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Remember the Boston busing crisis? — 42 Comments

  1. Gosh reminds me of the wonderful times I had being subjected to the desegregation foolishness of the left. In 1971 I was sent across town to West Jefferson High School…marvelous magical high school years were nothing like Happy Days. First 2 weeks of class were spent skipping school whilst the race riots that were inevitable occured.

    Remember the first day of class walking into the quad and seeing about 100 students fighting. This went on for the next two weeks as I remember…

    Was a real fun family moment when I discovered that one of my wife’s aunts was part of the Northern Liberal Group who came down to force this upon us. Gave her a piece of my mind when I found out this past summer during our summer vacation with my wife’s very large family. Told her that I remember exactly the place I was standing when a desk flew out of the window and I promised myself to never allow my children, if I ever had any, to attend any government funded schools.

    Gosh I still get angry thinking about it.

  2. I can recall the protests and furor being a lead item on the evening news, and the subtle inference that it was just typical Boston Irish racism.That was certainly the explanation from a liberal MIT grad friend who used to say Boston was the most racist city in the US, so those people had it coming to them.

  3. I was beginning 8th grade when our Texas school became half white and half black. The black parents must have been terrified, b/c they were willing to believe what their children told them about what went on in class. We white kids had never before seen parents who would take their own child’s word over the word of an adult teacher. Even we knew that such parental behavior was insane: even we knew that adolescent kids are huge liars.

    Discipline in our school crashed. I expect the principals and teachers had never before experienced the type of parental pressure which was suddenly being put on them, i.e. persistent parental accusations of mistreatment of the students.

    Within only a couple of weeks, we students began to understand that all discipline had gone to hell, and we could get away with anything: the teachers and principals were afraid to discipline us. I was a straight A student, yet decided to spend my Friday math class on a playground, playing basketball with some black students who never seemed to attend any class. I would get a bathroom pass at the start of class, and never return until the very end of class. No teacher or principal ever questioned us basketball players. I suspect they did not want to come near us.

    I have never been as happy, at the end of any school year, to get out of a school and never have to come back. Going to that school, that year, was stressful. Getting out equated to escaping a bad thing.

  4. I was living in Littleton MA at the time, and I too remember all the criticisms of people who just wanted their kids safe and at the local school.
    Years later when I was in grad school, a uberliberal guy who had attended BU was going on and on about the racists in Boston and how he hated them; when I suggested that the busing was a terrible idea, he became extremely angry and told me “We had to try.” I pointed out that “trying” with other peoples lives is arrogant and selfish. We hardly ever spoke again. Funny thing is I was still a bit of a liberal at the time.

  5. Brad: I was a liberal at the time, too. But busing really disturbed me. It seemed very hypocritical, and I could see how and why parents could be angry about it without being racist (although some were racist, of course).

  6. “Reading about the recent John Derbyshire flap …”

    From the link “Why National Review Must Fire John Derbyshire”:

    “And a further problem is that the non-investigation of Zimmerman (whose clothes were not even retained as evidence by the Sanford Police) sends the message that …”Josh Barro, Contributor 4/6/12

    March 27, 2012
    “Trayvon rumors abound, but here are facts”
    By Rene Stutzman, Orlando Sentinel

    “Sanford police failed to collect key evidence in the case: the clothing of George Zimmerman, the gunman who killed Trayvon.

    Not true, police said. They took his clothing as well as Trayvon’s and packaged it for crime-lab analysis. A spokeswoman for Special Prosecutor Angela Corey would not disclose Tuesday where the clothing is now, but she wrote in an email that the Florida Department of Law Enforcement “is assisting with the processing of physical evidence.”

    http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-03-27/news/os-trayvon-martin-question-answer-20120327_1_special-prosecutor-angela-corey-medical-examiner-releases-bodies

  7. I read something by Thomas Sowell either yesterday or today. He said that before all the forced integration, middle class backs lived at the edges of innercity black neighborhoods and that they helped integrate people in to the ways of middle class whites. The forced integration destroyed this stepping stone.

    I doubt that the radicals who pushed the acting white/Uncle Tom BS helped either. Instead of just worrying about how whites might treat them, the lower classes then had to worry about how their fellow blacks would. And through all this, the radical chic and the moralistic do-gooders closed their eyes to the real wants and needs of the poor.

  8. Playing feel-good head games with other people’s lives and paying no price for it. What could be better?

  9. The most important variable in the academic performance of a student in elementary school is the educational and economic level of his or her parents. The second most important variable is the parents of the other kids in the room. The next variable is the quality of the teacher to include intelligence and verbal ability. Busing can make some of these things worse.

  10. The question is why do we still allow oak groves to discriminate against pine trees and cod fish to swim seperate from the red snappers?

