Sunday, June 30, 2019
‘Forced busing’ didn’t fail. Desegregation is the best way to improve our schools. Biden Lied In The Debate
Biden Lied In The Debate Biden Lied In The Debate
"While much has been said about the failure of busing, it’s time to move beyond this myth. In one of the most famous examples of court-ordered desegregation, Boston began busing students between white and black neighborhoods in 1974, sparking violent white protests and boycotts by white students. White families fled to the suburbs. Supporting neighborhood schools and opposing school bus rides became rhetoric to fight desegregation without overtly racist language. But as black activists in Boston noted at the time, “It’s not the bus, it’s us.” Before the court order, nearly 90 percent of high school students rode a bus to school without protest. Today, most children get on a school bus to attend a segregated school. Busing ended because of a combination of white protest, media that overemphasized resistance, and the lack of systematic collection to judge the impact of desegregation. So we need to be sober about our history: Busing didn’t fail; the nation’s resolve and commitment to equal and excellent desegregated schools did."
___________________________________________________________________________________________
"Two miles from my office in Syracuse, N.Y., Westside Academy Middle School has been in need of repairs for decades. Located in one of the nation’s poorest census tracts, 85 percent of its students are black or Latino, and 86 percent are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. The 400 students have limited creative outlets, with no orchestra or band and just two music teachers.
Ten miles away, Wellwood Middle School, in a suburban district, offers students a stately auditorium and well-equipped technology rooms. There, 88 percent of the students are white and only 10 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The 700 students have at least five music teachers, band, orchestra, choir, musical theater and dozens of other clubs and activities.
Fifty percent of Wellwood’s eighth graders passed the state math assessment. At Westwood, none did. The disparate student outcomes are no surprise.
Since the Reagan administration’s “A Nation at Risk” report pronounced that schools across the country were failing, every president has touted a new plan to close the racial academic achievement gap: President Obama installed Race to the Top; George W. Bush had No Child Left Behind; and Clinton pushed Goals 2000. The nation has commissioned studies, held conferences and engaged in endless public lamentation over how to get poor students and children of color to achieve at the level of wealthy white students — as if how to close this opportunity gap was a mystery. But we forget that we’ve done it before. Racial achievement gaps were narrowest at the height of school integration.
U.S. schools have become more segregated since 1990, and students in major metropolitan areas have been most severely divided by race and income, according to the University of California at Los Angeles’s Civil Rights Project. Racially homogenous neighborhoods that resulted from historic housing practices such as red-lining have driven school segregation. The problem is worst in the Northeast — the region that, in many ways, never desegregated — where students face some of the largest academic achievement gaps: in Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.
[Critics say my school district’s new discipline policy is unfair to white students. Here’s why they’re wrong.]
More than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, federal education policies still implicitly accept the myth of “separate but equal,” by attempting to improve student outcomes without integrating schools. Policymakers have tried creating national standards, encouraging charter schools, implementing high-stakes teacher evaluations and tying testing to school sanctions and funding. These efforts sought to make separate schools better but not less segregated. Ending achievement and opportunity gaps requires implementing a variety of desegregation methods – busing, magnet schools, or merging school districts, for instance – to create a more just public education system that successfully educates all children.
Public radio’s “This American Life” reminded us of this reality in a two-part report this summer, called “The Problem We All Live With.” The program noted that, despite declarations that busing to desegregate schools failed in the 1970s and 1980s, that era actually saw significant improvement in educational equity. When the National Assessment of Educational Progress began in the early 1970s, there was a 53-point gap in reading scores between black and white 17-year-olds. That chasm narrowed to 20 points by 1988. During that time, every region of the country except the Northeast saw steady gains in school integration. In the South in 1968, 78 percent of black children attended schools with almost exclusively minority students; by 1988, only 24 percent did. In the West during that period, the figure declined from 51 percent to 29 percent.
But since 1988, when education policy shifted away from desegregation efforts, the reading test score gap has grown — to 26 points in 2012 — with segregated schooling increasing in every region of the country.
Research has shown that integration is a critical factor in narrowing the achievement gap. In a 2010 research review, Harvard University’s Susan Eaton noted that racial segregation in schools has such a severe impact on the test score-gap that it outweighs the positive effects of a higher family income for minority students. Further, a 2010 study of students’ improvements in math found that the level of integration was the only school characteristic (vs. safety and community commitment to math) that significantly affected students’ learning growth.
In an analysis of the landmark 1966 “Coleman Report,” researchers Geoffrey Borman and Maritza Dowling determined that both the racial and socioeconomic makeups of a school are 1¾-times more important in determining a student’s educational outcomes than the student’s own race, ethnicity or social class.
But we continue to think about segregation as a problem of the past, ignoring its growing presence in schools today. Desegregating schools has become a political third rail, even though it is an essential solution to one of our nation’s most persistent problems.
This month, Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced he would step down in December and his deputy, John King, would replace him. King, during his tenure as New York state’s education commissioner, visited both school districts mentioned above to advance the national Race to the Top agenda, but he never acknowledged the increasing school segregation apparent in the region. In 1989, Syracuse city schools were about 60 percent white, and just 20 percent of black and Latino students attended predominately minority schools. Today, the district is 28 percent white, while 55 percent of Latino students and 75 percent of black students attend predominately minority schools.
Racial and economic segregation affects schools in various ways. Federal and state policies that impose sanctions on poor-performing schools — state takeovers and forced replacement of school leaders, for example — often make matters worse. For example, Westside Academy , the Syracuse middle school where no students passed the state eighth-grade math assessment, has has had multiple principals and saw 44-percent teacher turnover in the 2012-2013 school year.
[My son has been suspended five times. He’s 3.]
About a decade ago, the elementary schools that feed into Westside Academy and Wellwood Middle School adopted the same math curriculum program, touted as one of the best standards-based elementary programs available. As is typical, both districts struggled to implement the new curriculum initially. But a decade later, the schools in Wellwood’s district are still using it, with teachers becoming more skilled and comfortable with the new way to teach math. The schools in Westside’s district, however, changed their math program at least two more times, leaving teachers, students, and families in a constant state of churn and undoubtedly affecting student learning and test scores. In this era of accountability, this instability is not forced upon white, upper-middle class families.
While much has been said about the failure of busing, it’s time to move beyond this myth. In one of the most famous examples of court-ordered desegregation, Boston began busing students between white and black neighborhoods in 1974, sparking violent white protests and boycotts by white students. White families fled to the suburbs. Supporting neighborhood schools and opposing school bus rides became rhetoric to fight desegregation without overtly racist language. But as black activists in Boston noted at the time, “It’s not the bus, it’s us.” Before the court order, nearly 90 percent of high school students rode a bus to school without protest. Today, most children get on a school bus to attend a segregated school. Busing ended because of a combination of white protest, media that overemphasized resistance, and the lack of systematic collection to judge the impact of desegregation. So we need to be sober about our history: Busing didn’t fail; the nation’s resolve and commitment to equal and excellent desegregated schools did.
Busing is not the only way to desegregate our schools. We can unify school districts so they encompass racially and economically diverse neighborhoods. The countywide district centered in Raleigh, for instance, has been successful in integrating schools and achieving academic success, in contrast to the 18 schools districts across the metropolitan Syracuse area. Shaping districts like pie pieces, so they cut across urban, suburban and even rural spaces, could have the same effect.
Creating more open-enrollment magnet schools would also bring families of various races and incomes into well-funded and themed schools. For existing public schools, we could merge two neighborhood campuses in segregated communities, so they attend one neighborhood school together from kindergarten through second grade and the other from third through fifth grades. Or we can incentivize school districts to take action, imposing segregation and providing financial resources to districts with aggressive desegregation plans.
