An African American Dilemma by Zoë Burkholder

Author:Zoë Burkholder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 5.3. Anti-busing demonstration in front of Ford Auditorium, Detroit, 1976.

Detroit News Photograph Collection. Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, MI.

White resistance to school integration in the North became more calculated and better organized as activists tapped into a rising national conservative movement. Opposition to integration took on a nativist tinge as detractors emphasized racially restricted, high-quality schools as a birthright, and one that white mothers were honor-bound to defend, even if this meant breaking the law. As a white mother in Chicago put it, “This is a traditional neighborhood. Our ancestors went to school here. Why should our children be uprooted and sent across the tracks?” In Boston, a 100-car motorcade of anti-busers sang “God Bless America” and waved American flags as they paraded through the city, claiming the mantle of patriotism for white families that resisted school integration. In another event, white protestors carried a flag-draped coffin with a sign that proclaimed “Freedom Is Dead.” In Detroit veterans dressed in uniform and carried American flags along with signs that read “Veterans opposed to forced busing anywhere.” President Gerald R. Ford, followed by Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, adamantly refused to support school integration. “I have consistently opposed forced busing to achieve racial balance as a solution to quality education,” boasted President Gerald Ford, as he denounced court-ordered school integration in Boston.13

Black civil rights leaders fought valiantly to counter this avalanche of anti-busing, anti-school integration rhetoric. “As a citizen, Mr. Ford is entitled to his opinions, but he abdicates his role as the nation’s leader when he articulates personal positions contrary to the ruling of the courts,” wrote editors of the NAACP’s Crisis. Others disputed the logic that busing children to school was inherently problematic. “Busing is not the issue. We’re here to see that our children get a better education by whatever means necessary,” stressed Gloria Joyner of the Community Task Force on Education in Boston. Michael Meyers, director of Research, Policy, and Planning for the NAACP, was more explicit. “Busing as a ‘problem’ for many parents and politicians seems to dissipate if white children on the bus ride end up at lily-white schools. No, it’s not the bus or the courts to which so many object. Stripped bare, the passionate objections to busing are thinly disguised arguments against the sensible mandates of justice.”14

White northerners were not the only ones who objected to busing as a central feature of school integration plans. The Black Power movement mobilized Black educational activists throughout the North to interpret community control of staffing, curriculum, and pedagogy as more important than racial mixing. Support for community-controlled schools waned over time, but the sense that integration did not automatically produce better opportunities for Black students lingered, as did reluctance to send Black children into hostile, white-dominated schools.

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