July 23, 1975

Racial School Busing Now Deemed Mistake

The opponents of racial busing in Boston, Detroit and elsewhere now can rest easy.

The man who started it all 10 years ago has changed his mind.

It can be expected that this will signal the social activists to defuse the busing controversies.  And the courts can go back to interpreting law instead of making it.

The aplomb of liberals while recanting their-own gospel never ceases to amaze me.

Dr.  James Coleman, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, wrote a federal report back in 1964 that concluded black pupils seemed to perform slightly better in integrated classrooms than in all black classrooms.

This was the rationalization for the massive busing of pupils out of their neighborhoods across town in order to achieve "racial balance."

So, for a decade, the big yellow busses rolled disrupting neighborhoods, increasing violence, degrading educational standards.

"White flight" from coercion accelerated.  Finally, whites and blacks living in defacto segregation within a single big city had resegregated themselves into different communities.

The result has been a poorer education for blacks and financial disaster for the cities as tax-paying, middle-class whites fled to the suburbs.

Viewing the wreckage of his beautiful theory, Dr.  Coleman has reassessed his conclusions.  "Only under certain specific circumstances," he avers, "does integration improve black classroom performance."

That improvement occurs, he declares, when the number of black students introduced is not sufficiently large to alter the middle class ethos of the classroom.

This sets severe limits to the number that can be integrated.  When those limits are exceeded and the ghetto ethos prevails, instead of black scores improving, white scores decline.

Now he tells us!

It is significant that Dr.  Coleman's revisionism from the liberal line comes soon after release of a federal government survey of discipline in the nation's schools.

The survey revealed that although blacks make up 27 percent of the enrollment in 2,908 school districts surveyed, they accounted for 37 percent of the expulsions and 42 percent of the suspensions.  In the inner-city schools alone, the percentages were doubled.

Associated Press Writer Marc Wilson confirmed the survey by going back to the place school integration started - Little Rock, Arkansas.  His findings were appalling.

It was nearly a generation ago - in 1957 - that President Dwight Eisenhower decided to "bust" the southern school systems.  More than 11,000 paratroopers and National Guardsmen moved into Little Rock to insure the safety of nine scared black youngsters entering the all-white Central High School for the first time.

Today, Central High has a black principal and more than half its students are black.  It also has two "campus supervisors" - in reality unarmed security men who guard the main entrance and patrol the halls with walkie-talkies.

"The school, indeed the entire school district, suffers from an abnormal scholastic crime rate," reports Wilson.

Last November a black junior high student was shot to death by another black student during school hours.  Every month, school officials have to contend with one or more gun incidents.  Some whites are involved, but most are blacks.  The teachers' association has complained its members are afraid of their pupils.

The statistics are disheartening for those who had hopes for high-quality, integrated education.

The district has 11,231 black students, and 10,895 whites.  Of 919 students suspended last year, 580 were black males as compared to 128 white males.  Black female suspensions numbered 180 against 31 white females.

The blacks in Little Rock claim discipline discriminates against them.  Attorney John Walker, a long-time civil rights activist, has filed- suit in U.S. District Court alleging the suspension regulations "make possible" racially discriminatory decisions.

In addition the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has filed a complaint with the U.S. Justice Department challenging the school's discipline policies.

Rufus C.  Huffman, NAACP southern education field director, says the discipline policies "have negated the benefits of desegregation."

"School officials think desegregation means the old melting pot concept, where the blacks are assimilated into white society," he said.  "But many blacks either can't or don't want to be assimilated into white society.  They'd be better off at the old separate but equal schools - even if there wasn't toilet paper in the restrooms.""

All of this is quite depressing.  I happen to believe in the melting pot concept where unlike metals fuse into a new alloy having different properties and a different appearance than either original.  Huffman misuses the analogy when he alleges blacks are expected to disappear into an unchanged all-white mix.

Demographers - those sociologists who pretend to know about population development - tell us that the present white and black citizens will meld into a single "light-brown" nationality group in five generations.  Laws, social pressure and religious persuasion will have very little effect on this slow but inexorable assimilation.

This is the natural and desirable direction of U.S society.  There are those that wish the millennium could be legislated to happen in the next generation, if not the immediate one.  Others are just as adamant that it never happen.

Most of us, I suspect, are content to meet change at a leisurely pace - an attitude that is maddening to the extremists but which is realistic.

Author: Lindsey Williams