Certainly, none of these approaches is easy or perfect, and desegregation alone is not a magic bullet to end the achievement and opportunity gaps. Even integrated schools face racial gaps. Many black and Latino kids end up in lower academic tracks and white parents protect exclusive opportunities for their kids. Still, knowing the benefits of integrated learning environments, we can’t continue to ignore the growing hold segregation has on our schools.
We’ve heard soaring words from Duncan and Obama touting education as the route to a better life, saying it is a moral imperative that we work tirelessly to improve the education of our most vulnerable children. But rhetoric is no match for our failure of will to change the disparate realities of our separate educational systems. It is no match for our failure of courage to call out the persistent segregation of our schools.
Some scholars have argued that King will be good for school integration. Time will tell if we are entering a moment that moves beyond rhetoric toward substantial desegregation.
In this time of transition for the Education Department — in the last year of the Obama administration — are we going to continue ignoring the moral implications of separate schools? Our history shows that policy cannot focus on improving “failing” schools; it needs to also emphasize desegregating them. No matter how much we seek to improve the back of the education bus, it will always be the back."
‘Forced busing’ didn’t fail. Desegregation is the best way to improve our schools.
"While much has been said about the failure of busing, it’s time to move beyond this myth. In one of the most famous examples of court-ordered desegregation, Boston began busing students between white and black neighborhoods in 1974, sparking violent white protests and boycotts by white students. White families fled to the suburbs. Supporting neighborhood schools and opposing school bus rides became rhetoric to fight desegregation without overtly racist language. But as black activists in Boston noted at the time, “It’s not the bus, it’s us.” Before the court order, nearly 90 percent of high school students rode a bus to school without protest. Today, most children get on a school bus to attend a segregated school. Busing ended because of a combination of white protest, media that overemphasized resistance, and the lack of systematic collection to judge the impact of desegregation. So we need to be sober about our history: Busing didn’t fail; the nation’s resolve and commitment to equal and excellent desegregated schools did."
___________________________________________________________________________________________
"Two miles from my office in Syracuse, N.Y., Westside Academy Middle School has been in need of repairs for decades. Located in one of the nation’s poorest census tracts, 85 percent of its students are black or Latino, and 86 percent are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. The 400 students have limited creative outlets, with no orchestra or band and just two music teachers.
Ten miles away, Wellwood Middle School, in a suburban district, offers students a stately auditorium and well-equipped technology rooms. There, 88 percent of the students are white and only 10 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The 700 students have at least five music teachers, band, orchestra, choir, musical theater and dozens of other clubs and activities.
Fifty percent of Wellwood’s eighth graders passed the state math assessment. At Westwood, none did. The disparate student outcomes are no surprise.
Since the Reagan administration’s “A Nation at Risk” report pronounced that schools across the country were failing, every president has touted a new plan to close the racial academic achievement gap: President Obama installed Race to the Top; George W. Bush had No Child Left Behind; and Clinton pushed Goals 2000. The nation has commissioned studies, held conferences and engaged in endless public lamentation over how to get poor students and children of color to achieve at the level of wealthy white students — as if how to close this opportunity gap was a mystery. But we forget that we’ve done it before. Racial achievement gaps were narrowest at the height of school integration.
U.S. schools have become more segregated since 1990, and students in major metropolitan areas have been most severely divided by race and income, according to the University of California at Los Angeles’s Civil Rights Project. Racially homogenous neighborhoods that resulted from historic housing practices such as red-lining have driven school segregation. The problem is worst in the Northeast — the region that, in many ways, never desegregated — where students face some of the largest academic achievement gaps: in Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.
[Critics say my school district’s new discipline policy is unfair to white students. Here’s why they’re wrong.]
More than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, federal education policies still implicitly accept the myth of “separate but equal,” by attempting to improve student outcomes without integrating schools. Policymakers have tried creating national standards, encouraging charter schools, implementing high-stakes teacher evaluations and tying testing to school sanctions and funding. These efforts sought to make separate schools better but not less segregated. Ending achievement and opportunity gaps requires implementing a variety of desegregation methods – busing, magnet schools, or merging school districts, for instance – to create a more just public education system that successfully educates all children.
Public radio’s “This American Life” reminded us of this reality in a two-part report this summer, called “The Problem We All Live With.” The program noted that, despite declarations that busing to desegregate schools failed in the 1970s and 1980s, that era actually saw significant improvement in educational equity. When the National Assessment of Educational Progress began in the early 1970s, there was a 53-point gap in reading scores between black and white 17-year-olds. That chasm narrowed to 20 points by 1988. During that time, every region of the country except the Northeast saw steady gains in school integration. In the South in 1968, 78 percent of black children attended schools with almost exclusively minority students; by 1988, only 24 percent did. In the West during that period, the figure declined from 51 percent to 29 percent.
But since 1988, when education policy shifted away from desegregation efforts, the reading test score gap has grown — to 26 points in 2012 — with segregated schooling increasing in every region of the country.
Research has shown that integration is a critical factor in narrowing the achievement gap. In a 2010 research review, Harvard University’s Susan Eaton noted that racial segregation in schools has such a severe impact on the test score-gap that it outweighs the positive effects of a higher family income for minority students. Further, a 2010 study of students’ improvements in math found that the level of integration was the only school characteristic (vs. safety and community commitment to math) that significantly affected students’ learning growth.
In an analysis of the landmark 1966 “Coleman Report,” researchers Geoffrey Borman and Maritza Dowling determined that both the racial and socioeconomic makeups of a school are 1¾-times more important in determining a student’s educational outcomes than the student’s own race, ethnicity or social class.
But we continue to think about segregation as a problem of the past, ignoring its growing presence in schools today. Desegregating schools has become a political third rail, even though it is an essential solution to one of our nation’s most persistent problems.
This month, Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced he would step down in December and his deputy, John King, would replace him. King, during his tenure as New York state’s education commissioner, visited both school districts mentioned above to advance the national Race to the Top agenda, but he never acknowledged the increasing school segregation apparent in the region. In 1989, Syracuse city schools were about 60 percent white, and just 20 percent of black and Latino students attended predominately minority schools. Today, the district is 28 percent white, while 55 percent of Latino students and 75 percent of black students attend predominately minority schools.
Racial and economic segregation affects schools in various ways. Federal and state policies that impose sanctions on poor-performing schools — state takeovers and forced replacement of school leaders, for example — often make matters worse. For example, Westside Academy , the Syracuse middle school where no students passed the state eighth-grade math assessment, has has had multiple principals and saw 44-percent teacher turnover in the 2012-2013 school year.
[My son has been suspended five times. He’s 3.]
About a decade ago, the elementary schools that feed into Westside Academy and Wellwood Middle School adopted the same math curriculum program, touted as one of the best standards-based elementary programs available. As is typical, both districts struggled to implement the new curriculum initially. But a decade later, the schools in Wellwood’s district are still using it, with teachers becoming more skilled and comfortable with the new way to teach math. The schools in Westside’s district, however, changed their math program at least two more times, leaving teachers, students, and families in a constant state of churn and undoubtedly affecting student learning and test scores. In this era of accountability, this instability is not forced upon white, upper-middle class families.
While much has been said about the failure of busing, it’s time to move beyond this myth. In one of the most famous examples of court-ordered desegregation, Boston began busing students between white and black neighborhoods in 1974, sparking violent white protests and boycotts by white students. White families fled to the suburbs. Supporting neighborhood schools and opposing school bus rides became rhetoric to fight desegregation without overtly racist language. But as black activists in Boston noted at the time, “It’s not the bus, it’s us.” Before the court order, nearly 90 percent of high school students rode a bus to school without protest. Today, most children get on a school bus to attend a segregated school. Busing ended because of a combination of white protest, media that overemphasized resistance, and the lack of systematic collection to judge the impact of desegregation. So we need to be sober about our history: Busing didn’t fail; the nation’s resolve and commitment to equal and excellent desegregated schools did.
