Montgomery leaders organize boycott. Montgomery bus boycott begins. MIA forms; elects King president. King and Ralph Abernathy meet with E. Nixon in Montgomery.
King arrested for loitering in Montgomery. Related Entries Abernathy, Ralph David. Carr, Johnnie Rebecca Daniels. Historical Material From E. The results have been sometimes sound, sometimes bizarre--but certainly uneven. The time has come for the Congress, on the basis of experience, to provide guidance. Where a violation exists, the act I propose would provide that: --The remedies imposed must be limited to those needed to correct the particular violations that have been found.
The list of authorized remedies--in order--is:. However, such a plan could not require increased busing of students in the sixth grade or below. If a plan involved additional busing of older children, then: a It could not be ordered unless there was clear and convincing evidence that no other method would work; b in no case could it be ordered on other than a temporary basis; c it could not pose a risk to health, or significantly impinge on the educational process; d the school district could be granted a stay until the order had been passed on by the court of appeals.
They would be limited to 10 years' duration--or 5 years if they called for student transportation--provided that during that period the school authorities had been in good-faith compliance. New orders could then be entered only if there had been new violations. These rules would thus clearly define what the Federal courts could and could not require; however, the States and localities would remain free to carry out voluntary school integration plans that might go substantially beyond the Federal requirements.
This is an important distinction. Where busing would provide educational advantages for the community's children, and where the community wants to undertake it, the community should--and will--have that choice. What is objectionable is an arbitrary Federal requirement-whether administrative or judicial-that the community must undertake massive additional busing as a matter of Federal law.
The essence of a free society is to restrict the range of what must be done, and broaden the range of what may be done. If we were simply to place curbs on busing and do nothing more, then we would not have kept faith with the hopes, the needs--or the rights--of the neediest of our children.
Even adding the many protections built into the rights and remedies sections of the Equal Educational Opportunities Act, we would not by this alone provide what their special needs require.
Busing helps some poor children; it poses a hardship for others; but there are many more, and in many areas the great majority--in the heart of New York, and in South Chicago, for example--whom it could never reach. If we were to treat busing as some sort of magic panacea, and to concentrate our efforts and resources on that as the principal means of achieving quality education for blacks and other minorities, then in these areas of dense minority concentration a whole generation could be lost.
If we hold massive busing to be, in any event, an unacceptable remedy for the inequalities of educational opportunity that exist, then we must do more to improve the schools where poor families live. Rather than require the spending of scarce resources on ever-longer bus rides for those who happen to live where busing is possible, we should encourage the putting of those resources directly into education--serving all the disadvantaged children, not merely those on the bus routes.
In order to reach the great majority of the children who most need extra help, I propose a new approach to financing the extra efforts required: one that puts the money where the needs are, drawing on the funds I have requested for this and the next fiscal year under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of and under the Emergency School Aid Act now pending before the Congress. As part of the Equal Educational Opportunities Act, I propose to broaden the uses of the funds under the Emergency School Aid Act, and to provide the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare with additional authority to encourage effective special learning programs in those schools where the needs are greatest.
Priority would be given to those districts that are desegregating either voluntarily or under court order, and to those that are addressing problems of both racial and economic impaction. This partial shift of funds is now possible for two reasons: First, in the nearly 2 years since I first proposed the Emergency School Aid Act, much of what it was designed to help with has already been done.
Second, to the extent that the standards set forth in the Equal Educational Opportunities Act would relieve desegregating districts of some of the more expensive requirements that might otherwise be laid upon them, a part of the money originally intended to help meet those expenses can logically be diverted to these other, closely related needs.
I would stress once again, in this connection, the importance I attach to final passage of the Emergency School Aid Act: those districts that are now desegregating still need its help, and the funds to be made available for these new purposes are an essential element of a balanced equal opportunity package.
For some years now, there has been a running debate about the effectiveness of added spending for programs of compensatory or remedial education. Some have maintained there is virtually no correlation between dollar input and learning output; others have maintained there is a direct correlation; experience has been mixed.
What does now seem clear is that while many Title I experiments have failed, many others have succeeded substantially and even dramatically; and what also is clear is that without the extra efforts such extra funding would make possible, there is little chance of breaking the cycle of deprivation.
A case can be made that Title I has fallen short of expectations, and that in some respects it has failed. In many cases, pupils in the programs funded by it have shown no improvement whatever, and funds have frequently been misused or squandered foolishly. Federal audits of State Title I efforts have found instances where naivete, inexperience, confusion, despair, and even clear violations of the law have thwarted the act's effectiveness.
In some instances, Title I funds have been illegally spent on unauthorized materials and facilities, or used to fund local services other than those intended by the act, such as paying salaries not directly related to the act's purposes. The most prevalent failing has been the spending of Title I funds as general revenue. Out of 40 States audited between and , 14 were found to have spent Title I funds as general revenue.
