The South Isn’t The Reason Schools Are Still Segregated, New York Is

[marmar]

(HuffPost) New York City didn’t experience school desegregation in the 1960s and ‘70s like other metropolitan areas. Unlike in Little Rock, Arkansas, the National Guard was never brought in to make sure black students could safely enter an all-white school. Unlike closer hubs, like Boston, resistance to school desegregation never escalated to a citywide crisis. New York never saw a large-scale integration program, and it was never ordered by courts to make its schools more racially balanced.

But the largest school system in the country still had a devastating impact on one of the most controversial causes of the civil rights movement.

In historian Matthew F. Delmont’s new book, Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation, he explains how New York City drove the rhetoric and resistance that allowed school desegregation to falter nationwide. In the late 1950s, years before any serious action was taken to desegregate most schools, New York City parents created the language that would lead opposition to racially mixed schools. This language — which emphasizes the importance of neighborhood schools and opposition to citywide busing — remains the weapon of choice for communities who fight integrated schools today.

The Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education made formal school segregation illegal in 1954. Schools in northern cities, like New York, weren’t segregated by law, but discriminatory housing patterns fostered racial divides all the same. It wasn’t until years after Brown that serious efforts were made to desegregate schools, and New York resisted these attempts early and often.

In 1959, for instance, a few hundred black and Puerto Rican students were getting bused to white areas in Queens to break up hubs of racial isolation. It was a small-scale, one-way busing program, but parents went on the offensive. Hordes of white mothers held protests and wielded signs reading “bussing creates fussing” and “neighborhood schools for all.” Parents emphasized the hardships their children would face if they had to get bused to schools outside their community and the importance of maintaining neighborhood schools as a way to foster community ties. Similar protests continued throughout the next several years.

Because these protests took place in the nation’s media capital, the demonstrators’ rhetoric spread far and wide. The demonstrations got legislators’ attention, too. In the 1960s, a New York legislator helped craft the language in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “that essentially blocked the federal government from having a role in pursuing school desegregation cases in the north,” Delmont said. ................(more)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/new-york-school-desegregation_us_56fc7cebe4b0a06d5804bdf0

[Capt. Obvious]

1. Restore Our Alienated Rights

[1939]

2. Trade-offs

Is having every school have the precise mix of students worth long bus rides at the beginning and ending of the day and the inconvenience of having your child's school all the way across town in the event of an emergency?

Many POC want a nearby and convenient "neighborhood" school even if it isn't fully integrated.

[gollygee]

4. I grew up taking a bus up to an hour to get to school, and up to an hour to get home

There's a story here. The "black school" - which is the school I was bused to - had broken windows that the school administrators had complained about for years with no response, and had finally just boarded up. The first desegregated school day, the city manager (wealthy and white) took his daughter into this same school that she would now be bused to. He saw the broken windows and complained about them, and the next day the school district had the windows fixed.

[MisterP]

3. Boston and Milwaukee, too! LA's mostly racist on principle

[Angel Martin]

5. Desegregation for thee

but not for me...

[cwydro]

6. Charlotte, NC went through busing at the same time as Boston.

It was successful here, and there were no nasty demonstrations like there were in Boston.