Busing is not the only way to desegregate our schools. We can unify school districts so they encompass racially and economically diverse neighborhoods. The countywide district centered in Raleigh, for instance, has been successful in integrating schools and achieving academic success, in contrast to the 18 schools districts across the metropolitan Syracuse area. Shaping districts like pie pieces, so they cut across urban, suburban and even rural spaces, could have the same effect.
Creating more open-enrollment magnet schools would also bring families of various races and incomes into well-funded and themed schools. For existing public schools, we could merge two neighborhood campuses in segregated communities, so they attend one neighborhood school together from kindergarten through second grade and the other from third through fifth grades. Or we can incentivize school districts to take action, imposing segregation and providing financial resources to districts with aggressive desegregation plans.
Certainly, none of these approaches is easy or perfect, and desegregation alone is not a magic bullet to end the achievement and opportunity gaps. Even integrated schools face racial gaps. Many black and Latino kids end up in lower academic tracks and white parents protect exclusive opportunities for their kids. Still, knowing the benefits of integrated learning environments, we can’t continue to ignore the growing hold segregation has on our schools.
We’ve heard soaring words from Duncan and Obama touting education as the route to a better life, saying it is a moral imperative that we work tirelessly to improve the education of our most vulnerable children. But rhetoric is no match for our failure of will to change the disparate realities of our separate educational systems. It is no match for our failure of courage to call out the persistent segregation of our schools.
Some scholars have argued that King will be good for school integration. Time will tell if we are entering a moment that moves beyond rhetoric toward substantial desegregation.
In this time of transition for the Education Department — in the last year of the Obama administration — are we going to continue ignoring the moral implications of separate schools? Our history shows that policy cannot focus on improving “failing” schools; it needs to also emphasize desegregating them. No matter how much we seek to improve the back of the education bus, it will always be the back."
‘Forced busing’ didn’t fail. Desegregation is the best way to improve our schools.
Saturday, June 29, 2019
Elena Kagan Wrote a Powerful Condemnation of the Court’s Gerrymandering Decision
"The Supreme Court on Thursday concluded that partisan gerrymandering—the increasingly effective practice by which the party in power in a given state (most often the Republican Party) draws electoral maps to retain that power—is not an activity the judiciary can check or restrain, as it “present[s] political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.”
While advocates for the purging of partisan gerrymandering from our democratic process will read John Roberts’ majority opinion as a sickening blow, they have found an ally in Justice Elena Kagan, who issued an impassioned dissent—joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Stephen Breyer—to Roberts’ ruling.
“For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities,” Kagan began. “And not just any constitutional violation. The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the rights to participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives.”
In her dissent, she wrote that partisan gerrymanders “debased and dishonored our democracy.” Kagan directed barely contained fury at the majority’s reasoning, which she stopped just short of calling cowardly and irresponsible. “The majority’s abdication comes just when courts across the country, including those below, have coalesced around manageable judicial standards to resolve partisan gerrymandering claims,” she wrote. “In giving such gerrymanders a pass from judicial review, the majority goes tragically wrong.”
Theorizing that the court’s decision came about because the justices paid “so little attention to the constitutional harms at the core,” Kagan went on to enumerate what she saw as the violations the court brushed aside: the decrease in the value of some votes, which should be protected by the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause; and the “disfavored treatment” of voters just because of their political views, in violation of the First Amendment.
“Is that how American democracy is supposed to work?” she asked.
Kagan wrote that she and the court were in agreement on the constitutional harms. “Indeed, the majority concedes (really, how could it not?) that gerrymandering is ‘incompatible with democratic principles.’ ” But that shared understanding seemed to anger her further. “And therefore what? That recognition would seem to demand a response.”
Instead, she wrote, the court’s decision hinged on the “dubious” idea that the political process can resolve the issue without the courts and on the comfort of knowing that gerrymandering is not a new issue.
The majority’s idea instead seems to be that if we have lived with partisan gerrymanders so long, we will survive.That complacency has no cause. Yes, partisan gerrymandering goes back to the Republic’s earliest days. (As does vociferous opposition to it.) But big data and modern technology—of just the kind that the mapmakers in North Carolina and Maryland used—make today’s gerrymandering altogether different from the crude linedrawing of the past. … The effect is to make gerrymanders far more effective and durable than before, insulating politicians against all but the most titanic shifts in the political tides. These are not your grandfather’s—let alone the Framers’—gerrymanders.What was possible with paper and pen—or even with Windows 95—doesn’t hold a candle (or an LED bulb?) to what will become possible with developments like machine learning. And someplace along this road, “we the people” become sovereign no longer.
Her dissent gets no less scathing when she returns to the court’s argument:
So the only way to understand the majority’s opinion is as follows: In the face of grievous harm to democratic governance and flagrant infringements on individuals’ rights—in the face of escalating partisan manipulation whose compatibility with this Nation’s values and law no one defends—the majority declines to provide any remedy. For the first time in this Nation’s history, the majority declares that it can do nothing about an acknowledged constitutional violation because it has searched high and low and cannot find a workable legal standard to apply.But in throwing up its hands, the majority misses something under its nose: What it says can’t be done has been done.
Kagan concluded her dissent by admitting that it wasn’t too late for our democracy to reverse course, but that the court failed when it shrugged off its duty to help voters regain their power.
Elena Kagan Wrote a Powerful Condemnation of the Court’s Gerrymandering DecisionIs it conceivable that someday voters will be able to break out of that prefabricated box? Sure. But everything possible has been done to make that hard. To create a world in which power does not flow from the people because they do not choose their governors. Of all times to abandon the Court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one. The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the Court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections. With respect but deep sadness, I dissent.
Joe Biden’s record on school desegregation busing, explained - Vox
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"The second round of the first Democratic primary debates on Thursday included a revealing — and at times tense — discussion of race between several candidates. But a defining moment was when Sen. Kamala Harris took former Vice President Joe Biden to task over his recent comments about segregationist senators, as well as his opposition to using federally mandated busing to racially integrate schools in the 1970s. She pointed directly to how it affected her life as a young child.
“You also worked with [those segregationist senators] to oppose busing,” Harris said, speaking directly to Biden. “And there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”
“I did not oppose busing in America,” Biden responded. “What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education. That’s what I opposed.”
There was a little girl in California who was bussed to school. That little girl was me. #DemDebate
In raising busing specifically, Harris hit on a part of Biden’s record that Biden hasn’t really discussed publicly. And as Vox’s Ella Nilsen reported on Thursday, his campaign swiftly moved to push back on Harris’s argument, issuing a statement that Biden’s busing stance had been misrepresented at the debate.
“When Biden said it wasn’t true that he supported anything that would have stopped the busing program that impacted her, he was correct,” the Biden campaign said. “None of [Biden’s] votes would have negatively impacted the Berkeley School Busing Program.”
Since the debates, Harris, as well as Sen. Cory Booker, has continued to press Biden on the issue, saying that his stance is troubling given how many states had to be forced into following civil rights rulings and legislation. “I literally leaned back in my couch and couldn’t believe that one moment,” Booker, who participated in the debates on Wednesday, said of Biden and Harris’s exchange during a CNN interview on Friday.
“I think that anybody that knows our painful history knows that on voting rights, on civil rights, on the protections from hate crimes, African Americans and many other groups in this country have had to turn to the federal government to intervene because there were states that were violating those rights,” he added.
In an election cycle where Democratic candidates have issued a flurry of policy proposals that are far more progressive than previously seen, these critiques of Biden are clearly intended to make a broader point: that the former vice president, in continuing to defend his stance on busing, is out of step with the current Democratic electorate on issues of race and fighting racism. And that could be an issue for many of the black voters Biden is counting on for support.
In reality, though, things are more complicated. In polling, there’s been little indication that white attitudes about busing have changed all that much from when Biden was a young US senator. Opposition to actions that would forcefully desegregate America’s increasingly segregated schools remains high in places like New York City, for example, where white parents have opposed some proposals to diversify schools.
