The Buses Are Running

It is schooltime again, and across the land last week children gathered up their lunch boxes and book bags and boarded buses for school. For thousands of children in both North and South, the buses took them a good deal farther than they had ever traveled to classes before. New court-ordered busing programs were being tested in hundreds of school districts, and while there was undeniable confusion and more than a smattering of residual resentment, most classes opened in an atmosphere of relative tranquillity.

The calm was perhaps a tribute more to the average American's traditional respect for the law than to firm guidance from his top lawmakers and executors. Last month President Nixon openly disavowed a busing plan for the Austin, Texas, school system that had been mapped out by Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Elliot Richardson, and warned federal officials that busing operations should be pressed only to the "minimum required by law." Last week Richardson returned from a long vacation to announce that he was in "complete agreement" with the President's stance. He also reported that Nixon was pleased by "the remarkable degree of public understanding" displayed in the South despite "court requirements that have carried desegregation much farther than anywhere else in the country."

Trouble Spots. Adding to the confusion of an already muddled issue, Chief Justice Warren Burger chose the moment to declare that the Supreme Court's Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg decision of last spring did not really mean what some courts seemed to think it meant-that the law required enough busing to achieve an equal racial balance in every school within a school district. Not so, said Burger, in an obiter dictum to a decision that substantiated a Winston-Salem, N.C., busing order. If federal and school officials would only read the opinion carefully, he pointed out, they would find the statement that "the constitutional command to desegregate schools does not mean that every school in every community must always reflect the racial composition of the school system as a whole." By thus accentuating the negative, Burger appeared to make it even more difficult for beleaguered school authorities to implement busing plans. Said one official: "Swann was supposed to be a landmark, but it's beginning to look like more of a barrier."

Taken together, the statements by Richardson and Burger amounted to an invitation for foot-dragging on the busing issue. As it turned out, there were protests, but not all the trouble spots were in the South and not all were created by reactionary whites. Some of the most notable: > In Alabama, Governor George Wallace continued to defy court orders. Last month the irascible Governor told a white girl to report to the predominantly white high school in her neighborhood rather than submit to busing, ordered the reopening of a junior high school in a solidly black area (it had been closed by court decree) and in general challenged President Nixon to put his antibusing sentiments into practice. A federal court ruled "meaningless" Wallace's decision on the school reopening, so last week he rammed through the Alabama house an antibusing bill that permits parents to keep their children in neighborhood schools if they deem busing hazardous to their health. Also, in an amendment to a general appropriations bill, the school boards are forbidden the use of state funds for busing.

> In the Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C., school district that provided the test case for the Swann decision, local officials tried a perversely ingenious concept to offset the consequences of busing. Under the plan, high school seniors scheduled for busing could swap schools with classmates of their own race. This meant that a middle-or upper-class white might be able to find a poor white friend who would take his place in a predominantly black school for a price-just as some of their forebears had sent off paid substitutes to the Civil War. The plan was scotched when rumors began circulating of under-the-table payments of up to $500 a head.

>In Pontiac, Mich., a tough factory town, ten school buses were fire-bombed in a parking lot on the eve of the opening of public schools. Despite that, the school board intends to begin busing this week, with each bus provided with a monitor (unarmed). Meanwhile, irate parents have been filing a paper snowstorm of harassment suits, charging that the buses were unsafe, and the drivers inadequately trained. They had the support of a state legislator with the Dickensian misnomer of John W. Law, who flagrantly urged parents to keep their children out of school rather than obey busing orders. The Pontiac school board warned parents that any such refusal will gain them only a subpoena to juvenile court. But a few progressive civic leaders were campaigning for busing under the slogan "Make It Work."

> In San Francisco, a form of reverse prejudice is at work in Chinatown. Last spring the school board approved a court-ordered plan that included a provision for busing several thousand Chinese children out of their teeming ghetto. But the Chinese Parents Committee is looking for a way to block the order. Basically, they fear a further dilution of the waning sense of cultural heritage among their young. The Chinese do not want their children's sense of identity corrupted by mingling with white youngsters. Says Dr. Dennis Wong, a leader in the Chinese community: "We have a saying that it takes ten years to plant a tree and it takes 100 years to cultivate a person."

Despite these isolated difficulties, most parents, school officials and politicians seemed to be genuinely trying to carry out busing orders with a minimum of fuss and at least a modicum of good will. The moderate view of the incendiary issue of busing was probably best expressed by Governor Reubin Askew of Florida. In a speech delivered in Gainesville last week, Askew agreed that the very concept of busing was onerous. "Busing," he said, "certainly is an artificial and inadequate instrument of change. Nobody really wants it-not you, not me, not the people, not the school boards-not even the courts. Yet," Askew added, "the law demands, and rightly so, that we put an end to segregation in our society."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.