I went to Gardena High School in south west Los Angeles. We probably had fairly equal racial representation. About 40% white, 25% asian, 20% black, and 15% hispanic. We all got along very well. The only exception was when each year a group of black kids were bussed in from some poor troubled area and each year we had 1 or 2 major fights where 100 students might be involved.
Here in Fort Worth, the “forced busing” leftover from desegregation was still alive and kicking in the 80s. I’m not sure exactly when they implemented this plan, but I believe it was the results of a failed earlier plan. Probably rolled out in the early 70s.
Here’s how it worked:
Kids from the primarily white schools would be bused to a primarily black school for second grade, while kids from the primarily black schools would get bused over to a primarily white school for two years, I believe it was third and fifth grades, although that might have varied.
I believe the “magnet school” program was also invented to help integrate the older, primarily black high schools in Fort Worth. I think that program was probably more successful than the forced busing for elementary kids, which hardly anyone liked. I literally do not remember one single person, black or white, that thought it was a good idea or beneficial to anyone. People weren’t rioting about it in the streets or anything, but there was a lot of eye-rolling and “Our government, hard at work!” snarky comments.
It was said at the time that a lot of Fort Worth’s private schools existed solely BECAUSE of the forced busing - parents simply didn’t want their kid headed across town on an hour-long bus ride every day when there were perfectly decent schools in their neighborhoods.
I went to a small private school in the early 80s, and I can attest to the fact that there would be one or two classrooms full of first grades, SIX classes for second graders (all full) and one or two classes for third grade.
And oddly enough, my school went out of business the year following the end of forced busing.
In the 70’s, I was bussed across town -
The demographics of the school were probably about 50% black, 30% Hispanic and 20% white.
I don’t really remember many major issues. I do remember that, one day, the black kids and the white kids got together and beat up the Hispanic kids –
Not sure what that was about.
Did it have anything to do with John Lennon’s death? I ask, because at my high school, the week after he died (Dec 1980), all the gang affiliated hispanics were dressed for mourning. I never did figure that one out.
Desegregation had a minimal impact on me because for most of grade school I went to private schools that were almost all white. However my mother, at least as she related it later, had a rougher time during the same period. She’s deceased now and this may be just her biased account, so take it with a grain of salt. As she told it:
My mother was a grade/middle school teacher whose career spanned desegregation, and she went from teaching white-majority classes to black-majority classes. She claimed that the same black students who were quiet, respectful and obedient for a black teacher turned into hellions when the teacher was white. She attributed this to black culture- that the black students had been taught from the cradle to distrust and fear whites, and that the proper response to white authority was to lie, make mischief and in general “put one over” white teachers anytime they could. And that if a white teacher disciplined them, they learned nothing from it because that was just the mean ole’ Man oppressing them. My mother quit after four years of this, had what they then called a “nervous breakdown”, and was housebound for a year, which she attributed solely to the stress of dealing with inner-city black youths.
Attended Catholic schools in New York City from 1965 through 1977.
Never really noticed much segregation then, or much angst over desegregation.
Now I realize that I was a bit isolated from reality because of demographics. At least in the Northeastern part of the US, most African-Americans are not Catholic. In the schools I attended, there were always a few black kids of Haitian descent, and nobody really noticed that they weren’t white. I mean not at all – they were just other kids in the school. I don’t doubt that those very same kids today, as adults, could tell me things I never knew about their time in Catholic schools, but I also think they’d agree that we were all in a bit of a bubble, and somewhat isolated from the school segregation issue. But segregation/desegregation on a larger scale never really came up.
As an adult, I now realize how very segregated my city is today. There are no Jim Crow laws, of course, but this city is in fact segregated. Schools are segregated, neighborhoods are segregated, workplaces are segregated. It’s truly sad.
What can I post to get Trickster’s panties in a bunch?