It suggests that Biden’s view — that desegregation is an important goal, but the federal government should only intervene in cases of segregation deliberately created by policy — might not be a problem for many voters.
But even if Biden’s stance aligns with part of the electorate, this part of his record, and his current struggle to defend it — still reveals important details about how Biden approaches larger issues of fighting racism. And it suggests that even as Biden leads the field, his record opens him up to criticism from other candidates, particularly when it comes to race.
America’s history of busing, explained
When the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education found school segregation unconstitutional, schools had to begin the process of integrating. But due to high amounts of state-sanctioned residential segregation and many cities and states’ outright refusal to integrate, the courts and the federal government had to intervene.
There were a number of ways to address this issue, but the one that caught public attention most was “busing” — a process where black students were driven to predominantly white schools in neighboring communities, and white students were driven to predominantly black ones. Many busing orders were mandated in the late 1960s and early 1970s after civil rights groups like the NAACP filed — and later won — school desegregation lawsuits.
Busing was often used as a last resort for cities and districts that clearly showed little interest in desegregation. It was used to immediately integrate schools in the hopes of not only ending state-sanctioned segregation of blacks and whites, but to also give black and white students equal access to resources and opportunities. Many of these opportunities had been isolated to white schools in white communities. Predominantly black and Latino schools, meanwhile, struggled with overcrowding, outdated materials, and dilapidated buildings.
But busing — one of many tools used to secure black students’ constitutional right to equal education — was often strongly opposed by white parents, many of whom did not want their children in integrated schools. Some parents and lawmakers stated that outright, others used different anti-busing arguments: saying that long bus rides to different schools were burdensome, and that their children were being placed in lower-quality schools (ignoring that schools in predominantly black neighborhoods had fewer resources and that per capita spending on black students was smaller).
Parents also claimed that “forced busing” wouldn’t work to bring about racial equality and would merely function as quotas. (To be fair, there were black people who also criticized busing, but their opposition was complex, and contrary to white Americans, their critiques of busing and the political attention it received were not rooted in a desire to maintain segregation, but rather a hope to see deeper investment in black schools and communities.)
Busing programs weren’t opposed just in Southern states. In fact, they were often met with even more resistance in the North due to the region’s avoidance of civil rights issues and efforts to claim moral superiority over the South. Busing was heavily criticized in Detroit, for example, where white families boycotted it in 1960 and continued to oppose it in the years after. In Boston, politicians campaigned and won on anti-busing platforms, arguing that black students’ struggles to access a quality education and succeed in schools were not affected by segregation, but were instead the result of pathology. The city also saw a series of violent riots in the 1970s after schools were ordered to desegregate by a court.
As opposition continued, anti-busing proponents argued that their criticism of busing was not opposition to school desegregation as a whole. But it was also true that in districts that had been the most resistant to integration, the absence of busing programs would leave many schools segregated.
Critics of busing were assisted by lawmakers and legislators who argued that Northern states weren’t segregated intentionally but were rather just “racially imbalanced,” a framing that ignored how policy in many of these states was used to keep white people separated from African Americans.
Here’s how Matthew Delmont, a Dartmouth historian and author of Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation explained things in a 2016 Atlantic article on the history of opposition to busing in Boston:
With busing, Northerners had found a palatable way to oppose desegregation without appealing to the explicitly racist sentiments they preferred to associate with Southerners. “I have probably talked before 500 or 600 groups over the last years about busing,” Los Angeles Assemblyman Floyd Wakefield said in 1970. “Almost every time, someone has gotten up and called me a ‘racist’ or a ‘bigot.’ But now, all of the sudden, I am no longer a ‘bigot.’ Now I am called ‘the leader of the antibusing effort.’” White parents and politicians framed their resistance to school desegregation in terms like “busing” and “neighborhood schools,” and this rhetorical shift allowed them to support white schools and neighborhoods without using explicitly racist language.
“Describing opposition to busing as something other than resistance to school desegregation was a move that obscured the histories of racial discrimination and legal contexts for desegregation orders,” Delmont added.
Still, even as cities like Boston protested busing, lawsuits led to Northern cities being subjected to busing programs in the late ’60s and 1970s. And in the mid-1970s, early into Biden’s first term as a US senator, a part of Delaware soon found itself facing the prospect of such an order.
Busing was one of the first issues to define Joe Biden’s early political career
In 1974, a federal court panel ruled that state housing and education policies had been used to keep the school systems of the city of Wilmington, Delaware (which was predominantly black), and its predominantly-white suburbs segregated. The court had not yet ruled that a busing program must be implemented, but white suburbanites still panicked over the prospect of having to follow a busing plan.
It presented a challenge for Biden, who had supported busing during his campaign a few years before. But in 1973 and 1974, Biden had begun to vote for anti-busing measures after feeling pressure from his constituents. However, in two key exceptions, he voted to table two anti-busing measures, killing their chances of moving forward in the Senate by one vote.
His constituents were outraged at those latter votes and, facing the looming prospect of a formal busing mandate in Delaware, pushed Biden to take a stronger stance on busing. Biden did so, going on to vote for eliminating policies that would provide federal oversight of busing.
In 1975, shortly after Boston residents protested and rioted over the city’s desegregation order, Biden came out in favor of an amendment introduced by North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms, an ardent segregationist and white supremacist. Helms’s amendment would bar the then-active Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from collecting data about the race of students or teachers, and also prevented the department from requiring schools “to classify teachers or students by race.” Helms proudly announced that the measure would effectively end any federal oversight or enforcement of busing.
“I have become convinced that busing is a bankrupt concept,” Biden said as he stood to support Helms’s amendment. He added that the Senate should instead focus on “whether or not we are really going to provide a better educational opportunity for blacks and minority groups in this country.”
The Helms amendment was defeated, but Biden then introduced a similar amendment. Here’s how University of New Hampshire historian Jason Sokol described Biden’s proposal in a 2015 Politico Magazine article:
Biden proposed his own amendment to the $36 billion education bill, stipulating that none of those federal funds could be used by school systems “to assign teachers or students to schools … for reasons of race.” His amendment would prevent “some faceless bureaucrat” from “deciding that any child, black or white, should fit in some predetermined ratio.” He explained, “All the amendment says is that some bureaucrat sitting down there in HEW cannot tell a school district whether it is properly segregated or desegregated, or whether it should or should not have funds.” Finally, Biden called busing “an asinine policy.”
The measure passed, outraging Massachusetts Republican Edward Brooke, the only black person in the Senate. Brooke called the Biden amendment “the greatest symbolic defeat for civil rights since 1964.” Biden later introduced a second amendment that explicitly barred the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from ordering busing, but left other integration measures intact.
The second amendment easily passed the Senate, but both of Biden’s proposals were stripped out of the bill later in the process.
In the years that followed, Biden would cast other votes and propose other anti-busing legislation. The New York Times recently described many of these votes:
Mr. Biden introduced another proposal in 1976 that blocked the Justice Department from seeking busing as a desegregation tool, and co-sponsored an amendment in 1977 that limited federal funding of busing efforts. He continued his efforts that year with a bill curbing court-ordered busing.
In February 1982, he voted for an amendment to a Justice Department appropriations bill described as the “toughest anti-busing rider ever approved by either chamber of Congress.” A month later, he voted in favor of another amendment that allowed the Justice Department to participate in litigation “to remove or reduce the requirement of busing in existing court decrees or judgments.”
And on Friday afternoon, NPR reported on a recently unearthed 1975 interview where Biden said that if legislation failed, he would be open to using a constitutional amendment to end mandated busing.
Busing would largely fall from the federal spotlight by the late 1980s, as fewer legislators actively pushed for measures supporting it. And Biden has maintained that his stance on busing was the right one, saying that he supports busing only when there is proof of intentional segregation in an area.
