The busing issue is based on one unavoidable fact.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

115. Actually, it was a response to mandates resulting from Brown v. Board of Education,

which held in 1954 that laws establishing racial segregation were unconstitutional, and that so-called "separate but equal" schools were inherently unequal. In a second case, Brown II, decided in 1955, the court ordered the states to desegregate "with all deliberate speed," but didn't suggest any method for doing so. Interestingly, Brown was a busing case. It started out as a lawsuit filed by a black family in Kansas after the school board wouldn't let their child attend the school closest to their home, but instead made her take the bus to a distant blacks-only school.

In response to Brown, the state of Virginia came up with a plan to resist segregation. One school district simply closed all of the public schools by refusing to appropriate any money for the school system. Instead, it provided tuition grants for all students to use at private school, but because all the private schools were segregated and there were no private schools for black students, no formal education was provided for black children in that county from 1959 to 1963. A lawsuit was brought on behalf of the black children, and in Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County the Supreme Court held that the county had violated the Equal Protection cause, and ordered the city to fund the public schools.

But many school districts, especially in the South, continued to drag their feet and pretty much ignore the directive to integrate their schools. The Brown decision caused some families to move to the suburbs or enroll their children in private schools; the number of white students in urban public schools decreased so much that between 1968 and 1978, schools in the South were more segregated than they were before Brown. Busing came about because other methods of desegregating schools hadn't worked, or school districts weren't even trying. In Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, decided in 1971, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a school board's plan to desegregate by means of busing. But later, in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), the Supreme Court said there were limits on busing, holding that federal courts did not have the authority to order desegregation by busing between the city and the suburbs unless there was proof that the suburban school districts were intentionally segregating. The result was that de facto segregation persisted in the North.

In other words, busing was a desegregation method ordered by the courts on a piecemeal basis, and it while it was always controversial it was never completely successful. By the mid-70s, 20 years after Brown, many schools were still segregated, and the question arose as to whether Congress should require busing as a means of desegregating schools nationally rather than leaving it to the courts. This is what the controversy is about - not whether the schools should be desegregated, but how they should be desegregated. The Supreme Court had ordered desegregation without offering any clue as to how to go about it, and even after many years of litigation that question remained unanswered. Busing was one attempt at a solution but it continued to be controversial, even leading to riots and violence in Boston. It was and is a difficult, complex problem, and there were many who wanted to integrate the schools but felt busing was not an effective means to do so. It seems to me that labeling anyone who held that opinion as racist is neither fair nor accurate.