  11. I lived in Brookline MA during that time. One day I decided to visit JFKs birthplace which was not far from me. Even though I was a Republican, I was interested in history. Anyway, the attendant that day said it was and had been closed to the public for awhile. I asked why and she said the entire back of the house had been firebombed because of Ted Kennedy’s pro busing position. NOT a word in the media/press about it!

  12. I grew up in Houston, just too late to avoid having my high school education destroyed by busing. I do remember reading about the problems in South Boston and concluding that finger-pointing Yankees were a bunch of d@mn hypocrits. For the record, Houston’s last race riot occured in 1917.

  13. Second post where “thy name is” is printed as “they name is” (see also the april 16th post on Obama’s audacity.) Sorry 🙂

  14. neo, glad to see you’re willing to talk about race. (Hope your boss doesn’t fire you!) I’d heard that Americans were cowards who were unwilling to talk about this topic.

  15. My Atlanta Public school had blacks bussed in the early 1960s. My parents transferred me to a white school when I was assigned to teach my black classmates how to read. White flight ensued ASAP. What saved my sanity was reading in MAD Magazine (forbidden by my parents and read on the sly) was this little gem: I is for integration, which everyone is for, as long as it doesn’t happen right next door. 😉

  16. Brad 4:06pm: “when I suggested that the busing was a terrible idea, he became extremely angry and told me ‘We had to try.’ I pointed out that ‘trying’ with other peoples lives is arrogant and selfish.”

    I would have liked to tell him he should ‘try’ to solve poverty by living with a convicted murderer and a few habitual thieves. And requiring him to do so would have been hilariously fitting. Does that sound cruel and insensitive? Not at all: “Intellectuals” should be made to suffer the consequences of their foolish and evil ideas.

  17. ah, but did anyone notice that the whole thing amounted to a social experiment as grand as anything the soviets would do or as despicable as what Mengele would do? by what right does the constitution grant them the power to manipulate outcomes to fashionable ends? where is the clause that allows them to use taxes to control behavior?

    all those kids were part of a vast social experiment that used the force of a gun and punishment at the end of such to do something for which they truly had no idea as to the outcome, but going in made huge promises for permission from people who had not the power delegated to give such…

    i could list out lots of such stuff that put me where i am and not where i worked hard from the age of five to be… Including putting top performers in with sociopathic kids so dysfunctional the school system warehoused them with ping pong and pool tables (and teachers feared them for their hospitalizing several of them).

    the power to repair or adjust social conditions just does not exist in the constitution, nor in a law that treats everyone equal. those kids were not equal before the law, they had not the right that others had to be left unbothered by the state and unmolested regardless of the assumed outcomes of conditions which are out of the states purview to repair.

    from 1900 onward the desire to domesticate mankind and administrate living has moved on into areas that our grandfathers would call neurotic and ill. to think that the state could do what the church could not in a thousand years of more fealty than a modern state has ever enjoyed…

  18. Judges. Who needs em. uck em.

    In my small but continuing education of judges, I register impressed, but with an important caveat: the experience of a judge. Most attorneys and judges have such a different life than the common man. That’s common sense and common sense, here, works. You can’t get rid of the requirement that only God can reason pure. That is why the Constitution relies on many voices of the common man as it’s most important, but not only, source of law.

    For instance, today, an older female judge who is very sharp and very likeable, stated an almost insane observation of a timecard. Various entries to record yard, travel, and job time, were interpreted by her as separate clock in and clock out times. In other words, she only understood a time card with two entries, start and end. And this despite the time card stating very desciptive titles such as “Time left Yard.” Whew. Her own understanding was a logical impossibility and ensued most likely because she had never filled out a time card. Did she think a person started and stopped three times a day? Was this a split-split-split shift? Woooooo.

    So, Judge Garrity, was an ass and, likely, a man with no experience to inform him of the common sense consequences of his decision. Hence, the progressive drive, (remember Santorum’s “not everyone needs a college indoctrination, here) to put everyone one in their bubble.

    Such a bubblicious society, well, it would be folly and comic and tragic and awful and if we don’t fight and get involved, ours.

  19. “Even though I was a Republican, I was interested in history. ” –Lee Merrick

    Yeah, you sound like a Republican, all right.

  20. We Southerners did feel some schadenfreude when the Northern cities finally were forced to integrate their schools, years after the same was forced on ours.

    That said, my small North Carolina town went through the change relatively painlessly. I went to integrated schools from 4th grade onwards. The ratio was 70% white, 30% black.

    A few things made it work. The balance of black and white didn’t reach a tipping point that would cause white flight. Second, there were only 3 high schools: the authorities closed the black one, and split the student population into two groups; one assigned to each of the mostly white high schools. Third, there was no actual bussing involved: all the students pretty much went to the nearest high school.

