Bumpy Road in Richmond

RICHMOND is a peaceful, tobacco-rich community nestled on the banks of Virginia's James River. Last week, however, many of the area's 480,000 citizens seemed ready to take to the Civil War trenches that still border parts of the city. Once the embattled capital of the Confederacy, Richmond is now the center of a school-busing war that has touched off a cross fire of bitter invective.

At one demonstration, more than 4,000 antibusing marchers toted American flags and a coffin inscribed DEATH OF FREEDOM as they massed outside the state capitol to hear City Councilman Howard Carwile denounce progressive Governor Linwood Holton as "gutless, spineless, no good," a man who made him "think of euthanasia." The Rev. John Spong, the esteemed rector of St. Paul's Episcopal Church and a cousin of Democratic U.S. Senator William Spong Jr., took to the pulpit last week to label Carwile's remarks as "the cheap shot of an insensitive politician." The councilman was unrepentant. Dismissing Spong as an "ecclesiastical lickspittle," he added: "When I look at some spiritually anemic preachers, I think of embalming fluid." Inevitably, Carwile's tasteless demagoguery led to a sick joke. The councilman was not being macabre, the snicker went, he was just trying to drum up some business for Mayor Thomas Bliley Jr. Bliley is one of the city's leading morticians.

School busing, an issue that has been smoldering in Richmond for two years, last month flared up when U.S. District Judge Robert R. Merhige handed down a landmark decision (TIME, Jan. 24). To end Richmond's unequal and racially imbalanced educational structure, Merhige ordered that the increasingly black (now 69%) city school system be consolidated with the two predominantly white (91%) districts in suburban Henrico and Chesterfield counties. The order, which has been temporarily stayed pending an appeal, has important implications for other U.S. cities where the pattern of a "white noose" of suburbia surrounding a black-dominated central city is even more pronounced.

There are 101,000 students in Richmond and in the two adjoining counties; consolidation would add only 10,000 children to the 68,000 that are already being bused either for purposes of integration or basic transportation. But reaction to the order was quick and heated. Angry whites sneered that Judge Merhige sends his eleven-year-old son to a private school. One member of the Virginia House of Delegates called for the impeachment of Merhige as a "judicial pirate." Last week both the House of Delegates and the state senate passed overwhelmingly a resolution calling for a constitutional amendment prohibiting busing to achieve racial balance. The conservative Richmond Times-Dispatch ran a series of antibusing editorials and printed angry letters decrying the "puppet courts throughout America" and the "Communist trend overtaking the nation." Raymond Boone, editor of the Richmond Afro-American, made it plain that the city's blacks consider the antibusing factions segregationist. "This will determine whether democracy can work or not," he said. "If we don't make it this time, you can forget it."

The flight of whites to the suburbs, which intensified when busing first started in Richmond in 1970, is now spreading beyond Henrico and Chesterfield counties. Says one real estate salesman in semi-rural Hanover County: "I can no longer measure the market because I've sold everything under roof." The area's private schools, already numbering more than 40 with two more scheduled to open this fall, have expansion plans for handling the expected boom in enrollment. Roman Catholic Bishop John J. Russell, meanwhile, has let it be known that parents of prospective students for the area's diocesan parochial schools, which have an 8% black enrollment, would be interviewed to weed out those fleeing integration. Amid all the furor, many parents are beginning to adjust to the idea of integrated housing as an alternative to busing. "I hear some talk now about integrating this neighborhood," says one suburban mother. "Before the consolidation, I didn't hear any."

Last week antibusing citizen groups organized a motorcade to Washington, 117 miles distant. "They've seen the hippies and the peaceniks and the tent cities," said William Hanner, president of the Henrico County P.T.A. "Now let's show them what a good clean American middle-class type of people can do in the way of a demonstration."

When the motorists arrived at the Virginia State Fairgrounds one morning last week, image-minded leaders asked them to remove all Confederate flags and such signs as IF NIXON CAN'T

STOP BUSING, WALLACE CAN. The first of the 3,261 cars in the caravan to complete the trek followed the designated route past the Washington Monument, the White House and the Capitol. Slowed by a slushy snowfall and wrong turns, the motorcade ended ineffectually in a traffic jam that stretched 25 miles back along Interstate 95.

William Loving, the black owner of a local real estate firm, had a wry comment on the Richmond controversy: "First, blacks were not permitted to sit in the front of the bus. Then they moved to the front. Now they're driving the bus."

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