At that dramatic moment when Sen. Kamala Harris challenged former Vice President Joe Biden’s opposition to court-ordered busing for school integration, the Democratic presidential candidates plunged back in time more than 40 years to the battles over school desegregation of the 1970s.
Those of us who lived through Federal Judge John Reynolds’ 1976 order to desegregate Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) know that busing was never the problem. In fact, white families like ours who supported school integration were fortunate our children had the opportunity to attend popular, successfully integrated elementary and high schools that were created in the black community.
In hyper-segregated cities like Milwaukee, busing was the only way to integrate schools in all-white and all-black neighborhoods. But the sad fact is those integrated schools didn’t last. White opponents resisted desegregation for two decades after the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared “separate and unequal” white and black schools were unconstitutional in 1954. Federal courts finally started enforcing the decision in the ’70s, but opponents soon found new ways to re-segregate those schools through white flight and underfunding.
Magnets for Integration
That was a major blow to education for everyone in MPS, because it had integrated its schools by creating high-quality, educational specialty schools attractive to families of all races. Educators called them “magnet schools,” and that’s exactly how they worked for our group of socially conscious East Side parents who wanted school integration in Milwaukee to succeed.
It was a combination of altruism and self-interest. We were politically progressive parents trying to assure peaceful, citywide integration after ugly white riots in other cities like Boston and Louisville, Ky. We also saw the benefit of moving our children as a group so they would be among friends in their new racially integrated educational environment.
After visiting several different specialty schools, we chose Lloyd Street School, at 12th and Lloyd streets, with an educational program called Individually Guided Education. Elementary school children changed teachers and classrooms for different subjects grouped by ability. Our son and daughter were in the first integrated classes in 1976. A few years later, their younger sister started school at another excellent, integrated specialty school, MacDowell Montessori. The two older kids went on to Rufus King for high school and the youngest to Milwaukee High School of the Arts, two of the best, most popular schools in the system.
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That glides right over everything that came in between, and I shouldn’t. No, everything wasn’t perfect when privileged, East Side white kids entered previously neglected, racially segregated, all-black schools. At a time when suburban schools had gleaming multi-media centers, what Lloyd Street called a library was pathetic: a small classroom with tattered, hand-me-down books, some with covers torn off. One teacher clung to an archaic idea of discipline designed to increase hatred of education by making students write sentences a hundred times as punishment.
One-Way Busing
Here’s the other reason integrating schools was so important. I don’t think for a minute black parents were any more pleased with a lack of educational resources or poor teaching methods in their schools than we were. But I know this: When white parents raised holy hell over educational deficiencies, we got many of them corrected. The white administration of Milwaukee’s illegally racially segregated school system never had any problem ignoring complaints from black parents. But white parents in integrated schools were accustomed to getting action on their complaints from those in power. It’s called white privilege.
That’s actually the most legitimate complaint about busing for integration in Milwaukee. The administration of MPS treated white parents with kid gloves during integration. Busing of white children was almost always voluntary; busing for black children often was not. Only a limited number of African American kids were allowed to stay in their own neighborhoods. The rest were bused all over the city, and there was usually nothing voluntary about it. The obvious inequity became known as one-way busing: forced busing for blacks, voluntary busing for whites.
Even with all the catering to whites, white flight was dramatic. From 1975 to ’77, the years before and after integration, MPS lost nearly 20% of its white students (about 15,000). Republicans prevented MPS from expanding successfully integrated schools by diverting education funding into private voucher schools. Most recently, former Republican Gov. Scott Walker devastated public school funding further statewide with draconian cuts of more than a billion dollars through 2017. In 1975, MPS was 60% white, 34% black and 6% Latino and other minorities. Today it’s 11% white, 54% black, 27% Latino and 7% other minorities.
Busing can never again integrate such racially imbalanced urban public school systems. But I’m glad it did once and that our own children benefitted from integrated schools to become politically progressive adults themselves. My son told me (as an adult) he grew up believing Milwaukee’s integrated schools were the way schools were supposed to be. That’s what I believe, too.
