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Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation (American Crossroads) (Volume 42) Paperback – Illustrated, March 1, 2016
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This broad and incisive history of busing features a cast of characters that includes national political figures such as then-president Richard Nixon, Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, and antibusing advocate Louise Day Hicks, as well as some lesser-known activists on both sides of the issue—Boston civil rights leaders Ruth Batson and Ellen Jackson, who opposed segregated schools, and Pontiac housewife and antibusing activist Irene McCabe, black conservative Clay Smothers, and Florida governor Claude Kirk, all supporters of school segregation. Why Busing Failed shows how antibusing parents and politicians ultimately succeeded in preventing full public school desegregation.
- Print length298 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherUniversity of California Press
- Publication dateMarch 1, 2016
- Dimensions6 x 0.75 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100520284259
- ISBN-13978-0520284258
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Meticulous and insightful. . . . Delmont’s critique is tough but fair." ― The Boston Globe Published On: 2016-03-31
"Why Busing Failed is an ambitious and well-researched account of an important aspect of the struggle for racial and educational equality in the United States." ― Pacific Historical Review Published On: 2018-07-11
From the Inside Flap
"In this important work, Matthew Delmont takes the biggest scapegoat for our failure to integrate our schools, and then systematically dismantles the story we thought we knew. Why Busing Failed dispels the all-too-convenient narrative about the disaster of busing as a tool for integration and instead shows that, as black activists noted decades ago, the problem was never the bus, it was us. Carefully researched and compellingly written, Why Busing Failed is an indictment of both politicians and mainstream news organizations that aided and abetted small numbers of white parents in shifting the national narrative of integration from a constitutional and moral imperative to an impossible inconvenience."&;Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times Magazine
"Delmont tells an eye-opening story of the struggle for school desegregation outside the South in the wake of the civil rights movement. The Southern campaign received at least moderately positive media coverage. But as Delmont reveals in this deeply researched and engagingly written history, the situation was very different in places like New York, Chicago, Pontiac, Michigan, and&;most famously&;Boston. Delmont shows how Northern anti-segregation activists were able to mobilize the 'busing' issue, along with the media strategies of the Southern civil rights movement, to generate sympathetic media treatment. This book provides a much-needed corrective to the enduring assumption that the American mass media were cheerleaders in the fight for racial equality in the 1960s and 70s."&;Aniko Bodroghkozy, author of Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement
"Matthew Delmont's brilliant study of 'busing' upends much of what we think we know about the media and the civil rights movement. If you want to understand where we are today in this country--and why school segregation is so ubiquitous and so accepted&;read this book. 'Busing' didn't fail; our resolve to desegregate schools did. This may be the most important book you read this year."&; Jeanne Theoharis, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and author of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks
From the Back Cover
"In this important work, Matthew Delmont takes the biggest scapegoat for our failure to integrate our schools, and then systematically dismantles the story we thought we knew. Why Busing Failed dispels the all-too-convenient narrative about the disaster of busing as a tool for integration and instead shows that, as black activists noted decades ago, the problem was never the bus, it was us. Carefully researched and compellingly written, Why Busing Failed is an indictment of both politicians and mainstream news organizations that aided and abetted small numbers of white parents in shifting the national narrative of integration from a constitutional and moral imperative to an impossible inconvenience."—Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times Magazine
"Delmont tells an eye-opening story of the struggle for school desegregation outside the South in the wake of the civil rights movement. The Southern campaign received at least moderately positive media coverage. But as Delmont reveals in this deeply researched and engagingly written history, the situation was very different in places like New York, Chicago, Pontiac, Michigan, and—most famously—Boston. Delmont shows how Northern anti-segregation activists were able to mobilize the 'busing' issue, along with the media strategies of the Southern civil rights movement, to generate sympathetic media treatment. This book provides a much-needed corrective to the enduring assumption that the American mass media were cheerleaders in the fight for racial equality in the 1960s and 70s."—Aniko Bodroghkozy, author of Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement
"Matthew Delmont's brilliant study of 'busing' upends much of what we think we know about the media and the civil rights movement. If you want to understand where we are today in this country--and why school segregation is so ubiquitous and so accepted—read this book. 'Busing' didn't fail; our resolve to desegregate schools did. This may be the most important book you read this year."— Jeanne Theoharis, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and author of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Why Busing Failed
Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation
By Matthew F. DelmontUNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-28425-8
Contents
List of Illustrations, vii,Acknowledgments, xi,
Introduction, 1,
1 • The Origins of "Antibusing" Politics: From New York Protests to the Civil Rights Act 2, 3,
2 • Surrender in Chicago: Cities' Rights and the Limits of Federal Enforcement of School Desegregation, 54,
3 • Boston before the "Busing Crisis": Black Education Activism and Official Resistance in the Cradle of Liberty, 77,
4 • Standing against "Busing": Bipartisan and National Political Opposition to School Desegregation, 93,
5 • Richard Nixon's "Antibusing" Presidency, 114,
6 • "Miserable Women on Television": Irene McCabe, Television News, and Grassroots "Antibusing" Politics, 142,
7 • "It's Not the Bus, It's Us": The Complexity of Black Opinions on "Busing", 168,
8 • Television News and the Making of the Boston "Busing Crisis", 190,
Conclusion, 209,
Notes, 213,
Index, 259,
CHAPTER 1
The Origins of "Antibusing" Politics
FROM NEW YORK PROTESTS TO THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT
There is a pressing need for a liberalism in the North that is truly liberal, that firmly believes in integration in its own community as well as in the deep South. — DR. martin LUTHER king JR., speaking to Urban League of New York City, 1960
I do not blame the two distinguished Senators from New York, for they desire to protect New York City, as well as Chicago, Detroit, and similar areas. ... In my opinion the two Senators from New York are, at heart, pretty good segregationists; but the conditions in their State are different from the conditions in ours. — MISSISSIPPI SENATOR JAMES O. EASTLAND, 1964
ON A SNOWY MARCH DAY in 1964, over ten thousand white parents walked from the Board of Education Building in Brooklyn to city hall in Manhattan to protest against school desegregation in New York City. Carrying signs reading, "We oppose voluntary transfers," "Keep our children in neighborhood schools," "I will not put my children on a bus," and "We will not be bused," the marchers called their coalition of local organizations "Parents and Taxpayers." They hoped to persuade the school board to abandon a school pairing plan that called for students to be transferred between predominantly black and Puerto Rican schools and white schools. "Most of the demonstrators were taking their case into the streets for the first time," the New York Times reported, noting that more than 70 percent of the demonstrators were women. "For every mother who's here, there's another one sitting at home with both her children, wishing she could be here," said Joan Adabo, a mother from Jackson Heights, Queens. While the protestors sought to influence policy at the city level, television news captured the scope of the march for a national audience. On NBC and ABC, rooftop camera shots showed a long line of protestors snaking through the wet streets of the city, while another camera angle depicted marchers, ten abreast, emerging from the fog as they crossed the Brooklyn Bridge. A street-level shot panned down to capture the marchers' reflection in the curbside puddles, an artistic image emphasizing that the protestors braved inclement weather to be heard and seen. Television news, as well as newspaper coverage and photographs, gave the protestors national visibility. One mother spoke frankly to an NBC reporter about why Parents and Taxpayers opted for a public protest march: "We feel like we can prove as much as our opponents to use the same tactics. We have as much right as they do. These are our civil rights and we're taking advantage of them."
The white protestors were borrowing tactics from the African American and Puerto Rican protestors in New York who organized a school boycott a month earlier that kept over 460,000 students out of school to demand that the school board create a plan for desegregation. This pro-desegregation boycott was, in 1964, the largest civil rights demonstration in the history of the United States (bigger than the 1963 March on Washington), but the event is largely absent from histories of civil rights. The New York Times, which insisted that there was "no official segregation in the city," criticized the boycott as "misguided." Given this climate, New York's civil rights activists recognized that the white protestors, while much fewer in number, would command much more attention from politicians. Civil rights veteran Bayard Rustin, recruited by Reverend Milton Galamison to organize the prodesegregation boycott, planned a second rally at city hall in response to the white parents' march and said, "We will be successful if we can top the anti-integration people by one person. ... I'll be happy with 15,000 and one Negroes, Puerto Ricans, and whites." Doris Innis, a member of Harlem's Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), later reflected, "When 10,000 Queens white mothers showed up to picket city hall against integration, it was obvious we had to look for other solutions."
These civil rights activists understood that the white "antibusing" marchers conveyed a powerful message visually and rhetorically. By 1964, the public protest march was a tactic closely identified with African American civil rights demonstrators. This made the white protestors particularly newsworthy, because they offered television and print reporters a new angle on a familiar story line. The newness of the white protest march also helped emphasize the view that white citizens were entering the school fight for the first time, after being pushed too far by school board officials. In reality, school officials and politicians structured housing and school policies around the expectations of white citizens. What these white "antibusing" marchers were making public was their fear and frustration that this settled expectation was being disturbed.