Too often, one result has been that instead of actually being concentrated in the areas of critical need, Title I moneys have been diffused throughout the system; and they have not reached the targeted schools--and targeted children--in sufficient amounts to have a real impact. On the positive side, Title I has effected some important changes of benefit to disadvantaged children. First, Title I has encouraged some States to expand considerably the contributions from State and local funds for compensatory education.
Second, Title I has better focused attention on pupils who previously were too often ignored. About 8 million children are in schools receiving some compensatory funds. In 46 States programs have been established to aid almost a quarter of a million children of migratory workers. As an added dividend, many States have begun to focus educational attention on the early childhood years which are so important to the learning process.
Finally, local schools have been encouraged by Title I to experiment and innovate. Given our highly decentralized national educational system and the relatively minor role one Federal program usually plays, there have been encouraging examples of programs fostered by Title I which have worked.
In designing compensatory programs, it is difficult to know exactly what will work. The circumstances of one locality may differ dramatically from those of other localities. What helps one group of children may not be of particular benefit to others. In these experimental years, local educational agencies and the schools have had to start from scratch, and to learn for themselves how to educate those who in the past had too often simply been left to fall further behind.
In the process, some schools did well and others did not. Some districts benefited by active leadership and community involvement, while others were slow to innovate and to break new ground. While there is a great deal yet to be learned about the design of successful compensatory programs, the experience so far does point in one crucial direction: to the importance of providing sufficiently concentrated funding to establish the educational equivalent of a "critical mass," or threshold level.
Where funds have been spread too thinly, they have been wasted or dissipated with little to show for their expenditure. Where they have been concentrated, the results have been frequently encouraging and sometimes dramatic.
Throughout the country States as widely separated as Connecticut and Florida have recognized a correlation between a "critical mass" expenditure and marked effectiveness. Of late, several important studies have supported the idea of a "critical mass" compensatory expenditure to afford disadvantaged pupils equal educational opportunity. One key to the success of this new approach would be the "critical mass" achieved by both increasing and concentrating the funds made available; another would be vigorous administrative follow-through to ensure that the funds are used in the intended schools and for the intended purposes.
In times of rapid and even headlong change, there occasionally is an urgent need for reflection and reassessment. This is especially true when powerful, historic forces are moving the Nation toward a conflict of fundamental principles--a conflict that can be avoided if each of us does his share, and if all branches of Government will join in helping to redefine the questions before us. Like any comprehensive legislative recommendation, the Equal Educational Opportunities Act that I have proposed today is offered as a framework for Congressional debate and action.
The Congress has both the Constitutional authority and a special capability to debate and define new methods for implementing Constitutional principles.
And the educational, financial and social complexities of this issue are not, and are not properly, susceptible of solution by individual courts alone or even by the Supreme Court alone. This is a moment of considerable conflict and uncertainty; but it is also a moment of great opportunity. Why Busing Failed is the first book to examine the pitched battles over busing on a national scale, focusing on cities such as Boston, Chicago, New York, and Pontiac, Michigan.
This groundbreaking book shows how school officials, politicians, the courts, and the media gave precedence to the desires of white parents who opposed school desegregation over the civil rights of black students. This broad and incisive history of busing features a cast of characters that includes national political figures such as then-president Richard Nixon, Chicago mayor Richard J.
Daley, and antibusing advocate Louise Day Hicks, as well as some lesser-known activists on both sides of the issue—Boston civil rights leaders Ruth Batson and Ellen Jackson, who opposed segregated schools, and Pontiac housewife and antibusing activist Irene McCabe, black conservative Clay Smothers, and Florida governor Claude Kirk, all supporters of school segregation.
Why Busing Failed shows how antibusing parents and politicians ultimately succeeded in preventing full public school desegregation. In , Dr. Carter G. Since we continually strive to publish works that will be relevant for …. Board of Education by enabling the withholding of federal funds, cities in the North, Midwest, and West routinely flouted federal authority. Antibusing rhetoric spiked in , the year Joe Biden was elected to the U.
White protesters such as Irene McCabe of Pontiac, Michigan, received massive amounts of media attention for their defiance of court-ordered school desegregation. President Richard Nixon called for Congress to pass a busing moratorium and used televised presidential addresses to signal that he would limit federal oversight to unconstitutional de jure segregation, most commonly associated with the South, to set the terms of the busing debate.
When Biden came to the Senate and began introducing his own antibusing amendments, he was building on more than 15 years of white parents and politicians using busing as a code word to oppose school desegregation. Berkeley was able to craft a successful school-desegregation plan in this context because of strong local leadership and a sense of civic purpose. Starting in the s, local civil-rights activists pushed the school board to address the overcrowded and unequal schools black students attended.
As in other cities, these steps were controversial in Berkeley. Public debates and PTA meetings remained heated for the next several years. Theodore R. Johnson: Kamala Harris knew what she was doing. Sullivan took the Berkeley job in , after successfully opening free schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia, which had closed its public schools to avoid court-ordered desegregation, leaving black students without public education for four years.
Sullivan understood the importance of making a strong case for school integration.
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