ON AND OFF THE BUS IN CHARLOTTE

...It is, he maintains, the most significant moral achievement in the city's recent history—a reminder to the entire nation that racial problems are not beyond solution...

...In Norfolk, Virginia, the school board—supported by the Reagan Administration's Justice Department—persuaded the Federal courts that busing had caused such serious white flight that Norfolk schools were becoming more segregated, not less...

...After several years of crisis, a consensus emerged that integration was not only inescapable but morally right...

...There have been modifications and adjustments through the years, but that basic k plan is still in effect, and by almost any measure the schools have done well under it...

...Citizens by the tens of thousands signed antibusing petitions, held rallies to denounce the Federal courts, and called for a boycott of the public schools...

...What troubled him, Scheick told the school board, was the principle of the thing...

...Its city and county school systems had long been combined, with no easy escape to the suburbs...

...Charlotte has grown rapidly in the last ten years...

...Every year, hundreds and sometimes thousands of children are assigned to new schools as the authorities try to prevent a drift toward resegregation...

...Soon, a fledgling alliance of local New Right activists began echoing Reagan's theme...

...They were sound academically, and they had achieved far more integration than public school systems in most other cities...

...Scheick wasn't the only resident of Charlotte to feel that way...

...it was convenient to the school his two children would attend, and it was racially integrated, with a smattering of black families and immigrants from Southeast Asia...

...The upbeat mood began to dissolve in 1984...

...The neighborhood was integrated...

...There were more the next day, and they continued through the semester, but such calls were not the worst of it...

...But the people of Charlotte rallied to end the strife in their city...

...In response to the board's unfair practices, a small group of white leaders began a populist movement for greater equity and stability—a crusade that quickly gained momentum and soon included blacks and whites from heavily bused areas...

...It showed a young black girl in a prim checkered dress, a large bow at the collar, her head erect and her eyes defiant, making her way through an angry mob...

...District Judge James B. McMillan handed down a landmark decision in the case of Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg, ruling that transporting children by bus out of racially segregated neighborhoods was Frye Gaillard, a staff writer for The Charlotte Observer, has covered school desegregation and other race-relations issues since 1968...

...his own children had attended them...

...In an address to an all-white Republican rally, Reagan denounced school busing as a failed "experiment...

...The school was integrated...

...Elsewhere, too, busing often became an experiment imposed on poor and working-class neighborhoods, while those who could afford to flee moved out to the suburban sanctuaries...

...For the first wave of protesters, including David Scheick, the issue was not so much desegregation or busing but the persistent instability in pupil assignments...

...When busing began in 1970, buses were sometimes surrounded and stoned, their windows smashed by screaming white mobs...

...By 1973, racial fighting had temporarily closed down every high school in the system...

...In 1971, the U.S...

...Students are classified according to ability or achievement, the most advanced classes being largely white, the least advanced mostly black...

...His book, "The Dream Long Deferred," will be published later this year by the University of North Carolina Press...

...They know they must simultaneously address the growing concerns of blacks and soothe the mounting anxiety of whites...

...By In the city that made busing work, many schools have reverted to segregation, and rumblings of discontent echo among blacks and whites...

...Official policy, he argued, made for segregated neighborhoods in Charlotte, so neighborhood schools were bound to be segregated too...

...Yet there were persistent signs of hope...

...The girl in the picture was Dorothy Counts, who had broken the color barrier at a Charlotte high school...

...On September 9, 1970-the first day of school that fall—the schools received half a dozen bomb threats...

...Swann's two young children, born in India, had never experienced racism...

...Though the violence had subsided by 1973, the mood was still tense...

...the mid-1970s, pupils' test scores had begun a steady rise, especially among blacks, and in the new, liberated atmosphere that followed school desegregation, the city twice elected a black mayor—a civil-rights pioneer named Harvey Gantt...

...Students were rarely reassigned from the affluent southeast neighborhoods...

...The reassignments contribute to a steadily growing reservoir of resentment...

...It was a city where busing worked, in contrast to the highly publicized failures of school busing plans in many other communities...

...With his wife, Sandy, he had become an active participant in the life of the neighborhood school, and the Scheicks were co-presidents of their parent-teacher association...

