1 gen 1974 anni - Miliken v. Bradley

Descrizione:

Another major civil rights objective — desegregating schools — produced even more friction. For fifteen years, southern states, using a variety of stratagems, had fended off court directives to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” In 1968, only about one-third of all black children in the South attended schools with whites. Federal courts finally took a serious stance against noncompliance and in a series of firm decisions ordered an end to “dual school systems.”

In areas where schools remained highly segregated, the courts increasingly endorsed busing students in order to achieve integration. Busing differed across the country. In some states, black children rode buses from their neighborhoods to attend previously all-white schools. In others, white children were bused to black or Latino neighborhoods, leading to fierce resistance and major protests by white parents and community members. In Charlotte, North Carolina, Vera and Darius Swann, with help from the NAACP, had forced a federal court to order the desegregation of the local school district. In an important 1971 decision, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg, the Supreme Court upheld the order, siding with the Swanns and affirming that federal courts had the authority to oversee and enforce school desegregation plans. Despite intense local opposition by white parents, desegregation proceeded, and many cities in the South followed suit. By the mid-1970s, 86 percent of southern black children were attending school with whites.

Postwar suburbanization produced a particularly entrenched form of school segregation in the North, and busing orders there proved less effective. Detroit exemplified the problem. To integrate Detroit schools would have required merging city and suburban school districts. A lower court ordered just such a merger in 1971, but in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), the Supreme Court reversed the ruling, requiring busing plans to remain within the boundaries of a single school district. Without including largely white suburbs in busing efforts, however, achieving racial balance in Detroit, and demographically similar northern cities, was impossible. Courts continued to issue busing plans for individual cities, and wherever they did, from Boston to Denver and Los Angeles, white communities erupted in protest and opposition, strengthening the silent majority’s growing influence.

White and black students fighting outside Hyde Park High School in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1975. The city of Boston started a court-ordered school integration program requiring the busing of 18 percent of public school students. Wherever busing was implemented across the country, it often faced stiff resistance and protest. Many white communities resented judges dictating which children would attend which neighborhood school. Busing also had the perverse effect of speeding up “white flight” to city suburbs.

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