How much longer are the American people going to put up with the unjust, unnecessary, tyrannical court-ordered forced busing of our school children?
Busing certainly has not improved race relations. It has caused the most bitter racial strife and hostility we have seen in our life time. Busing certainly has not improved education. The quality of achievement by public school students has been going rapidly downhill, and this year’s college entrance examination scores showed the biggest drop in a steady ten-year decline.
Busing certainly has not improved moral conduct or respect for the law. Crime and violence inside the public schools are at an all-time high. Busing has not even benefited the very people it was designed to help. There is no evidence that busing black children makes them smarter or increases their self-esteem.
More and more blacks are voicing their disillusionment with busing. Remember the black housewife Marsha Flagg who participated in the lawsuit that brought about massive cross-town busing in the famous Inglewood, California case? This year she took her own children out of the public schools, saying they have “become places where bad things happen. I just can’t let my kids be buried there.”
William Raspberry, a black writing in the Washington Post, summed it up like this: “In the absence of any persuasive evidence that racial balancing is worth the effort in terms of increased edu cation or social opportunity for the children, or even any evidence that it helps children get along together better, it seems to me that the time, effort and money spent on busing could be better used for other things. Like better schools, for instance.”
Coleman A. Young, the mayor of Detroit, is another black who has called forced busing “an exchange of hostages.” Even Mrs. Coretta King has expressed her doubts, calling forced busing a “futile shuffling of students from one school to another with scant prospects for a meaningful educational experience in either.”
Dr. James s. Coleman, whose federally-funded “Coleman Report” was cited in so many judicial busing orders, has finally concluded that, “In large cities induced integration, usually brought about as a result of court action, seems to be self-defeating. … You can’t create integration by court edict.”
It is a tossup as to who is more to blame: the politicians who say they are against forced busing, but allow HEW to continue to spend the taxpayers’ money for busing — or the politicians and the judges who say they are for busing, but send their own children to private schools.
In any event, it is time to admit that this social experiment has been a costly failure, undemocratically forced on the American people by radical social experimenters and arrogant federal judges. Busing is an offense against family, neighborhood, and educational principles and realities. Busing has cheated thousands of school children out of a peaceful, productive school experience. It is disruptive to social harmony and educational goals, and it isself defeating of its proclaimed purpose.