    And finally, they used tracking — using achievement test scores, they stratified students into classes according to academic ability. In the end, I went to all-white honors classes from 6th grade on. There was none of this “punish the smart kids” meanness of making us do the teachers’ job, teaching the slower/dumber kids. Thank God.

    We only had two rumbles that I can remember: one was when I was in the eighth grade, and the principal and vice-principal, both men, broke it up before it really got started: the blacks had beaten the daylights out of a white football player named Ken, who had to ride the schoolbus home on a mostly black route. So the next day, the white guys on the team threw down to the black toughs, and it was on, with chains and knives.

    The other rumble happened when I was in tenth grade, in the high school: a couple of white guys were walking through the black (self-designated) section of the cafeteria and got jumped, and all hell broke loose, with furniture and trays flying. We were in the second seating, and Mr. Blair, our geometry teacher (black guy, best math teacher I ever had) steered us away from the violence post-haste.

    Oh, and we now had things like Guns in the girls’ bathroom, etc. But only a couple of times. 😉

  21. One other thing: all the Boston uproar was reported as “those terrible White IRISH racists!!” by the hyperventilating mediots. No reporting on the white liberals in well-to-do suburbs escaping the consequences of their insufferable sanctimony.

    Garrity should’ve been sent to live in the most dangerous ghetto in town, with no bodyguards.

  22. I was a Democrat back then, a liberal long before my move to the right. But I remember thinking it was a wrong turn for the civil rights movement to try and erase de facto segregation, that what they needed to do with legal segregation eliminated was improve the quality of inner city schools. One of the few things I had right then.

    Another thing I remember someone saying in the late 60s or early 70s: “they should allow affirmative action for 25-30 years and then declare it unconstitutional”.

  23. I join the ranks of other Southerners who chortled over the Boston busing kerfuffle.

    (Actually, we were in Hawaii, then northern California for most of the worst of it, and missed the worst years.)

    But, the effects lingered in the South for generations. Many southern districts found the best solution was to just bus everyone. That attitude became ingrained. Now, when folks wonder where all the money goes, all they need to do is look at the long lines of yellow buses, and try to imagine how much it costs to buy and operate them.

  24. It was the worst of times
    It was the best of times,
    and what save the US of A
    were people who P, R, and Y ED.

  25. I could not find anything in John Derbyshire “Talk” not founded on facts and plain common sense. Probably, his opponents use some new, arcane definition what racism means totally beyond my understanding.

  26. Beverly mentions the tipping point. The minority population of a school tends to grow slowly up to about 40%. Then it rapidly goes to 70%. The dominant group sets the tone for the school.

  27. For an equally astonishing example of judicial control of schools, check out what happened in Kansas City.

    By the way, Neo, I assume you were never under the impression that organized feminism cared much about ordinary working-class women, especially white ones. The class bigotry of the women’s movement is so palpable that the only reason it doesn’t occur even to the women’s movement is that it’s a movement which combines rapt self-absorption with a complete lack of self-reflection.

    Anyway, we had a similar busing issue in the Detroit area about the same time. Some of the people in the anti-busing movement were racists, without question. Most were just ordinary lower-middle class and working class people who were scared, and with good reason.

    For people of that income level, the family home is usually the major family financial asset. And especially in an area dominated by single and two-family housing, the prime determinant of the home’s value is often the local school system. And the idea that with busing, both who was being sent out and who would come in, would come lower property values was, I regret to say, not fanciful.

    And yes, the people who spoke on tv and wrote editorials urging people to sacrifice for the good of all were almost without exception not personally involved.

    At the time I thought of myself as sort of a social democrat but this was one of the events that got me started on the road to conservatism. People whose finances, assets, and children would be unaffected were very good at telling less well-off and less powerful people why those folks should sacrifice money, education, and sometimes safety. I saw the same thing a few years back during the campaign over a state initiative, dubbed “racist,” that would bar discrimination on account of race or sex in Michigan. I saw many affluent people cheerfully indulging in feelings of moral superiority by giving away rights that belonged to someone else.

    That’s what liberalism has become and I’m not even hesitant anymore to say I am still a neoconservative but I recognize neoconservatism as a subset of conservatism, not something different.

  28. “Some of the people in the anti-busing movement were racists, without question. Most were just ordinary lower-middle class and working class people who were scared, and with good reason.”

    I lived through that time, attending a public school with its share of problems. Anyone who talked about black-on-white crime in the schools was automatically denounced as a racist by the liberals. It was enough to cause one to wonder if liberals were heartless crackpots.

  29. Alex Bensky, your comments strike the right chord exactly.

    The busing/school take over episode was the “perfect storm” of hypocritical social engineering, but only one of a multitude of possible examples.

    The self-segregation that followed, and continues to this day, is an excellent example of the limitations of imposed policies.

  30. “…people cheerfully indulging in feelings of moral superiority by giving away rights that belonged to someone else.”

