#busing

Boston '75: Anti-Racism Action Project: An Advertisement Supporting the Desegregation of the Boston Public Schools System

Record Group 21: Records of District Courts of the United StatesSeries: Civil Action Case Files

Busing became a contentious issue in the 1960s, but New York began it earlier. Here, teacher Marie Donnelly is in her classroom at P.S. 77 in Glendale, September 28, 1959. In her 40 years of teaching, never has Donnelly had so many African-American students in a class. The youngsters were bused to the school from Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, a predominantly black neighborhood where schools are overcrowded. P.S. 77, which had an enrollment of 368 all-white students, can handle 1,000 children comfortably. Parents in the Queens neighborhoods objected to influx, but the children themselves adjusted to one another without incident.

Stephen Colbert: You landed haymakers against Joe Biden for what was for you bedrock principles. (Busing which Kamala Harris benefit from in her life and something Joe Biden in his career in the Senate voted against 19 times.) And I believe that you fully support Joe Biden now. How do you make that transaction? Kamala Harris: It was a Debate. *laughter* Stephen Colbert: Not everyone landed punches though. Kamala Harris: IT WAS A DEBATE. :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: Stephen Colbert: So you don't mean it. Kamala Harris: It was a Debate. Literally, the whole reason was it was a debate. It was called a "debate."

Recent Acquisition - Photograph Collection

It was an achievement the Reagan administration actively worked to undermine....

In 1981 Reagan had appointed Robert Potter, a onetime anti-busing activist, to the U.S. District Court in western North Carolina. In September 1999, Potter ruled in favor of a Charlotte father who sued the school district to end busing, arguing that it discriminated against his biracial daughter, who was white and Latina. What happened next was tragic. According to research from the labor economist C. Kirabo Jackson, as Charlotte schools reverted to the demographics of their surrounding neighborhoods between 2002 and 2005, schools that became predominantly black suffered a loss of high quality teachers as measured by growth in students’ test scores, teachers’ years of experience, and scores on teacher certification tests. Though black teachers were more likely than white teachers to remain in majority-black schools, those black teachers who left had been more effective than those who remained—especially at increasing the achievement of black students. Jackson estimated that this shift in the distribution of effective teachers could explain up to 7.5 percent of the achievement gap between black and white children in Charlotte.”