University of Virginia Library

Rod MacDonald

In Back Of The Bus

"Even the blacks don't want
integration any more" said the
white liberal, and I could almost see
him rubbing his hands with glee as
if to say "At last, that burden is off
our consciences."

Integration as a goal does seem
to be sidetracked right now, as
segregationists have diverted the
issue by injecting the question of
busing in the situation. And President
Nixon's recent statement that
American should dedicate itself to
"quality education" rather than
mere integration has further
clouded the issue.

We have come to expect no
leadership from the Nixon administration
in radical matters; in fact,
the President's actions are usually
so hypocritical that it would be
better if he adopted the "benign
neglect" his advisor Patrick Moynihan
is urging.

When the President turns activist
it is usually to attack the court
system for enforcing the law or
expecting the President to enforce
it, or to weaken the courts
themselves; Vice-President Agnew
handles the rest, and he is currently
engaged in undermining the educational
strategy of seeking out
underprivileged and culturally deprived
students under the guise of
disliking "quotas."

Quotas have existed for years; in
the South the schools had a quota
system - no blacks. The President,
who claims the Supreme Court
should have no "quota system" and
therefore will not appoint a "representative
Jew or Negro" has twice
maintained that the Court needs a
"representative Southerner" to
balance it against the activists.

Regardless of the fact that
blacks have a greater stake in the
racial problem than do whites, their
leaders are denied the opportunity
to participate in the only body in
America that has the nerve to deal
with it - the Supreme Court. We
will have no quotas.

Other hypocrisy runs through
the race question. One writer
recently called the Senate a "lynch
mob" for denying confirmation to
a judge it thought was a racist G.
Harrold Carswell. Whether or not
the Senate was correct, the term
"lynch mob" coming as a protest
from a pro-Southerner is interesting.
After all, Southern Senators
fought for years to retain the right
to lynch "niggers," filibustering
skillfully against all legislation that
threatened to punish their pet
white bigots. The tables are turned,
and the South doesn't like lynching
anymore.

Dislikes Busing

Neither does it like busing
anymore, although it has been
doing it for years to avoid integration.
Now that the courts want the
same process used to speed desegregation
busing has become a moral
question; whites must not be sent
to schools not of their choice, even
though blacks were for a hundred
years sent to schools they didn't
choose, if schools for blacks even
existed where they lived.

All these are examples of the
double talk with which we treat
what may be our greatest problem
learning to live together. Integration
as an educational policy is now
under fire, from black men as well
as from whites. Recent issues of
several newspapers and magazines
show this fact, with articles from
such notables as Edward Brooke on
the failure of integration (although,
as one SDS member said last year.
Senator Brooke represents the people
of Massachusetts, not the blacks
of America).

Of course, no one wants mere
integration if it means a decline in
school quality. No one wants all
school children to become as culturally
deprived as the black children
of the south have often been
for the past fifty years. The trouble
is, no one wants to face the real
issue.

Integration does not mean a
decline in quality education if it is
handled property. Running a dual
school system, as anyone should
know after this debate has been
going on for all these years, costs
more than does a unitary school
system. If cities are busing all
whites to one spot and all blacks to
another, they are necessarily running
more buses at more cost and
more moral hangups (sure) than
they would be to distribute the
population of the city fairly evenly,
even at the price of some core-city
to suburb busing.

But there is a further dimension.
While most educators agree that the
most necessary skill a small child
can learn is reading, schools have
another useful purpose - cultural
assimilation. The white youth who
has never had an interpersonal
relationship with a black youth is as
uneducated at that age as he would
be if he had never heard a note of
music. It is the separation of races
that is arbitrary, and like it or not
they cease to be as separated as
each child reaches his later life.

Perpetuates Hatred

That is why columnists such as
the Washington Post's William Raspberry
trouble me, for he has
written that the Nixon administration
is right to pursue quality
education at the expense of integration.
Perhaps the black power and
the white power theorists would
prefer just that goal; but I fail to
see that "separate but equal"
produces either quality or equal or
constructive education; it only
perpetuates hatred.

Raspberry's column thus points
out the gap now existing, for the
white liberals have nearly abdicated
the cause and many blacks are
hesitating. Part of the reason is the
apathy they new find in blacks
about it; part is that leadership of
any kind is lacking. This is certainly
the time, as white liberalism
flounders, for black leaders to
assert themselves toward reaching
their goals. If the time for whites to
follow the hand of leadership were
it belongs with the blacks. Or, as
Whitney Young wrote last week,
"We're back where we started
fighting Jim Crow. We won once;
we'll win again."