    Alex, Giving away things that belong to someone else is the epitome of liberalism.

  31. I remember reading an article describing a riot in a Boston school cafeteria where the tops of tables were pulled off and scaled across the room at the opponents.

    I was a sophomore in high school in Nashville when busing began. We had no fighting in my high school that was busing related and none that I can recall reading about in the paper at other schools. There was a lot of anger, though, and an outsider running for mayor who focused on busing grabbed about 40% of the vote. There were a few ‘segregation academies’ that sprang up but they represented a tiny portion of the student population.

    My little brother in 6th grade had an hour bus ride each way to the other side of town. He had a tooth broken from a fist to the mouth when he refused to give up his lunch money. It was a much rougher experience than anything in the neighborhood schools.

  32. >>> What’s that “the law is a ass” quote again?

    Nawww, this one sounds a lot more like a
    “THAT guy is *a* ASS.”
    kinda situation.

    >>> A: What studies are finding is that it doesn’t matter what kind of school it is–for example, if it’s a magnet school or whether parents have choice. It comes down to the quality of the teachers. The more high-quality teachers you have in a school, the better it will perform, regardless of the type of students.

    This doesn’t fit my own data in the least (granted: no kids, so no direct experience, but there are teachers in my family and one of my best friends is a teacher, so I have a lot of input from their side).

    The reason why students succeed or fail is usually tied to school choice for a simple reason — parents who don’t give a rat’s ass about their kids won’t go out of their way to make sure their kids get into a decent school. Parents who do make the effort instill in their kids the idea that education is important, and, even if they themselves had a sucky one, they will try and make sure their kids get the hand up that they need one way or the other.

    A teacher can’t do much when the parents — regardless of race — are telling the kids they’ll never amount to anything and no amount of education will change that.

    Good teachers are important — but at the heart of anything, the kid has to want to learn more than s/he wants to goof off. A good teacher can change that, and inspire, but not if the kid in question is determined to be a disruption and the teacher’s response to that is strongly limited, as is the case with all of today’s anti-corporal punishment folderol (And I say THAT while having been a victim of one of the most egregiously inappropriate misapplications of it in any school system ever)

  33. Why on God’s good earth should kids be bussed to schools across town when they could just walk to schools in their own neighorhood? What a colossal waste of time, gas & money. What a horrible idea. And yes, the media coverage of the busing opponents was as bad as any mainstream/lamestream media we complain about today. There were several utterly wasted years for thousands of Boston students back then. Awful!

  34. Do I remember? Sure do. From right inside the cauldron. I was 15 when busing came to Charlestown.

    I am a 4th generation Townie. My father decided in 1968 that his four children would attend Catholic schools, but people accused us of avoiding the busing. Guess my Dad was psychic, huh?

    Even though I attended private schools, I was deeply affected. Busing was an attack on the Town. The TPF OCCUPIED us. The media lied about us. For years we couldn’t even have a rataional conversation with outsiders because they had already made up their minds that we were in the wrong.

    You will never know how I feel unless you lived in a war zone. Years later I nearly hyperventilated when I was watching the movie “Siege” and the military marches into the city.

    The rights of every Charlestown resident were violated.

    I often think how different it would have been if we had social media tools as we do today.

  35. If only we lesser Irish would have listened to our betters.
    A true paradise would be born. — I thought Obama was going to lead us to such a land.

  36. I had a cambodian coworker who grew up in Seattle. To meet the Seattle school district’s racial quotas, she and other Asian students were shipped to a different school every year. Not as a group, mind you, but individually — off to whatever schools the district thought needed to be more Asian.

    The effect of this was that she never had a childhood school friend for more nine months. Occasionally she’d wind up at the same school as another Asian kid that she had met when their paths crossed at another school, but that was it.

    When I met her she was in her early 20s and had many of the same problems forming long term relationships as you see in military brats. She knew that, and she also knew that, to the school district, she was just as much a part of the education (of other students) as a chalkboard or a periodic chart. She was an Asian person that all the other kids got exposed to so that they would be better people when they grew up or something.

    She was used, used for her race with no thought given to her emotional, educational or developmental needs. I find that quite disgusting.

  37. Pingback:Obama | HUD | neighborhood diversity

  38. Pingback:Social engineering in the neighborhood - Freedom's Floodgates

  39. “Rich white kids?

    Sorry to burst your bubble, Freedom’s Floodgates and and Obama/HUD/neighborhood diversity, but Boston’s whites who were bused to predominantly black schools, and Boston’s white working-class ethnic enclaves, into which blacks were bused to go to school, were not rich either. Boston’s public school students, on the contrary, were poor, and it was the poor people, both white and non-white alike, who were involved in mandatory school busing, NOT the rich whites, most of whom had either moved out to the ‘burbs or sent their kids to the best private schools they could afford, long ago.

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