I graduated from high school in 1973, in Topeka Kansas. You know, Brown vs. Board of
By then there was no official segregation. I never even heard of the Brown case until 1969. But the school I attended had maybe a dozen black students, if that many, in a student population of 1400 in three grades. We were in a predominantly westside area, few blacks lived there, and school attendance was by district, not by choice.
Now I think students can, to some extent, attend a school outside of thier district boundary lines, and quite a number of black students attend where I did…
In the 50’s and 60’s Dallas was among the most completely segregated cities in the world. Black women came into our white neighborhoods as maids, all the sanitation workers were black, and the main trade open to black men was concrete labor. They weren’t allowed to buy or rent in white neighborhoods, and knew not to go into the white part of town after dark. They went to the big park around White Rock Lake, and to the State Fair, especially on the last Friday of the Fair which was widely known as "Colored Day,’ and the Fair had the last ‘Coloreds Only’ drinking fountain I remember. Pro Football was the 1st foot in the door for integration, tickets were cheap and the stadium (the Cotton Bowl of all things) sat right in the middle of one of the worst ghettos on the planet. I remember going to the bathroom at halftime and finding my 10 year old self jammed shoulder to shoulder with giant beer swilling cigar smoking black men at a long concrete trough peeing and peeing and realizing life was gonna be a whole lot more complicated than I ever thought…
I lived through the Boston busing crisis. My mother was aghast at the idea of busing white students to “poorer” schools.
I went to school in a small town in southern California in the late 50’s- early 70’s. There was no segregation in housing or schools; I grew up with Black people and Mexican, Chinese and Japanese immigrants in my neighborhood and in my schools.
Not nearly as diverse as my current neighborhood and its schools (in San Jose, California) but it was a good start. I never learned to look at people as different than me and I was utterly clueless as to why anyone else would. I have no illusions that there was no racism in my home town, but at least it wasn’t institutional.
Then in 1971 I moved to Raleigh, North Carolina and discovered a Whole New World: separate public bathrooms (they had been painted so that they said “Employees” and “Customers” instead of “White” and “Colored”), older Black folks still stepped off the sidewalk to let me (a white woman) pass, I heard the N word spoken by people who wouldn’t have said shit if they had a mouthful of it. There were billboards advertising the KKK. And a HUGE controversy about busing. Bleeping amazing.
“Nothing” would be the wise choice.
Hal Briston - MPSIMS moderator
Although this story is far removed from the OP I find that, though it’s a slight hijack, I want to tell it.
My grandmother, as a little girl, went to one room schools in rural Kansas. She was born in 1904, so she would have been in the elementary grades in the early 1910’s. Her father was a farmer. As it happened, there were a number of black farmers in the county, and my great-grandfather never seemed to see anything different about them, according to my grandmother, his daughter. Like all farmers of the time they’d esxchange labor, helping each other out.
And the schools couldn’t be segregated, my grandmother went to the early grades at least with the black kids. She never encountered racial segregation until she moved to the city of Topeka.
I started kindergarten in the fall of 1973, first at the neighborhood school 2 blocks form home, and then when my mom decided that school was terrible (I came home one day complaining that they had told me I wasn’t allowed to read), I was transferred to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Experimental Laboratory School (King Lab for short - not the current K-8 version, the previous K-5 version).
Needless to say, a carefully calculated racial balance was a substantial part of their mission, and frankly still is in the Evanston public schools generally. I was shocked when I got to high school about the rumors that Evanston Township High School (essentially the only public high school in town) had been semi-segregated - the black students weren’t allowed to swim in the pool, for example. I still don’t know whether that’s true. Evanston prides itself on its hippie sensibilities, and was a stop on the Underground Railroad (or so we were always told).
I lived in Boston and was going into second grade when busing started. My parents sent me and all of my siblings to a private Catholic school in our neighborhood instead of letting them bus us to a bad public school. Everyone we knew went to private schools too. I went back to public school in the seventh grade, but it was one of Boston’s elite testing schools (you took a test to qualify for admission). That school had racial quotas so they had to admit some black students who scored lower than some white students, but I never felt that any of the black students didn’t deserve to be there.