...Enrollments soared in all-white private "academies," and public-school test scores began a steady and disheartening decline...

...Important community leaders decided to stick with the public schools, and an astonishing 4,000 parents and other citizens turned out as volunteers to tutor students, move furniture into the schools, add new books to library shelves, and help in other ways to keep the schools going...

...The system of assigning pupils by 'neighborhoods' superimposed on an urban population pattern where Negro residents have become concentrated almost entirely in one quadrant of a city of270,000 is racially discriminatory," McMillan found...

...in 1986, Norfolk stopped busing at the elementary level...

...It was a controversial case...

...Everything was working well...

...But Relic also understands that Charlotte's experience conveys a more sober message: The struggle for fairness, for decency, for equal treatment is not yet won and not yet over...

...They may never feel it viscerally, having never lived through it, but the least we can do is make them aware...

...As a prominent Charlotte lawyer, McMillan had never been known as a crusader for integration—crusading was not his style—but he was sympathetic to the civil-rights cause and understood that in the climate of 1968, it was a force to be reckoned with...

...Supreme Court upheld that decision, making Charlotte the national test case for busing...

...Black parents have complained, with good reason, that their children are bused more frequently and over greater distances than most white students...

...But by the time arguments ended in the Swann case, McMillan was persuaded—as he wrote in the ruling that soon became the national test case for busing—that "the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools are not yet desegregated...

...But times change, and Charlotte's widely shared sense of satisfaction, almost euphoria, that went with its national reputation as The City that Made It Work has gradually given way to a new round of questioning and controversy...

...Supreme Court had just ruled in a Virginia school case that historic patterns of segregation had to be eliminated "root and branch...

...For Swann, who had been in India for about five years— the first black Presbyterian missionary to be assigned outside Africa—the photo of Dorothy Counts was a shocking reminder of conditions back home...

...A year later, the Supreme Court ruled unequivocally that Judge McMillan had been right...

...White flight to private schools slowed to h a trickle, and parental support for public schools reached an all-time high...

...The argument that schools cater to racial minorities while ignoring the needs of white children was supposed to have been settled in the early 1970s...

...In fact, blacks and whites in Charlotte's poorer areas had consistently borne a disproportionate share of the burden of busing—a form of discrimination that was . attributable to school-board policies rather than Judge McMillan's rulings...

...Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg had its origins more than thirty years ago, on a warm September day in 1957...

...What makes its recent flare-up doubly depressing is that it is happening in Charlotte, North Carolina, which has regarded itself as a showcase of successful school desegregation...

...They organized an ad-hoc Citizens Advisory Group, racially mixed, h to work with school officials on a new desegregation plan—one that would entail, among other things, the busing of students from a wealthy neighborhood to a formerly black high school...

...One, First Ward Elementary, was forty-five minutes away by bus, and it was adjacent to a predominantly black housing project...

...David Scheick, a salesman, was one of the first of the new protesters...

...The school board appealed, but in the fall of 1970, as the case made its way through the Federal courts, the buses began to roll...

...Increasingly, black parents have come to believe that the needs of black children—particularly those from public-housing projects and other pockets of poverty—are too often ignored in an integrated classroom setting...

...It started with a north Charlotte neighborhood that was mostly working class— a neighborhood that had been bitterly hostile to desegregation...

...Almost twenty years have gone by since U.S...

...District Judge Arthur Garrity's 1974 order requiring busing as a remedy for segregation met with violent resistance, and after more than a decade of flight the white enrollment in Boston public schools dropped from 52 per cent to 27 per cent...

...Half a world away in Allahabad, Swann, a former Charlotte resident, recognized her as the daughter of a long-time family friend...

...Charlotte, he acknowledged, had moved from a system of pupil assignments based explicitly on race to a policy of neighborhood schools...

...The U.S...

...Scheick liked the area...

...The renewed assault on busing received its first impetus from a campaign stop that year by President Reagan...

...Their most vocal allies are often new arrivals—people who have recently moved to Charlotte, bringing with them a deep commitment to the logic of neighborhood public schools and an indifference to the danger of resegregation...

