recent CBS sampling of public opinion in which people listed busing 29th among the problems they worry about...
...Perhaps only in a country as used to fakes and substitutes as ours could Gerald Ford's "decency and integrity" still strike millions of people as the real thing...
...Real progress toward dismantling our dual school system began 10 years later, under Lyndon Johnson, with the enactment, at his prodding, of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the federal education acts of 1965, particularly the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA...
...I have never seen an appropriation to make it a meaningful reality for every student in America...
...There may be other ways, but none of them will be painless or priceless...
...he compounded his defection by making a long speech in defense of its constitutionality...
...succeeded in adding to an energy conservation bill a rider that prohibits the use of any gasoline or Diesel fuel-powered vehicle to transport any public school student, other than one's own child, to a school further than the one closest to his home—at a penalty of $5,000 for each violation...
...Richardson Preyer (D., N.C...
...Even then, segregation in the North proved more stubbornly resistant...
...At the National Democratic Issues Convention in Louisville last November a former presidential candidate, George McGovern, took the floor to warn that for Democrats "busing" could be the new Vietnam...
...The Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) has virtually stopped enforcing school desegregation laws, unless it is forced to do so by the courts...
...But though civil rights groups have no trouble with this, Glenn's bill and Preyer's and others like them are all based on a shaky premise: that it is possible to enact rational federal legislation on the subject...
...Now, in an election year, with many congressional candidates ready to exploit the "busing" issue and President Ford certain to exploit it, there may be further turmoil before this session of Congress ends...
...In the case affecting Richmond, Virginia, in 1972, the Court, by a 4-to-4 decision, let stand an appellate ruling that rejected a merger of city and county schools...
...Most egregious among the shifts was probably Tom Eagleton's, for he counts for something among the liberals...
...It is tempting and probably useless to think of what might be done through the courts...
...Quite the contrary...
...largest school districts...
...Senate, Philip Hart, parents and students in that city are learning to live with integrated schools...
...School desegregation did not begin inI' earnest with the Brown decision, though it would be impossible without it...
...There were no heroes on "busing" among the candidates running in the primaries...
...The liberals who joined him in his fight, for motives not unlike his own, may foreshadow a shift that could eventually do more damage to desegregation than the Byrd Amendment does...
...But it was only a temporary retreat...
...He probably drew back from that because he was persuaded it was strategically unwise, because civil rights leaders shook him by suggesting such a move might encourage resistance and even fresh violence, and perhaps also because a number 385 of his legal peers questioned the wisdom of what he seemed to have in mind...
...The five-year limit flies in the face of recognition by both the Supreme Court and the Solicitor General, expressed in a recent brief, that a court must have flexibility and the right to continued supervision in devising a school desegregation plan...
...He was reacting, plainly, to the busing furor in his state of Delaware...
...We conclude that in the field of public education," a unanimous Court declared, "the doctrine of `separate but equal' has no place...
...On the basis of these estimates from HEW and the U.S...
...And the going is getting harder...
...Standing firm can have a marvelously calming effect, as George Meany and Leonard Woodcock demonstrated in Louisville...
...and the resistance within some desegregated schools that shows itself in tracking and ability grouping and in the disproportionately large suspension and expulsion of minority students...
...We must also recognize, to the understandable despair of many of us, that in this sad time all we may be able to do is inch toward integration...
...The polls that tell us more than 70 percent of the public is against busing also tell us that a like percentage is still in favor of integration...
...since HEW has virtually stopped cutting off funds to resisting districts...
...And in the courts, civil rights forces were startled to find that the Justice Department no longer fought on their side but was just as likely to turn up aligned against them with segregationist governors and school boards...
...it would complicate and delay present methods of desegregation and create new loopholes for school districts that want to evade desegregation...
...q 391...
...At the same time, segregation of our second largest student minority, Latin children, has increased in all regions of the nation...
...In a study he did last year,4 Associate Director of the Populations Studies Center at the University of Michigan Reynolds Farley notes that in the nation's 15 largest cities, the rate of racial residential segregation ranges from 97 percent in Dallas to 75 percent in San Francisco...
...More than 43 percent of all the public students in this country are transported to school...
...In the North, however, the proportion of black students attending predominantly white schools increased less than one percent between 1968 and 1972 and has changed little since then...
...He eased restrictions on school districts that would not comply with Title VI and turned from administrative enforcement to "persuasion...
...It wasn't much of an issue in the presidential primaries until Gerald Ford began stirring it up in what seemed a desperate attempt to win delegates in Kentucky and Tennessee...
...Whatever his audience may think these days, Derrick Bell has changed his views...
...Still another was Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, prompted as is often the case, by his own mysterious urges, since busing is no issue in Montana...
...But old apprehensions have been stirred again by the Burger Court's handling of cases that sought to establish metropolitan plans for desegregation...
...The second proposal would tend to exclude from a court's consideration the effects on schools of discriminatory governmental policies in housing, zoning, etc., even though the Supreme Court has upheld the relevance of considering such policies in school desegregation cases...
...For a while, until civil rights activists protested, his cosponsors included Barbara Jordan of Houston and Andrew Young of Atlanta, reacting, one supposes, to difficult busing situations back home...
...on transporting colored children, they spent a little more than one million dollars...
