What was busing?

Busing was the practice of transporting public school students by bus from one neighborhood to another to achieve racial integration of schools, used as a court-ordered remedy for school segregation primarily during the 1970s and 1980s in many American cities. Busing emerged because the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education had outlawed legally segregated schools, but housing segregation meant that neighborhood schools often remained almost entirely Black or white well into the 1960s and 1970s.

The Supreme Court unanimously approved busing as a desegregation tool in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education on April 20, 1971, ruling that federal courts could order busing to dismantle dual school systems where they had been maintained by law. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg system in North Carolina then became one of the most successfully integrated school systems in the country.

Boston became the most famous and contentious example. Federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. ruled in Morgan v. Hennigan on June 21, 1974 that the Boston School Committee had deliberately maintained a segregated system, and he ordered extensive busing of students between predominantly Black Roxbury and predominantly white South Boston and Charlestown. The first day of busing on September 12, 1974 met angry crowds of white residents who threw rocks and racial slurs at buses carrying Black students. School-related violence continued for several years, and white enrollment in the Boston Public Schools dropped from about 60 percent in 1973 to under 30 percent within a decade as families moved to suburbs or chose private schools.

Other cities such as Detroit, Denver, Cleveland, Louisville, and Los Angeles experienced their own busing controversies. The Supreme Court limited cross-district busing in Milliken v. Bradley in 1974, ruling that suburbs could not be forced into desegregation plans without proof of their own intentional segregation.

Public opinion polls consistently showed that majorities of Americans, including many Black parents, opposed busing as a tool. Most court orders ended in the 1990s and early 2000s as judges concluded that segregation had been remedied or was no longer correctable. The legacy of busing is mixed. It produced significant integration in some cities but white flight in others, and many American schools today are again sharply segregated by race and income.