On Friday, the Biden campaign pointed to a quote Biden gave in 1975 explaining his stance. “In cases where a school system has racially segregated by gerrymandering district lines or by other legalistic means, Biden said he supports desegregation by any legal means at hand — including busing,” the Wilmington News Journal reported at the time. “However, for school districts which are all white or all black ‘because of historical pattern not involving segregation practices disapproved by a court’ he is against busing.”
But Sokol has said that Biden’s comments ignore the fact that by the 1970s the lines on the issue were not as clearly drawn as Biden says. “By that point in history, there were very few school districts voluntarily integrating by other means, which is why judges were ordering busing,” the historian told Politifact on Friday. “He is using disingenuous logic.”
Biden says his stance on busing isn’t controversial. His critics disagree.
Speaking to Vox on Friday, an adviser to the Biden campaign argued that Biden’s comments had been misconstrued to suggest that he opposed busing in its entirety, when he actually only opposed federal enforcement of busing in certain districts.
On Friday afternoon, addressing the renewed controversy over his busing record since the debates, Biden told the audience during an appearance at the Rainbow PUSH Coalition Convention in Chicago, “I want to be absolutely clear about my record and position on racial justice. I never, never, ever opposed voluntary busing.”
But for some, that claim is simply a distinction without a difference. “He wasn’t just a silent supporter of anti-busing, he was out there crafting bills,” Noliwe Rooks, a professor of Africana studies and director of American studies at Cornell University, told EdWeek recently. “As a standalone, [his opposition to busing] probably wasn’t going to be that big a deal. But when you put that in tandem with his more recent comments about these white segregationists, it’s a problem.”
While questions about Biden’s record on busing continue to circulate in the news, it’s still unclear if the issue will actually resonate with voters in general, or Biden’s base of black support in particular. But it is clear that Biden’s primary opponents see weakness in this part of his record, especially when coupled with the controversy over Biden’s recent comments about segregationist senators and his role in the passage of the 1994 crime bill. At times, discussion of Biden’s lead in primary polling has treated his campaign as if it was unstoppable. Harris showed on Thursday that he can be bruised."
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/28/18965923/joe-biden-school-desegregation-busing-democratic-primary
Joe Biden’s record on school desegregation busing, explained - Vox
Joe Biden’s record on school desegregation busing, explained - Vox
"The second round of the first Democratic primary debates on Thursday included a revealing — and at times tense — discussion of race between several candidates. But a defining moment was when Sen. Kamala Harris took former Vice President Joe Biden to task over his recent comments about segregationist senators, as well as his opposition to using federally mandated busing to racially integrate schools in the 1970s. She pointed directly to how it affected her life as a young child.
“You also worked with [those segregationist senators] to oppose busing,” Harris said, speaking directly to Biden. “And there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”
“I did not oppose busing in America,” Biden responded. “What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education. That’s what I opposed.”
There was a little girl in California who was bussed to school. That little girl was me. #DemDebate
In raising busing specifically, Harris hit on a part of Biden’s record that Biden hasn’t really discussed publicly. And as Vox’s Ella Nilsen reported on Thursday, his campaign swiftly moved to push back on Harris’s argument, issuing a statement that Biden’s busing stance had been misrepresented at the debate.
“When Biden said it wasn’t true that he supported anything that would have stopped the busing program that impacted her, he was correct,” the Biden campaign said. “None of [Biden’s] votes would have negatively impacted the Berkeley School Busing Program.”
Since the debates, Harris, as well as Sen. Cory Booker, has continued to press Biden on the issue, saying that his stance is troubling given how many states had to be forced into following civil rights rulings and legislation. “I literally leaned back in my couch and couldn’t believe that one moment,” Booker, who participated in the debates on Wednesday, said of Biden and Harris’s exchange during a CNN interview on Friday.
“I think that anybody that knows our painful history knows that on voting rights, on civil rights, on the protections from hate crimes, African Americans and many other groups in this country have had to turn to the federal government to intervene because there were states that were violating those rights,” he added.
In an election cycle where Democratic candidates have issued a flurry of policy proposals that are far more progressive than previously seen, these critiques of Biden are clearly intended to make a broader point: that the former vice president, in continuing to defend his stance on busing, is out of step with the current Democratic electorate on issues of race and fighting racism. And that could be an issue for many of the black voters Biden is counting on for support.
In reality, though, things are more complicated. In polling, there’s been little indication that white attitudes about busing have changed all that much from when Biden was a young US senator. Opposition to actions that would forcefully desegregate America’s increasingly segregated schools remains high in places like New York City, for example, where white parents have opposed some proposals to diversify schools.
It suggests that Biden’s view — that desegregation is an important goal, but the federal government should only intervene in cases of segregation deliberately created by policy — might not be a problem for many voters.
But even if Biden’s stance aligns with part of the electorate, this part of his record, and his current struggle to defend it — still reveals important details about how Biden approaches larger issues of fighting racism. And it suggests that even as Biden leads the field, his record opens him up to criticism from other candidates, particularly when it comes to race.
America’s history of busing, explained
When the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education found school segregation unconstitutional, schools had to begin the process of integrating. But due to high amounts of state-sanctioned residential segregation and many cities and states’ outright refusal to integrate, the courts and the federal government had to intervene.
There were a number of ways to address this issue, but the one that caught public attention most was “busing” — a process where black students were driven to predominantly white schools in neighboring communities, and white students were driven to predominantly black ones. Many busing orders were mandated in the late 1960s and early 1970s after civil rights groups like the NAACP filed — and later won — school desegregation lawsuits.
Busing was often used as a last resort for cities and districts that clearly showed little interest in desegregation. It was used to immediately integrate schools in the hopes of not only ending state-sanctioned segregation of blacks and whites, but to also give black and white students equal access to resources and opportunities. Many of these opportunities had been isolated to white schools in white communities. Predominantly black and Latino schools, meanwhile, struggled with overcrowding, outdated materials, and dilapidated buildings.
But busing — one of many tools used to secure black students’ constitutional right to equal education — was often strongly opposed by white parents, many of whom did not want their children in integrated schools. Some parents and lawmakers stated that outright, others used different anti-busing arguments: saying that long bus rides to different schools were burdensome, and that their children were being placed in lower-quality schools (ignoring that schools in predominantly black neighborhoods had fewer resources and that per capita spending on black students was smaller).
Parents also claimed that “forced busing” wouldn’t work to bring about racial equality and would merely function as quotas. (To be fair, there were black people who also criticized busing, but their opposition was complex, and contrary to white Americans, their critiques of busing and the political attention it received were not rooted in a desire to maintain segregation, but rather a hope to see deeper investment in black schools and communities.)
Busing programs weren’t opposed just in Southern states. In fact, they were often met with even more resistance in the North due to the region’s avoidance of civil rights issues and efforts to claim moral superiority over the South. Busing was heavily criticized in Detroit, for example, where white families boycotted it in 1960 and continued to oppose it in the years after. In Boston, politicians campaigned and won on anti-busing platforms, arguing that black students’ struggles to access a quality education and succeed in schools were not affected by segregation, but were instead the result of pathology. The city also saw a series of violent riots in the 1970s after schools were ordered to desegregate by a court.
As opposition continued, anti-busing proponents argued that their criticism of busing was not opposition to school desegregation as a whole. But it was also true that in districts that had been the most resistant to integration, the absence of busing programs would leave many schools segregated.
Critics of busing were assisted by lawmakers and legislators who argued that Northern states weren’t segregated intentionally but were rather just “racially imbalanced,” a framing that ignored how policy in many of these states was used to keep white people separated from African Americans.