By calling themselves Parents and Taxpayers, these white protestors made an implicit claim that they occupied a higher level of citizenship than black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers, who were also parents and taxpayers. Parents and Taxpayers advanced a similar argument to the hundreds of segregationists in the South and North who, in the years after the Brown decision, wrote to the Supreme Court to complain that the court was violating their rights as taxpayers. The news media and politicians paid special attention to Parents and Taxpayers because they were white, while also affirming the group's assertion that their resistance to "busing" for school desegregation was about their rights as parents, taxpayers, or homeowners, not about race. The simultaneous assertion and disavowal of white political power made it difficult for civil rights advocates to counter Parents and Taxpayers and similar "antibusing" groups.
Perhaps no one took more notice of the white "antibusing" march than the legislators who were debating the Civil Rights Act in the spring of 1964, where several United States senators mentioned the New York protest. Senator Absalom Robertson of Virginia read to his colleagues directly from the news ticker the day of the protest: "Nearly 15,000 parents opposed to planned busing of their children for public school integration descended on city hall today in the largest civil demonstration there in years." Later in March, Louisiana's Russell Long said to Indiana's Birch Bayh, "I presume the Senator noticed that on a cold, snowy day in New York City 15,000 white mothers got out and protested. I have heard that half a million whites have joined in a counter protest to the mobs marching and taking over. It could happen even in Indiana." South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond returned to this talking point in April: "In New York, where students were 'bused' around, such a howl went up that 15,000 people assembled in protest against the practice." "Fifteen thousand white mothers," Georgia's Richard Russell reiterated in June, "walked in the snow to protest any action to correct [racial] imbalance by the assignment of children to schools outside their residential areas."
For southern senators who opposed the Civil Rights Act, the white parents' protests against school desegregation in New York highlighted what they saw as the hypocrisy of the Civil Rights Act's different treatment of school segregation in different regions. In addition to recognizing New York's standing as a cosmopolitan city and international media hub, southern senators stressed the New York protests because U.S. congressman Emanuel Celler, who represented Brooklyn, had played an important role in drafting the legislation and shepherding it through the House of Representatives. Celler, as the southern senators repeatedly pointed out, oversaw the bill as one amendment stripped federal power to investigate and remedy "racially imbalanced" schools and another amendment drew a line between desegregation of schools in the South ("'Desegregation' means the assignment of students to public schools and within such schools without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin") and desegregation of so-called de facto segregated schools ("'Desegregation' shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance"). Illinois senator Everett Dirksen and Montana senator Mike Mansfield successfully proposed another "antibusing" amendment to Title IV, section 407: "Nothing herein shall empower any official or court of the United States to issue any order seeking to achieve a racial balance in any school by requiring the transportation of pupils or students from one school to another or one school district to another in order to achieve such racial balance, or otherwise enlarge the existing power of the court to insure compliance with constitutional standards." Regarding this amendment, Mississippi's James Eastland argued, "It appears that the draftsmen of the Dirksen-Mansfield substitute are so zealous to protect the States of New York, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Missouri, and California, where de facto segregation is now such an important factor in life, that they go so far as to deny the court itself the power to enlarge its existing decisions regarding the achievement of racial imbalance."
While they vehemently opposed the Civil Rights Act, these southern politicians saw clearly that the legislation's "racial imbalance" loophole would allow school segregation to exist and expand in northern cities like New York, Chicago, and Detroit. For these southern politicians, the "15,000 white mothers" were a symbol of how resistance to school desegregation in the North was accorded more political respect than similar efforts in the South. Seeing the white parent protests against "busing" as a "white backlash" to civil rights, as the news media and scholars would later describe them, obscures the fact that these protests encouraged northern congressmen to exempt northern schools from the Civil Rights Act's desegregation provisions.
