Bernie Sanders was against 'busing' in the 1970s

[customerserviceguy]

64. I believe it was a cause

I don't know how old you are, but if you're under the age of fifty-five, then you have no living memory of the urban riots of the 1965-68 time frame, where even after passage of the Civil Rights Acts, the inner cities would blow up into fiery infernos every summer, and the problems spread to more and more cities.

During the busing period, these "race wars" as they were sometimes called, were displayed on TV as often as was the carnage from Vietnam. When white people were told that their kids would be transported to inner city neighborhoods for school every day, they were alarmed. Even if they had raised their kids as best as possible to minimize racism, they knew that would not protect their children from physical violence. So, they moved out of the school district, and just commuted to the jobs in the city, where the adults felt that they would be better able to deal with any violence that occurred.

I know that the Sixties are often depicted as times when people were into peace, love, rock-and-roll, and pot, but they were incredibly intense times for the people who lived in them. In 1968, even with George Wallace being on the ballot in all fifty states, bleeding off the votes of the most racist whites, and even snagging the electoral votes of several Southern states, Nixon managed to win the election with his dog whistle slogans of "Law and Order" and "This time, vote like your whole world depended on it" to lure the votes of frightened white people.

With middle class working people deserting the cities in droves, they deteriorated. Then, they were targeted by the Giuliani types who were into crackdown mode, and the drug laws that put away thousands of people for minor amounts of substances that had been sold legally earlier in the century.

Calling white flight an excuse ignores the history that white people of various European ethnicites and people of color had living with each other in urban areas, even if sometimes it was less than ideal. My adoptive grandfather came from Poland, and he had about as much tolerance for a racial joke as he did for a "Polack" joke. He was a union representative in the steel mills of Northwestern Indiana, and always fought hard to make sure African-Americans were treated fairly by the mills and by the union.