Here’s how Matthew Delmont, a Dartmouth historian and author of Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation explained things in a 2016 Atlantic article on the history of opposition to busing in Boston:
With busing, Northerners had found a palatable way to oppose desegregation without appealing to the explicitly racist sentiments they preferred to associate with Southerners. “I have probably talked before 500 or 600 groups over the last years about busing,” Los Angeles Assemblyman Floyd Wakefield said in 1970. “Almost every time, someone has gotten up and called me a ‘racist’ or a ‘bigot.’ But now, all of the sudden, I am no longer a ‘bigot.’ Now I am called ‘the leader of the antibusing effort.’” White parents and politicians framed their resistance to school desegregation in terms like “busing” and “neighborhood schools,” and this rhetorical shift allowed them to support white schools and neighborhoods without using explicitly racist language.
“Describing opposition to busing as something other than resistance to school desegregation was a move that obscured the histories of racial discrimination and legal contexts for desegregation orders,” Delmont added.
Still, even as cities like Boston protested busing, lawsuits led to Northern cities being subjected to busing programs in the late ’60s and 1970s. And in the mid-1970s, early into Biden’s first term as a US senator, a part of Delaware soon found itself facing the prospect of such an order.
Busing was one of the first issues to define Joe Biden’s early political career.
In 1974, a federal court panel ruled that state housing and education policies had been used to keep the school systems of the city of Wilmington, Delaware (which was predominantly black), and its predominantly-white suburbs segregated. The court had not yet ruled that a busing program must be implemented, but white suburbanites still panicked over the prospect of having to follow a busing plan.
It presented a challenge for Biden, who had supported busing during his campaign a few years before. But in 1973 and 1974, Biden had begun to vote for anti-busing measures after feeling pressure from his constituents. However, in two key exceptions, he voted to table two anti-busing measures, killing their chances of moving forward in the Senate by one vote.
His constituents were outraged at those latter votes and, facing the looming prospect of a formal busing mandate in Delaware, pushed Biden to take a stronger stance on busing. Biden did so, going on to vote for eliminating policies that would provide federal oversight of busing.
In 1975, shortly after Boston residents protested and rioted over the city’s desegregation order, Biden came out in favor of an amendment introduced by North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms, an ardent segregationist and white supremacist. Helms’s amendment would bar the then-active Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from collecting data about the race of students or teachers, and also prevented the department from requiring schools “to classify teachers or students by race.” Helms proudly announced that the measure would effectively end any federal oversight or enforcement of busing.
“I have become convinced that busing is a bankrupt concept,” Biden said as he stood to support Helms’s amendment. He added that the Senate should instead focus on “whether or not we are really going to provide a better educational opportunity for blacks and minority groups in this country.”
The Helms amendment was defeated, but Biden then introduced a similar amendment. Here’s how University of New Hampshire historian Jason Sokol described Biden’s proposal in a 2015 Politico Magazine article:
Biden proposed his own amendment to the $36 billion education bill, stipulating that none of those federal funds could be used by school systems “to assign teachers or students to schools … for reasons of race.” His amendment would prevent “some faceless bureaucrat” from “deciding that any child, black or white, should fit in some predetermined ratio.” He explained, “All the amendment says is that some bureaucrat sitting down there in HEW cannot tell a school district whether it is properly segregated or desegregated, or whether it should or should not have funds.” Finally, Biden called busing “an asinine policy.”
The measure passed, outraging Massachusetts Republican Edward Brooke, the only black person in the Senate. Brooke called the Biden amendment “the greatest symbolic defeat for civil rights since 1964.” Biden later introduced a second amendment that explicitly barred the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from ordering busing, but left other integration measures intact.
The second amendment easily passed the Senate, but both of Biden’s proposals were stripped out of the bill later in the process.
In the years that followed, Biden would cast other votes and propose other anti-busing legislation. The New York Times recently described many of these votes:
Mr. Biden introduced another proposal in 1976 that blocked the Justice Department from seeking busing as a desegregation tool, and co-sponsored an amendment in 1977 that limited federal funding of busing efforts. He continued his efforts that year with a bill curbing court-ordered busing.
In February 1982, he voted for an amendment to a Justice Department appropriations bill described as the “toughest anti-busing rider ever approved by either chamber of Congress.” A month later, he voted in favor of another amendment that allowed the Justice Department to participate in litigation “to remove or reduce the requirement of busing in existing court decrees or judgments.”
And on Friday afternoon, NPR reported on a recently unearthed 1975 interview where Biden said that if legislation failed, he would be open to using a constitutional amendment to end mandated busing.
Busing would largely fall from the federal spotlight by the late 1980s, as fewer legislators actively pushed for measures supporting it. And Biden has maintained that his stance on busing was the right one, saying that he supports busing only when there is proof of intentional segregation in an area.
On Friday, the Biden campaign pointed to a quote Biden gave in 1975 explaining his stance. “In cases where a school system has racially segregated by gerrymandering district lines or by other legalistic means, Biden said he supports desegregation by any legal means at hand — including busing,” the Wilmington News Journal reported at the time. “However, for school districts which are all white or all black ‘because of historical pattern not involving segregation practices disapproved by a court’ he is against busing.”
But Sokol has said that Biden’s comments ignore the fact that by the 1970s the lines on the issue were not as clearly drawn as Biden says. “By that point in history, there were very few school districts voluntarily integrating by other means, which is why judges were ordering busing,” the historian told Politifact on Friday. “He is using disingenuous logic.”
Biden says his stance on busing isn’t controversial. His critics disagree.
Speaking to Vox on Friday, an adviser to the Biden campaign argued that Biden’s comments had been misconstrued to suggest that he opposed busing in its entirety, when he actually only opposed federal enforcement of busing in certain districts.
On Friday afternoon, addressing the renewed controversy over his busing record since the debates, Biden told the audience during an appearance at the Rainbow PUSH Coalition Convention in Chicago, “I want to be absolutely clear about my record and position on racial justice. I never, never, ever opposed voluntary busing.”
But for some, that claim is simply a distinction without a difference. “He wasn’t just a silent supporter of anti-busing, he was out there crafting bills,” Noliwe Rooks, a professor of Africana studies and director of American studies at Cornell University, told EdWeek recently. “As a standalone, [his opposition to busing] probably wasn’t going to be that big a deal. But when you put that in tandem with his more recent comments about these white segregationists, it’s a problem.”
While questions about Biden’s record on busing continue to circulate in the news, it’s still unclear if the issue will actually resonate with voters in general, or Biden’s base of black support in particular. But it is clear that Biden’s primary opponents see weakness in this part of his record, especially when coupled with the controversy over Biden’s recent comments about segregationist senators and his role in the passage of the 1994 crime bill. At times, discussion of Biden’s lead in primary polling has treated his campaign as if it was unstoppable. Harris showed on Thursday that he can be bruised."
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/28/18965923/joe-biden-school-desegregation-busing-democratic-primary
Joe Biden’s record on school desegregation busing, explained - Vox
Friday, June 28, 2019
Letters from Joe Biden reveal how he sought support of segregationists in fight against busing
"CNN) — Joe Biden's road to a third presidential bid has been lined with a series of explanations and apologies, illustrating the challenges of preparing a long record of public service for fresh scrutiny under the spotlight of the 2020 campaign.
Yet he rarely discusses one of the earliest -- and most controversial -- issues he championed in the Senate: his fight against busing to desegregate schools. His record on the issue was at the center of the most dramatic moment of the Democratic presidential debate on Thursday, when Sen. Kamala Harris confronted him about his position, and how it impacted a little girl in California.
"That little girl was me," Harris said. "So I will tell you that on this subject, it cannot be an intellectual debate among Democrats. We have to take it seriously. We have to act swiftly."
When pushed by Harris on whether he was wrong to oppose busing, Biden shot back, "I did not oppose busing in America. What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education, that's what I opposed."
Biden opposed busing more than four decades ago as a battle raged across the country -- and in Congress -- over sending white students to majority-black schools and black students to majority-white schools often far away from their own neighborhoods. Biden forcefully opposed the government's role in trying to integrate schools, saying he favored desegregation, but believed busing did not achieve equal opportunity.
