BUSING BUGABOOS
Gillespie, David E.
BUSING BUGABOOS busing & backlash, by Lillian B. Rubin. University of California Press. 255 pp. $7.95. reviewed by David E. Gillespie Historians of the Twenty-first Century may be curious to...
...Pure old racism and white backlash were self-evident...
...reviewed by David E. Gillespie Historians of the Twenty-first Century may be curious to know how the people of the United States stood up emotionally over a hundred years of bloody wars, a severe world and national depression, and decades of a tense nuclear arms race, yet teetered on the verge of nervous breakdown in using buses to integrate white and black children in the public schools...
...Rubin spreads the blame for this condition to practically all who had a hand in shaping Richmond itself and its school district, which was "unified" only in the sense of a cruel joke played by the state of California...
...Rubin's purpose is to look at white versus white in an urban school district...
...The costs, the logistics, and the implementation of busing plans to end the nation's shameful legacy of racist schools must await other studies, other books...
...Gillespie edited the editorial pages of The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina for a decade...
...State government policies forced into a single school district peoples and areas with little social or political cohesion...
...These "dispossessed," who indeed had been all but silent observers of the political events that had helped shape their lives until then, were silent no more...
...The moderate-to-liberal coalition that held sway in Richmond folded in the busing crunch...
...she calls for wider and deeper preparation of Americans to approach with the mind, rather than the spleen, the critical social problems that have left us separate and hostile...
...Rubin set out in two and a half years of research to learn why the whites of the Richmond Unified School District in the San Francisco Bay area acted as they did in 1968 to 1971 on the busing issue...
...A finding larger than the real trauma over busing soon began to emerge...
...Then there was the failure of the "liberal politics" of Richmond, where high-minded officeholders and other leaders were ambivalent in their inte-grationist convictions and vacillatory in their actions...
...When the political and economic fallout came in deadly doses, the state virtually deserted RUSD...
...Her book is not so much about busing as the fear of busing for integration that has been implanted in the American mind—and implanted by Americans in places as high as the Presidency and as low as the Ku Klux Klan...
...Lillian Rubin places the people of RUSD on the couch and picks at their psyches for a long time...
...Lillian Rubin's book, Busing & Backlash, will help supply some answers...
...One of Ms...
...This indecisiveness and their lack of communication across social and economic lines helped point the district toward three years of turmoil...
...it was rather an honest effort to understand how these people had been shaped by the system in their attitudes on race, class, and the function of the public schools...
...The blacks of the district undergo analysis only briefly, for Ms...
...Included, too, for want of a better inclusive term, were the angry, swarming "conservatives," in whom the mere mention of busing (and its hated association with nearby Berkeley's experiment) triggered race and class fears...
...But the more this research sociologist probed, the more she came to question the idea that American urban communities can be governed in this day, especially in times of great emotional crisis, by the elitism of the "respectable establishment...
...An underlying theme in this book might be addressed to those Americans bent on unifying the schools through integration of the races: Don't fire until you see the eyes of their whites...
...This one is concerned with the shrill reactions and hateful politics that usually follow the first mention in a community of using buses as one tool to end segregation in public education...
...Her plea is for the nation to quit paying lip service to the involvement of more of its citizens in the governing process...
...Mr...
...This is a book that for the most part will hold the interest of all Americans concerned more than casually with the unification of our people in something other than name...
...The salient fact in this penetrating study is that the Richmond Unified School District (RUSD) was not prepared in 1968 for any significant degree of integration, much less to take on the gut-reaction issue of cross-busing...
...Rubin's more important accomplishments is that she listened carefully to the anti-busers, despite her predisposition to integrated schools...
...Federal government policies segregated Richmond's housing...
...The quality she brought to that task could not be called empathy...
...Indeed, the only real weakness of the book is her tendency to over-psychoanalyze and to reiterate her conclusions, profound though they are...
...Amazed first by their own audacity and then by their collective strength, they moved into the vacuum, seized power in the schools, and performed all manner of reactionary deeds in freedom's much-maligned name...
...With a few rare exceptions in the nation, the Richmond District was no different from others in these respects, whether busing was voluntary or court-ordered...
Vol. 36 • November 1972 • No. 11
