Back to Busing

Violence is defused, but problems linger

Chicago is on the verge of a racial explosion," declares the Rev. Jesse Jackson, whose Operation PUSH is pushing for better education. "Busing means the destruction of our neighborhoods, and we're going to fight for our survival," replies Housewife Connie Schaefer, president of the Bogan community council, which represents the largely blue-collar Bogan-Marquette Park areas, one of the last all-white enclaves on Chicago's Southwest Side.

The occasion of the exchange is the opening of school in Chicago and an attempt to bus about 900 students from overcrowded black schools to under-crowded white ones. An estimated 6,000 local residents plan to boycott the first day of school this week as black transfer students are bused into a dozen schools in the section. When rumors spread that police might develop "blue flu" that day--calling in sick--so that they would not have to protect black children, Jackson hinted that black men might have to ride the buses carrying the transfers.

Such signs of rage and despair have been all too familiar since court-ordered busing first began. Yet as schools open around the country, there is encouraging evidence that Chicago's tensions--if not its desegregation problems--are far from typical. For a variety of reasons, busing is no longer education's most controversial issue. Many cities have accepted it as a fait accompli either from sheer fatigue, distraction over declining educational standards, or because in some places busing has worked better than expected.

In dozens of other cities, mass busing may never come. The Supreme Court has backed away from the concept of cross-district busing ever since 1974, when it ruled that Detroit need not bus suburban students into downtown schools unless it could be proved that both city and suburban officials willfully sought to segregate their schools. Several alternatives to mass busing have also appeared and received the blessing of Congress, which has acted strongly over the past few years to curtail the Department of Health, Education and Welfare's power to order busing. Among the options: so-called magnet, or specialty, schools that offer courses not available elsewhere in the system. Herewith a report card on how the situation stands in a sampling of U.S. cities:

Boston Rumblings are heard in South Boston, but no one predicts a return of riot police or tear gas. A citywide Parent Advisory Council established by Federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. has done much to defuse race tension. Another worry is low test scores. The national median on the Scholastic Aptitude Test is 429 on the verbal exam, 471 for math. Boston's white students are scoring 445 on the verbal and 464 on the math, blacks 331 on verbal, 339 on math.

Louisville Schools opened without incident last week, after two years marked by back-to-school riots, though diehard antibusers were planning a rally over Labor Day. The city's big problem now is student discipline--a staggering 14,611 suspensions last year, more than half of them from among the 23% black portion of enrollment--and so-called white flight, or white-family migration to the suburbs to escape integration. The exodus has caused school enrollment to drop from 129,000 in the summer of 1975 to an estimated 113,913 this fall.

St. Louis Some 71% of public school students in St. Louis are black, and a desegregation case that goes to trial Oct. 17 is creating "a sense of nervousness and apprehension," reports Anthony Sestric Jr., attorney for the Concerned Citizens for Neighborhood Schools. But neither Sestric nor anyone else anticipates violence if the plan's massive busing goes into effect. Says one cynical resident of Carondelet, a Dutch enclave: "The first year, they will apportion the 29% white students among all the schools. Two years later, they will reapportion the 15% whites. Pretty soon the number of white kids will be down to zero."

Los Angeles The logistics of integrating the area's 710-sq.-mi., 600,000-student district have proved a formidable roadblock in desegregating the city. Nonetheless, the city must present a plan on Oct. 3 to Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Paul Egly, which, if approved, would take effect next spring. To avoid the ruling, affluent whites are already leaving the San Fernando Valley area to adjacent, nonbused Ventura County, where developers are busily uprooting orange groves to plant new houses for the escapees.

Dallas A 21-member interracial committee devised a desegregation plan peaceably put into effect last year in Dallas. Under it, white children are bused into predominantly black schools for grades four through eight; black children in the same grades are taken out to a central integrated school; and no one is bused more than two or three miles. But despite what seems "total commitment of the community," according to Superintendent Nolan Estes, the city's white flight continues. That flight prior to the plan had been phenomenal: over 40,000 pupils have vanished since 1970 in a system that then enrolled 160,000.

It is hardly news that integration and busing have worked best in Southern cities, where educators predict that the lack of violence and climbing test scores may stanch the flow of whites. Says Wendell Holmes, the lone black member of the Jacksonville, Fla., school board: "I still have some concerns about the small number of black administrators in the system, and about the sensitivity of some teachers to black children. But for Jacksonville, integration is a dead issue."

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