Why Busing Failed by Matthew F. Delmont

Author:Matthew F. Delmont
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520284241
Publisher: University of California Press

Born and raised in Pontiac, McCabe claimed to have never traveled south of Detroit before she started to protest “busing” at the age of thirty-six.7 Like many other women who became grassroots activists, McCabe, a married mother of three, emphasized her lived experience as a mother and housewife as the reason she became involved in politics. McCabe regularly described her and her fellow marchers as “ordinary housewives and mothers,” and she explained to a Washington Post reporter, “I’m an amateur. When I address people at rallies, if they can relate to me it’s just because they know I’m the same type of person they are, that I am a housewife . . . just mainstream, grass-roots America.”8

Most housewives, of course, were not interviewed in major newspapers and did not regularly appear on the nightly television news, but it would be a mistake to see these claims of ordinariness as empty rhetoric. McCabe’s televisual appeal drew on her ability to visibly lead and capably speak for “antibusing” parents, while also being able to persuasively present herself as a representative member of this group. McCabe’s authority to appear on television and speak on “busing” depended on her ability to identify as both an “ordinary” housewife and the president of a grassroots political group.9 Like many in the crowd, television cameras looked to McCabe as a representative voice of white parents concerned about the federal government’s role in their private family lives, but at the same time television also tracked McCabe as a public political figure who led a six-week mothers’ march to Washington, DC, while her family was home in Pontiac.

These dual identities are clearly displayed in news coverage of the “antibusing” march McCabe led in Pontiac on September 6, 1971. Pontiac had been propelled into the news a week earlier when members of the Ku Klux Klan dynamited ten empty school buses that were parked in the bus depot.10 The bus bombings prompted federal district court judge Damon Keith, who issued the “busing” order, to warn, “This case will not be settled in the streets of Pontiac.”11 With tensions high in Pontiac, McCabe led several hundred residents on a two-mile protest march from downtown Pontiac to Madison Junior High School in the northeast section of the city. CBS and ABC covered the march, which presented television news camera operators and viewers with easily identifiable images that differed sharply from the KKK’s vigilante violence: orderly marchers with women and children foregrounded, dozens of U.S. flags, and clearly worded placards expressing support for the “busing” boycott (e.g., “Bury the Bus, Keep Freedom Alive” and “Our Kids Like Neighborhood Schools”). After wide shots of the crowd walking toward the camera (CBS estimated six thousand marchers, ABC four thousand), both stations cut to footage of McCabe addressing the large crowd from an elevated platform at the junior high school. These visuals quickly established that this was a mass gathering and that McCabe was recognized as a leader on this issue. CBS offered viewers a medium close-up of McCabe encouraging defiance of the “busing” order.

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