...2) require the courts to concentrate on determining what unlawful acts by school officials have resulted in racially segregated schools...
...We may have no recourse, then, except to fight defensive actions in Congress and, in those communities where busing emerges as an issue, simply to stand firm...
...the oldest is a bill introduced by Rep...
...Despite the President's convictions on the issue, the Johnson administration was not ready to do battle with the Daley machine...
...His search for alternatives to the present arrangement of leaving desegregation largely to the judgments of the courts (enabling some members to use federal judges as congressional whipping boys) is no doubt sincere...
...Desegregation in Louisville, these days, seems to be proceeding fairly well...
...Like Nixon, he professes to be for law and order but against "court-ordered forced busing"3—which is a bit like saying he's all for using the courts to stamp out crime so long as they do not seek, by sentence or order, to force criminals to give up their errant ways...
...The issue is full of contradiction and confusion...
...This year, the House added three amendments to education legislation that would, among other things, force HEW to continue to give funds to school districts that are discriminating against minorities and women...
...So we must ask: Is the goal still 384 viable...
...Briefly, the Preyer bill would require each state to develop a plan to effect desegregation of its schools within the next five years...
...HEW's attempt to get Chicago to break up the most rigidly segregated school system in the country ended in ignominious failure...
...For years it has been customary in Congress for House opponents of desegregation to offer some wildly irresponsible and unconstitutional "antibusing" amendment to a bill, get it adopted in floor debate, and then have it modified in At a meeting between the President and civil rights leaders in June of this year, in which Ford was urged to abandon his antibusing strategy, Clarence Mitchell, the NAACP's lobbyist, observed that when the President used the term `forced busing" he should know it struck "wells of deepest anger in black people...
...Best known and most quoted of the waverers is Dr...
...There may be hopeful implications in these rulings for school desegregation...
...and that the forces of opposition may still win the day and leave us, finally, with a handful of token victories...
...One need only move among liberal friends at a suburban party...
...If, in the meantime, we advocate compensatory education for students trapped in inner city schools, it must be done in full recognition that this is an expedient against the time when integration can be achieved...
...It would have been a fine thing if any of the Democratic candidates for president had spoken as much harsh sense on the subject as McGovern did—if Jimmy Carter would do so now...
...Residential segregation is correctly seen as the main reason why busing is often the only way to desegregate the school system in large urban areas...
...Finch and Attorney General Mitchell teamed up to move enforcement away from routine administrative action to the longer process of litigation...
...Then, at a meeting with a civil rights delegation, he suggested that the Department was rethinking the whole desegregation issue and might even seek a judicial reexamination of the Swann decision on busing...
...A vulnerable and defensive position, but a realistic one...
...Ford's bill proposes to do three things: (1) limit "court-ordered busing" to a specific period of time—no more than five years...
...It took a court suit, Adams v. Richardson, to find HEW derelict in its responsibilities and to force the Department to move again on desegregation after it had let the Title VI mechanism fall into disuse...
...As for the President, there is nothing new in his opposition to busing...
...In 1974, in Milliken v. Bradley, it gave metropolitan desegregation plans their biggest setback yet by refusing, 5-to-4, to hold the state of Michigan accountable for its segregated schools and rejecting the plan that would have required interdistrict busing between Detroit and 53 nearly all-white suburbs...
...But in most places the white schools are better than the black ones, and will be as long as school boards and state education agencies are controlled by whites...
...388 V 'f Congress is not the forum, where else can the issue be discussed sensibly...
...In the first 5To those who raise objections to the cost of busing for desegregation, it should be pointed out what busing for segregation used to cost...
...In April of this year, in the Gautreaux case, the Court made clear that its prohibitions against an interdistrict plan for school desegregation did not preclude interdistrict plans for public housing, specifically for Chicago and its suburbs...
...Then the courts appear to be about the only workable instrument we have...
...It was a good speech—and an irritating one...
...The third seems to disregard the Supreme Court's ruling in the Denver case, that unlawful segregation in a significant portion of a school district may raise a presumption that the entire system is similarly segregated...
...the shift in sentiment may even have helped him win...
...In May 1976 he let it be known that he was thinking of intervening in the Boston case...
...they may have worsened...
...But it is also true that much of what his Administration did tended to weaken the drive for desegregation...
...the cooler atmosphere of the Senate, through the addition of a "nullifier," a phrase that squared whatever the House had adopted with the requirements of Brown and the Constitution...
...Apprehension in the civil rights movement, as the Burger Court took shape, that Brown might be undermined, was allayed somewhat by that Court's first school decisions—most notably, perhaps, in the Swann case in 1971...
...This notion invokes for some of us a recollection of how often black Americans have been denied constitutional rights because change was said to be too difficult or unsettling...
...He not only voted for the Byrd Amendment...
...As far back as December 1975, Levi signaled his intentions...
...Their insistence that union members there comply with the AFL-CIO's and the UAW's national policy—to recognize and support busing as one means among others for giving students their constitutional rights—quenched a rebellion in the rank and file...
...on too many heartbreaking occasions it has had to mark time against the moment when an opportunity could be seized to make a major gain—as in the Brown decision...
...Nevertheless, he has let it be known he is still looking for a case in which to intervene and seek a rethinking of the busing remedy...
Vol. 23 • September 1976 • No. 4
