To Bus or Not to Bus

Abstract

The Supreme Court in Swann drove the yellow school bus down the road of racial reform. And a bumpy journey it would prove to be. Why, one wonders, did the Court choose busing among all the alternatives available? Why, moreover, was that choice unanimous? Why, lastly, had several justices even swallowed their personal misgivings to join the opinion? For the Court’s commitment to this fateful step, there exist various explanations. One is that the Court never anticipated just how much opposition compulsory busing would provoke. Northern sentiment had not yet been aroused at the time of Swann; South Boston was but a speck on the racial horizon. The justices might still have believed opposition to busing just another eruption of the same southern temper that had produced Little Rock, Prince Edward, and the ugly happenings at Lamar. By 1970, moreover, the Court was most impatient with the South and more than a little embarrassed that sixteen years after Brown the task of southern integration remained incomplete. Thus Swann seemed the final step in the South’s subjugation. That busing would soon become the hottest issue of national domestic politics, the justices had not as yet fully foreseen. There was more to the Court’s approval of busing than integrating the South. Green had whetted the Court’s appetite for numbers. Black-white percentages at last gave the Court a concrete measuring rod, an objective determinant of a school board’s good faith. If one’s goal for schools was statistical racial balance, busing seemed the most direct way to achieve it. In fact, busing seemed the only way to achieve it in the urban metropolis where the races lived largely apart. But something more profound motivated the Court’s probusing stance in 1971: a mystical force in the catacombs of the Supreme Court known as the spirit of Brown. Brown’s legacy was a special race consciousness, an understanding among justices that blacks were henceforth to enjoy constitutional priority.