Desegregation busing

Race-integration busing in the U.S. is the practice of assigning and transporting students to schools within or outside their local school districts. Busing met considerable opposition from both white and black people. The movement of large numbers of white families to suburbs of large cities reduced the effectiveness of the policy.

About Desegregation busing in brief

Race-integration busing in the U.S. is the practice of assigning and transporting students to schools within or outside their local school districts. Busing met considerable opposition from both white and black people. The movement of large numbers of white families to suburbs of large cities, a phenomenon known as white flight, reduced the effectiveness of the policy. The origins of desegregation busing can be traced back to two major developments that occurred in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s, writes John Sutter, author of “The Race-Integration Busing Project” (Simon & Schuster, 2013) The U. S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education overturned racial segregation laws for public schools that had been in place in a number of states since the late 19th century, writes Sutter. The impact of Green and Swann served to end all remnants of de jure segregation in the South, he says, but the consequence of the Swann decision ushered in new resistance to desegregating public schools in subsequent decades, he writes. The decision failed to address de facto segregation, by the late 1960s public schools remained de facto segregated in many cities because of demographic patterns, Sutter writes, and in some cases, school district intentionally drawn the racially segregate schools, due to conscious plans to send black children to inferior schools. He writes: Proponents of early plans to engage in conscious segregation argued that busing schoolchildren to other schools, with an objective to imbalances, was a way to equalize their neighborhood schools, but this was not the case in most of the cases.

Sutter: In many cases, by 1969, more than nine out of every ten black students in Nashville still attended all-black schools, despite the fact that nine-out-of-ten white students in the city were attending all-white schools. In other cases, such as in New Kent County, Tennessee, black students still attended every ten schools, even if it meant redrawing school boundaries and the use of busing as a legal tool to achieve racial balance. He says the impact of the 1971 Supreme Court decision, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of. Education, ruled that the federal courts could use bused as a further integration tool to achieved racial balance, but it did not address the de facto racial segregation in schools in many other cities, he adds. The decision was a setback for the desegration efforts in many areas. It was also the beginning of the end of racial discrimination in public schools, says Sutter; the court ruled in 1971 that the school district must desegregate immediately and eliminate racial discrimination “root and branch” The court’s decision was followed by a backlash of resistance and violence from the Southern states and members of Congress, who vowed to use all legal means to undermine and reverse the Court’s ruling. By 1960, all major Northern and Western cities had sizable black populations. Sutter says.

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Plessy v. Ferguson Political positions of Joe Biden Brown v. Board of Education Ryan Sutter