Busing (Contd.)

As of last week, the vast majority of U.S. public school children were back in class. Though there were a few pockets of resistance, hundreds of thousands of students, parents and administrators did their lawful and orderly best to cope with the difficulties of new court-ordered busing programs aimed at bringing racial balance to school districts.

In the South, racist politicians tried to make capital of the busing issue by urging parents to boycott the schools. Surprisingly few did. Alabama Governor George Wallace, for instance, visited a suburb of Mobile one day last week to plead with parents to resist busing "because it is not fair to arbitrarily bus these children." Despite Wallace's speech, more than 85% of Mobile's public school children showed up for classes, carrying out a busing program developed during the summer by Harold Collins, the aggressive superintendent of Mobile's board of education, and various community groups. In Nashville, Tenn., Casey Jenkins, a recently defeated mayoralty candidate, told a crowd of 20,000 at an antibusing rally that "Communism is creeping into the city." He urged parents to write their representatives asking for an end to busing. School has, nonetheless, opened smoothly.

Jackson, Miss., faced a problem of a different nature. After school quietly opened with 8,000 of 29,000 elementary school children being bused, Governor John Bell Williams stepped in to muddle up the situation. To justify an executive order cutting off all state aid --not just funds for busing--to the Jackson school district, he invoked a musty state law that prohibits busing within a municipality.

Fire-Bombed Buses. The most notable trouble spot was in Pontiac, Mich., where ten school buses were fire-bombed on the eve of the academic year. Last week the FBI arrested six people, including Robert Miles, grand dragon of the Michigan Ku Klux Klan, and charged them with conspiracy to obstruct federal-court orders. In all, 48 people have been arrested in Pontiac in connection with antibusing protests, and a boycott organized by white parents is still effective. During the week, the absentee rate in the city's schools held steady at 24%.

By week's end there was almost as much antibusing activity in the courts as in the streets. The school board of Winston-Salem, N.C., asked a U.S. District Court to reconsider its order requiring the busing of more than half the city's 48,000 public school students. A delegation of parents from Pinellas County, Fla., showed up in Washington to ask Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas to stay a district court busing order. In light of the Supreme Court's consistent record of upholding busing plans, there was only a dim chance that the appeals would succeed.

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