In a series of never-before-published letters from Biden, which were reviewed by CNN, the strength of his opposition to busing comes into sharper focus, particularly how he followed the lead of -- and sought support from -- some of the Senate's most fervent segregationists.
"My bill strikes at the heart of the injustice of court-ordered busing. It prohibits the federal courts from disrupting our educational system in the name of the constitution where there is no evidence that the governmental officials intended to discriminate," Biden wrote to fellow senators on March 25, 1977. "I believe there is a growing sentiment in the Congress to curb unnecessary busing."
Biden, who at the time was 34 and serving his first term in the Senate, repeatedly asked for -- and received -- the support of Sen. James Eastland, a Mississippi Democrat and chairman of the Judiciary Committee and a leading symbol of Southern resistance to desegregation. Eastland frequently spoke of blacks as "an inferior race."
"Dear Mr. Chairman," Biden wrote on June 30, 1977. "I want you to know that I very much appreciate your help during this week's committee meeting in attempting to bring my anti-busing legislation to a vote."
Joe Biden Fast Facts
Two weeks later, Biden followed up with a note to Eastland "to thank you again for your efforts in support of my bill to limit court ordered busing."
Biden, who would go on to lead the Judiciary Committee a decade later, got his start on the panel under Eastland. Few senators were more virulently outspoken against desegregation than the Mississippi senator, who was known for incendiary floor speeches on race.
Yet Biden invited Eastland to speak on the Senate floor in support of his anti-busing bill.
"I want to personally ask your continued support and alert you to our intentions," Biden wrote on Aug. 22, 1978. "Your participation in floor debate would be welcomed."
The letters, which are filed away in Eastland's archives at the University of Mississippi, offer a window into the robust nature of Biden's support of anti-busing bills.
While most of Biden's legislative efforts failed, he was not a passive observer like many fellow Democrats of the era, who sought to balance the anger of white constituents surrounding school busing without blocking the next step in the expansion of civil rights.
When an anti-integration amendment from North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms failed, Biden proposed an anti-busing amendment of his own that rankled Sen. Ed Brooke, a Massachusetts Republican and the first black senator to be elected since Reconstruction.
"I have become convinced that busing is a bankrupt concept," Biden said during debate.
While Biden has built a strong civil rights record over the last four decades and spent eight years as vice president to the nation's first black president, his stand against busing as a method to desegregate schools -- which he still stands by today -- is among the chapters of a legislative record facing a second look by today's progressive Democratic Party.
Bill Russo, a spokesman for Biden, told CNN the former vice president stands by his belief that mandatory busing did not achieve equal opportunity for students or provide "real answers to problems like educational inequities," including fair housing and how school district lines were drawn.
He said Biden's long record of service makes clear his commitment to civil rights.
"Joe Biden is today -- and has been for more than 40 years in public life -- one of the strongest and most powerful voices for civil rights in America," Russo said in a statement. "His long commitment to civil rights has repeatedly been recognized by many of the most important civil rights organizations in America."
While Biden supported integration during his 1972 campaign, he rarely discussed busing until many of his constituents urged him to take a forceful stand against mandatory busing in the aftermath of a court-ordered desegregation plan in Delaware.
Jason Sokol, a civil rights historian and the author of "All Eyes Are Upon Us," reviewed the letters for CNN that Biden wrote to Eastland during that tumultuous time.
"At the very least, they present further evidence to suggest that Biden was quite committed to the anti-busing cause," said Sokol, a professor at the University of New Hampshire who has extensively studied Biden's role in the anti-busing debate. "He was strongly opposed to busing and was very interested in the passage of the anti-busing legislation that he sponsored. It wasn't a half-hearted thing."
For most of the next four decades, Biden has become known as a champion of civil rights legislation like the expansion of the Voting Rights Act and changes to the Fair Housing Act. But he has rarely explained his views surrounding busing.
Joe Biden's experience sets him apart. It could also hurt him in 2020.
Ronnie Dunn, a professor at Cleveland State University and co-author of "Boycotts, Busing, & Beyond," said Biden's old views opposing busing should not be disqualifying, but warrant a broader explanation. After reviewing the letters from Biden to Eastland, Dunn said he was surprised at the degree to which Biden was soliciting support from such a known segregationist leader.
"We all evolve and grow, but we're still going to have to answer for our past records," Dunn told CNN. He said busing certainly wasn't popular among many black and white families, but he said history has shown integration to be "a necessary measure to achieve change."
While Dunn said Biden's views should be considered through the full context of nearly half-century in public life, he said he doubts Barack Obama could have reached the White House if anti-busing legislation -- like Biden's -- would have succeeded.
"If it weren't for the busing during that time period, we likely wouldn't have seen our first African American president," Dunn said. "That social interaction helped break down the structural barriers of racism."
While Biden has run for the White House twice before, his long record -- on civil rights and other matters -- will be examined in the context of a Democratic Party that has shifted to the left and become far more diverse. For the first time, an extensive conversation is underway among Democratic candidates about reparations -- or the compensation of descendants of slaves.
Biden has yet to offer his view of reparations.
Yet even before he formally declares his presidential candidacy, Biden's remarks about busing are already facing fresh scrutiny. A month ago, The Washington Post unearthed a lengthy 1975 interview Biden conducted with a Delaware newspaper, which at the time was entered into the congressional record.
"I don't feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather," Biden said in the interview. "I feel responsible for what the situation is today, for the sins of my own generation. And I'll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago."
As he prepares to join the presidential race at the end of this month, experience is one of Biden's biggest calling cards. It is also one of his biggest challenges, given the breadth of his public service that spans a period of historic change in the United States. He's already expressed second thoughts over the consequences of the 1994 crime bill and voiced regret about the treatment of Anita Hill during the Supreme Court confirmation hearing of Clarence Thomas in 1991.
He has repeatedly touted his progressive roots, declaring last month to a Delaware audience: "I have the most progressive record of anybody running." And last week, he said: "I was never labeled as a moderate."
Asked about those comments, he said he welcomes the ideological debate ahead.
"Everybody asks me what kind of Democrat," Biden said. "I'm an Obama-Biden Democrat, man, and I'm proud of it."
Letters from Joe Biden reveal how he sought support of segregationists in fight against busing
Rev. Jesse Jackson says Biden was on 'the wrong side of history' with busing
"
"In my judgment, it was the wrong side of history," the Rev. Jesse Jackson said about Joe Biden's past stance against busing. | Streeter Lecka/Getty Images
The Rev. Jesse Jackson knocked Joe Biden for his past views on busing, saying the former vice president used to be on "the wrong side of history."
Ahead of Biden's Friday afternoon appearance at the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, Jackson said on CNN that he would press the Democratic front-runner on his positions and defense of states' rights when it comes to civil rights.
The heightened scrutiny of Biden's stance on busing comes after the second round of debates Thursday night, when California Sen. Kamala Harris hit him on his record, referring to her own experience as a child bused to a better school.
As a senator in the 1970s, Biden stood against federally mandated busing as the best way to integrate schools. In the debate, he reiterated: “I did not oppose busing in America. What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education.” Biden had also recently talked to wealthy donors about finding common ground when he was a U.S. senator to work with known segregationists in the Senate.
"I don't know why he took that side of history, but I think he's changed," Jackson said. "The oldest show of dismissing, of being insensitive of the need to heal, exalting Clarence Thomas was a big mistake."
He went on to say about Biden's past stance against busing: "In my judgment, it was the wrong side of history."
In his CNN appearance, Jackson also equated the protection of states' rights to "when Trump says 'make America great again.'" He pointed to the lynching of black Americans, voting rights and health care, and said it was necessary for the federal government to intervene to stop human rights violations.
Jackson and Biden have history: After a failed presidential campaign in 1984, Jackson launched a second run in 1988, when he faced off with Biden, who had told a mostly black audience to reject Jackson's candidacy. But Jackson said that over the years, Biden has grown in the positions he's taken — and that the former vice president just wasn't prepared for an attack from Harris.
