Beyond busing: George H. W. Bush and school desegregatioin

Educational Foundations, Fall 2001 by McAndrews, Lawrence J

In 1986, Willie Horton, a convicted murderer on a weekend furlough granted by Massachusetts Democratic Governor Michael Dukakis, raped a woman and tortured her fiance. Two years later, seizing upon an issue introduced to the Democratic Presidential primaries by Tennessee Senator Al Gore, a George H.W. Bush supporter produced a television commercial showing a photograph of Willie Horton passing in and out of prison doors. Although the Bush camp called Horton a symbol of Democratic nominee Dukakis' softness toward crime, critics claimed that Horton's photograph was memorable less for his blue coveralls than his black skin. The ad, they asserted, was racist.1

They stopped short of calling Bush a racist, however. After all, as an undergraduate at Yale, Bush had led a drive for the United Negro College Fund. As a Republican Congressman from Texas, he had voted for the Fair Housing Act of 1968, taking on a group of angry white constituents in a meeting he later called the most significant of his political life. As a Presidential candidate two decades later, he called on the country to "leave that tired old baggage of bigotry behind." As President, he would appoint his friend Dr. Louis Sullivan, president of predominantly black Morehouse College, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, and black conservative Clarence Thomas to succeed Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. He would provide legal safeguards and compensation for minorities and women by signing the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 and the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which permitted defacto racial quotas based on "business necessity." He would reject a recommendation by Deputy Undersecretary of Education Michael Williams to outlaw race-based college scholarships.2

But in the eyes of his opponents, President Bush would never completely exorcise the ghost of Willie Horton. By vetoing the Civil Rights Act of 1990, very similar to the following year's legislation, as a "quota bill"; trying unsuccessfully to appoint black conservative William Lucas as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights; refusing to withdraw Thomas' nomination amid charges of sexual harassment; and selecting affirmative action critic David Souter for the Supreme Court, Bush rekindled the ire of his adversaries. And on an issue which still mattered to the civil rights community, the inconsistent Mr. Bush remained consistently "wrong." In word and deed, his Administration opposed busing to coerce school desegregation.

This study will provide brief backgrounds of school desegregation and busing, examine the Bush Administration's challenge to busing, explore the change and continuity in the Administration's school desegregation policies, document the emergence of Hispanic education as an issue in the Administration and the country, and offer scholarly conclusions within the broader context of assessments of the Bush Presidency and its civil rights policy. These conclusions point to George H.W. Bush as a President who, however tentatively, helped move the country beyond busing and toward voluntary school desegregation.

School Desegregation

In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board ofEducation that de jure segregation violated the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The next year, the Court ordered the dismantling of such segregation "with all deliberate speed," leaving implementation to lower court judges. On the tenth anniversary of the Brown decision, however, only one percent of African-American children in the South attended desegregated schools, so the Civil Rights Act of 1964 moved to enforce the Brown decision. Title IV of the Act empowered the Justice Department to litigate school desegregation cases, while Title VI permitted the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to withdraw federal money from segregated schools. By 1968, due partly to the Civil Rights Act, the fraction of African-- American children in desegregated Southern schools had increased to ten percent.3

In the same year, the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. New Kent County that "freedom of choice" voluntary desegregation plans which did not produce significant racial mixing violated the Equal Protection clause. For the next three years, on the important questions of"whether a school system must achieve a particular racial balance in order to satisfy constitutional standards and the extent to which a school board must reassign students to distant schools in order to overcome segregated residential patterns," the High Court would remain silent.4

Busing

In 1971, in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board ofEducation, the Supreme Court unanimously approved forced busing as a constitutional method of achieving school desegregation. The Supreme Court's Milliken v. Bradley decision of 1974, however, outlawed forced busing across governmental jurisdictions, and President Richard Nixon joined a majority of Americans in opposing this means of desegregating the nation's public schools. "A dwindling band of northern liberals found that they were defending a policy with no real constituency," write Thomas and Mary Edsall. "Poll after poll found white opposition to busing, and only lukewarm support in the black community, which was generally right down the middle on the issue."5