...Scheick said he didn't mind the school's location, and he knew that in the years since desegregation First Ward had acquired a reputation as one of the best schools in Charlotte...

...Administrators and teachers, still struggling to do their jobs, were treated periodically to the sight of police squadrons with batons and gas masks, or armed members of the Ku Klux Klan, or crowds of young blacks wielding chains and two-by-fours...

...With sufficient commitment, the community believed, the school system could increase opportunities for all students...

...Even the city's most affluent citizens became involved in the process of integrating the schools...

...So many people have moved into Charlotte not knowing the history," laments School Superintendent Peter Relic, who is determined to preserve and protect desegregated schooling...

...But in January 1986, the school board transferred 186 children, including Scheick's, from the overcrowded school they had attended to two other schools with rising black enrollments...

...But in a new motion filed in Darius Swann's lawsuit, Chambers noted that the majority of black children—more than 14,000—were still in black schools...

...By now, however, more strident voices are being raised, arguing passionately and openly for the first time in years that the only solution to Charlotte's problem is an immediate end to busing...

...In Charlotte, as elsewhere, the initial response to the ruling was an increase in tension, and even some violence...

...Darius Swann, an American black man working as a missionary in India, picked up a newspaper and was riveted by the photo on the front page...

...A grassroots coalition of blacks and whites began to build a strong consensus for integrated schools, profoundly altering the city's racial climate...

...The Swanns filed a lawsuit in 1965, and for more than three years it meandered through the courts, eventually landing on the desk of Judge McMillan, a native North Carolinian who had just ascended to the Federal bench...

...In Boston, for example, U.S...

...an acceptable remedy for the wrongs of segregated schooling...

...busing became a buzz-word and a slogan...

...Until the Swann case came before him, Judge McMillan shared the view of the Charlotte establishment that the local schools were doing fine...

...Within the first three years after McMillan's ruling, Julius Chambers's law offices were burned to the ground, McMillan was hanged in effigy as crowds of protesters gathered around his home, and his life was regularly threatened by callers in the night...

...Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, performance on standardized tests improved and the gap between black and white students' scores began to narrow...

...In India, where Swann and his wife were the only blacks in a community of missionaries, they had been able to relate to whites as fellow human beings, not oppressors, for the first time in their lives...

...By 1974, blacks and whites had formed a powerful grassroots coalition, determined not only to preserve the public schools but also to establish a climate of interracial harmony...

...He ordered the school board to prepare a new plan for pupil assignment and "to consider all known ways of desegregation, including busing...

...In the wealthy new suburbs that sprawl on the city's fringe, white parents in increasing numbers question the quality of the public schools and the validity of the integration plan...

...Though the gaps between black and white academic performance have narrowed, many high schools have reverted to segregation...

...He came to the Charlotte area from Indiana a decade ago and bought a $70,000 home in a just-completed subdivision near the city limits...

...Julius Chambers, the brilliant black attorney in the Charlotte case, immediately seized on that precedent...

...Still, School Superintendent Relic—supported so far by a majority of the school board—seems determined to preserve school integration...

...But Charlotte was different...

...So when the Swanns returned to Charlotte in 1964, they remembered the searing image of Dorothy Counts at Harding High School and decided to join the movement to integrate the schools—a decision made easier and more urgent when James, their first-grade son, was bused some distance to an all-black school instead of being enrolled in the integrated school much closer to home...

...Why should all this be disrupted just to maintain racial balances in another part of town...

...Surprisingly, the movement also attracted support from some white residents of southeast Charlotte, who announced their commitment to integration and stressed that they had never sought special favors for their area...

...It seemed that every time the school board needed white students to correct a declining ratio at a formerly black school, it looked to the working-class areas of north and west Charlotte...

...The city's white Republican business establishment has begun flexing its muscles once again—Mayor Harvey Gantt went down to defeat last November—and in the schools, problems persist...

...For the next decade, Charlotte became a kind of national curiosity...

...School officials are caught on the horns of a dilemma...

...It was a time of agony for Charlotte...

...Among whites, the rumblings of discontent have very different causes but are no less intense...