In “Recitatif,” Twyla and Roberta find themselves on opposite sides of a controversial late-20th-century issue: school busing. We will look deeper at this to understand its origins and the views on both sides, which will also help to illuminate the story further.
In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas that segregated schools were inherently unequal. This struck down Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which had stated that “separate but equal” accommodations for different races were constitutional, and began to path toward racial integration. This was neither an easy nor a clear road; it was unclear to many whether simply saying segregation was unconstitutional was enough, or whether more dynamic measures were needed to secure a school population that mirrored the rest of the country.
Hence, busing became a flashpoint in the 1970s, particularly after the case Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, in which the Court ruled that desegregation to achieve racial diversity was constitutional.
In certain places in the country such as Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, black students were beginning to be bused from urban schools to suburban ones where the student population was primarily white. The reverse also happened: white suburban students were bused to primarily black schools in urban areas. The New York Times explained the ruling, stating, “It is not enough for school officials to draw school attendance lines that appear to be racially neutral. Officials must foster integration by such affirmative measures as gerrymandering school boundaries to include both races, pairing ‘white’ and ‘Negro’ schools, and drawing school zones that combine noncontiguous areas in racially diverse neighborhoods.” The ruling and busing overall were intended to combat “de facto” segregation: segregation by patterns of settlement and residency, rather than by law. In 1973, the Court clarified its ruling, saying in Milliken v. Bradley that students could only be bused across district lines if it was clear that discriminatory policies existed in multiple districts.
Resistance was high, especially among white parents. Protests and pickets were common and sometimes broke out into violence, as was the case in South Boston in 1974. Those who opposed busing claimed the travel time from home to school and back was too long; indeed, sometimes it could take an hour there and an hour back. This might mean less time for extracurricular activities or family activities. Others were concerned about the costs for maintaining and operating these buses. On the other side of the debate, parents were frustrated at the disparity between schools in different parts of town. Boston activist and mother Ruth Batson explained, “What black parents wanted was to get their children to schools where there were the best resources for educational growth—smaller class sizes, up-to-date-books. They wanted their children in a good school building, where there was an allocation of funds which exceeded those in the black schools; where there were sufficient books and equipment for all students.” Additionally, 'de facto segregation' was also a term that garnered criticism from those who were well aware that it happened as a result of a web of decisions; James Baldwin wrote, “’De facto segregation’ means Negroes are segregated, but nobody did it.” Leon Panetta, fired from the Nixon administration for advocating a deeper look into school segregation in the North, stated, “It has become clear to me that the old bugaboo of keeping federal hands off Northern school systems because they are only de facto segregated, instead of de jure segregation as the result of some official act, is a fraud … There are few if any pure de facto situations. Lift the rock of de facto, and something ugly and discriminatory crawls out from under it.”
An Atlantic article looked at Boston’s troubles in particular and summed up the crisis by writing, “School desegregation was about the constitutional rights of black students, but in Boston and other Northern cities, the story has been told and retold as a story about the feelings and opinions of white people. The mass protests and violent resistance that greeted school desegregation in mid-1970s Boston engraved that city’s ‘busing crisis’ into school textbooks and cemented the failure of busing and school desegregation in the popular imagination. Contemporary news coverage and historical accounts of Boston’s school desegregation have emphasized the anger that white people in South Boston felt and have rendered Batson and other black Bostonians as bit players in their own civil-rights struggle.”
Mandatory busing largely faded by the 1980s and 1990s as new housing patterns emerged. The Times explains the connection to the current moment: “Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s busing program remained in place until 2002, when, after a 1999 court decision that found 'remedial techniques' like busing were no longer needed, it implemented a plan that gave all students the option of attending schools in their own neighborhoods. Other cities with longstanding busing plans also dropped the programs around this time…But now that legal and political tolerance for even mildly coercive forms of integration appears to be evaporating, the hope of integrated public schools may soon be a distant memory.”