This chapter examines how New York emerged as the focal point for the battle over "busing" for school desegregation in the late 1950s and early 1960s, how "busing" developed as shorthand for politicians and parents to describe and oppose school desegregation in polite terms that distinguished them from the South, and how protests in New York shaped the wording of the Civil Rights Act. These early demonstrations against school desegregation in the North offer an example of how local protests worked their way into national debates and how, in turn, the resulting national policies shaped what kinds of changes were possible at the local level. These early "busing" protests and the resulting "antibusing" provision in the Civil Rights Act limited the federal authority and political will to uproot school segregation in the North, and encouraged local, state, and national politicians to take up "busing" as a way to oppose civil rights. At the same time, early "busing" protests emboldened northern school boards to delay taking action to address school segregation. "Fifteen thousand white mothers" marched in New York a decade before Boston's "busing crisis" garnered national attention, and these early "busing" protests help explain both why Boston and other northern cities were able to postpone desegregating until ordered to do so by a federal court and why "busing" resonated so powerfully as a way to oppose school desegregation. Taking a long view of the "busing" battles makes clear the important role that anticipation and fear played in motivating opposition to "busing." White parents in New York and elsewhere organized to stop "busing" even before school boards or courts ordered that buses be used for school desegregation and despite the fact that most cities had used buses to maintain segregated schools. News media coverage of "busing" protests and plans played an important role in fostering this anticipation and fear. Desegregation plans designed for a handful of schools in two neighborhoods could become citywide stories via newspapers, or national stories via magazines or television broadcasts. Parents in Seattle, Pontiac, and Los Angeles, like the senators in Washington, DC, watched and read about the "fifteen thousand white mothers" protesting "busing" in New York, and this news contributed to existing local fears that "busing" might soon come to their cities. The white parents who took to the streets to protest school desegregation on a wet and cold day in March 1964 walked less than three miles, but their protest rippled across the country, and their opinions shaped civil rights for years to come.
NEW YORK AFTER BROWN V. BOARD
In 1954, New York City had the nation's largest black population. New York's black population had grown from 60,000 (under 2 percent of the total city population) to 750,000 (over 9 percent of the total city population) in the prior five decades, as migrants from southern states and immigrants from the Caribbean joined African Americans who had lived in the city for generations. Significant black neighborhoods developed in Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Brownsville, with people drawn by the vibrant cultural life in these areas but also restricted by racially discriminatory housing policies and a lack of affordable housing in other parts of the city. The majority of black students in New York attended segregated schools, but school officials maintained they were not to blame for this situation. "We did not provide Harlem with segregation," insisted New York City school superintendent William Jansen in 1954. "We have natural segregation here — it's accidental." Counter to Jansen's suggestion, in New York as in other northern cities, school zoning policies worked in concert with housing discrimination to segregate schools. Black parents and their white allies had protested the New York schools in the twenty years before Brown, calling for equal education, an end to teachers' corporal punishment of students, and removal of textbooks with racist text and imagery.
Ella Baker and Dr. Kenneth Clark, two of the most important African American thinkers and activists in the twentieth century, played central roles in pushing for educational equality in New York. Baker, best known for her grassroots organizing in the South for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), had lived in New York City since 1927. Baker traveled across the country in the 1940s organizing black communities as the director of branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and served as the president of the New York NAACP in the early 1950s. Baker grew frustrated both by the poor condition of education for black students in New York and the NAACP's reluctance to prioritize racial discrimination in New York and other northern cities. "They were always talking about the poor people down South," Baker later recalled. "And so the question was, what do you do about the poor children right here?"
Kenneth Clark, famed for the doll experiments that would be cited in the Brown case, was also well aware of the racism and educational inequality black children faced, having founded the Northside Center for Child Development with his wife Dr. Mamie Clark to provide mental health care to Harlem's children. In the summer of 1952, Baker and the Clarks organized meetings of black civic leaders and parents at the Clarks' suburban home in Hastings-on-the-Hudson to discuss educational issues in the city. The following summer the ad hoc group formally became the Committee on New York Public Schools, with Kenneth Clark serving as chairman and Baker leading the organizing effort. This committee was the foundation for the Intergroup Committee on New York's Public Schools, an interracial coalition of twenty-eight social, welfare, civic, labor, and religious organizations. Formed in April 1954, the Intergroup Committee included Clark as chairman and Baker on the steering committee.
(Continues...)Excerpted from Why Busing Failed by Matthew F. Delmont. Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : University of California Press
- Publication date : March 1, 2016
- Edition : First Edition
- Language : English
- Print length : 298 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0520284259
- ISBN-13 : 978-0520284258
- Item Weight : 14.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.75 x 9 inches
- Part of series : American Crossroads
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,054,923 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,370 in Black & African American History (Books)
- #1,547 in Education Administration (Books)
About the author

Matthew F. Delmont is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth College. A Guggenheim Fellow and expert on African American history and the history of civil rights, he is the author of Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad (Viking, 2022), as well four previous books: Black Quotidian, Why Busing Failed, Making Roots, and The Nicest Kids in Town. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and several academic journals, and on NPR. Originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Delmont earned his BA from Harvard University and his MA and PhD from Brown University. To learn more about the author, please visit: http://mattdelmont.com