"We hope he's outgrown those problems, but his competition will force him in the primary to deal with that," Jackson said."
Rev. Jesse Jackson says Biden was on 'the wrong side of history' with busing
Thursday, June 27, 2019
Who’s behind the law making undocumented immigrants criminals? An ‘unrepentant white supremacist.’
Migrants mainly from Central America guide their children through the entrance of a World War II-era bomber hangar in Deming, N.M. (Cedar Attanasio/AP)
The provision of federal law criminalizing unlawful entry into the United States — which some Democratic presidential candidates now want to undo — was crafted by an avowed white supremacist who opposed the education of black Americans and favored lynching, which he justified by saying, “to hell with the Constitution.”
The law, referred to as Section 1325, became a flash point in the first of two Democratic presidential debates this week, when Julián Castro, a former secretary of housing and urban development, challenged his rivals to back its repeal. The measure’s little-known history did not arise on Wednesday night in Miami, where the first cohort of Democrats vying to compete against President Trump took the stage. No one mentioned Sen. Coleman Livingston Blease.
But the legacy of the criminal lawyer and neo-Confederate politician from South Carolina hangs over the 2020 election. Blease was the architect of Section 1325, the part of Title 8 of the United States Code that makes it a misdemeanor to enter the country without authorization.
The statute, adopted in 1929, is the basis for Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which his administration used to justify separating families at the border. And as the contestants in Wednesday’s debates sought to burnish their images as opponents of that policy, it was the call for Section 1325′s repeal that became one of the starkest dividing lines in a crowded field.
Castro’s quest for the statute’s annulment forms part of his “People First Immigration” plan unveiled in April. Some, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Cory Booker of New Jersey, have backed the idea.
“The reason that they’re separating these little children from their families is that they’re using Section 1325 of that act, which criminalizes coming across the border, to incarcerate the parents, and then separate them,” Castro said from the debate stage. “Some of us on this stage have called to end that section, to terminate it.”
Others, he added, singling out his fellow Texan, former congressman Beto O’Rourke, have not.
That Section 1325 got airtime on Wednesday indicates its significance in American political history, according to Kelly Lytle Hernández, a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles and the author of a 2017 book that exposes the explicit racial motivations for the statute.
“I’m thankful to hear it’s being brought to the surface,” Hernández, author of “City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965,” said in an interview with The Washington Post. “One of the things that this president has gifted us is the opportunity to finally talk about what immigration control and immigration law is in the United States. There is no immigration reform without grappling with the hold that Jim Crow has on our immigration regime.”
The influence of Jim Crow on the nation’s immigration laws is personified by Blease, whom Hernández called an “unrepentant white supremacist.” His ideas gained currency as part of a larger effort to enforce racial exclusion a century ago, including through national origin quotas and a complete ban on immigrants from Asia. That system was scrapped during the civil rights era, but criminal penalties for unlawful entry remain.
“The world that Blease imagined in 1929 is very much the world in which we’re living,” Hernández said.
Coleman Livingston Blease was a state legislator, governor and Democratic senator from South Carolina. (Library of Congress)
Coleman Livingston Blease was born in 1868 in the foothills of South Carolina, raised near the mill town of Newberry. Tall and slender, he walked with a swift gait. A felt hat with a broad rim covered a shock of dark hair, which matched his prominent mustache.
Asking voters to call him “Coley,” Blease entered politics as a protege of Benjamin Tillman, the white supremacist governor and senator from South Carolina who would go on to denounce his former disciple for his extreme populism, saying, “Catiline among the Romans and Aaron Burr among the Americans are the only other men I have ever read of who were equal to Blease in bamboozling the people.”
“He is a past master in the arts of a demagogue,” Tillman added. “He knows full well that when the angry passions of the masses are aroused they lose their reason.”
Casting himself as an ally of poor whites, including textile workers in upper South Carolina, Blease became a state legislator in 1890 and the governor in 1911. He was a Southern Democrat, in favor of segregation, before party realignment in the second half of the 20th century.
Blease defended violence against people he called racially inferior, saying a band of white men had done “exactly right” for whipping blacks, saying that “the morals and the mode of living between colored people are not up to the standard adopted and lived up to by the white people.”
Blease defended lynching, dismissing legal concerns with vigilante justice.
“Whenever the Constitution comes between me and the virtue of the white women of the South, I say to hell with the Constitution,” he argued.
Blease had similar scorn for the judgments of courts, which he said served mainly to prop up the rich. Before resigning the governorship in 1915, he pardoned more than 1,000 state prisoners, among them a man convicted of murdering his wife, as well as many of his former clients who had enlisted his services as a well-known defense attorney.
Blease won election to the Senate in 1924, bringing his campaign of racial agitation in Washington. He proposed prohibiting interracial marriage by constitutional amendment. Incensed by the decision of the first lady, Lou Hoover, to invite the black wife of a congressman to tea at the White House, he offered a resolution demanding that the president and his wife “remember that the house in which they are temporarily residing is the ‘White House.' "
Many of Blease’s efforts were fool’s errands, Hernández notes in her book. He was less intent on shaping policy than on riding a “wave of anti-black racism” coursing through the country. One of his biographers wrote that he harbored “Negro-phobia that knew no bounds.”
In 1929, however, as Congress strained to develop a policy on Mexican immigration, Blease became the broker of a compromise between nativists and a faction protective of business interests that required cheap labor.
As a result, he was able to transform American immigration law, which bears his imprint to this day.
“Blease shifted the conversation to controlling unauthorized Mexican migration rather than capping authorized migration,” as Hernández’s account explains. “Citing the large number of unauthorized border crossings made by Mexicans each year, Senator Blease proposed criminalizing unlawful entry into the United States.”
His bill was approved in March 1929, yielding Section 1325. By 1939, United States attorneys had prosecuted more than 44,000 cases of unlawful entry, as Hernández chronicles.
In the decades that followed, law enforcement often pursued other priorities, deciding that prosecuting a stream of misdemeanor cases was not worth the time or resources. Immigrants caught crossing the border without authorization could still be returned, as they were before criminalization.
Prosecution was stepped up during the George W. Bush administration, in response to an increase in border crossings. Supporters of such an approach argue that it is necessary to deter unlawful entry, said Tom K. Wong, an associate professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego and an adviser to the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders during the Obama administration. But the evidence is not conclusive on that point, he maintained, while the costs have been significant.
Meanwhile, abandoning the criminal classification of unlawful entry, and treating it instead as a civil infraction, could be “immensely consequential for undocumented immigrants,” Wong said. For one, it would prevent large-scale detention and end the practice of separating children from their parents, as the adults would no longer face criminal proceedings.
Critics of Section 1325 also argue that the statute deters migrants from turning themselves in to immigrant officials, which is necessary to claim asylum. Those who do not favor its repeal say it is possible to overhaul the country’s immigration system and do away with “zero tolerance,” while maintaining criminal penalties.
“You’re looking at just one small part of this,” O’Rourke told Castro. “I’m talking about a comprehensive rewrite of our immigration laws. And if we do that, I don’t think it’s asking too much for people to follow our laws when they come to this country.”
Hernández sees benefit in the discussion, which could cast light on the “extraordinary power of federal law enforcement” in the area of immigration, she said, where “what we presume to be people’s constitutional rights can be violated.”
But she is ultimately skeptical about the likelihood of ambitious changes.
“I think it’s more likely that we would satisfy ourselves with fairly moderate reforms to our immigration laws rather than thinking more broadly about how the economic system, political system and military system dictate the flow of human beings around the globe,” she said.
Blease’s transgressions are easy to recognize today. And yet, Hernández said, “there are many Bleases.”
Who’s behind the law making undocumented immigrants criminals? An ‘unrepentant white supremacist.’
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