Concept
Race-integration busing in the United States (also known simply as busing or integrated busing or by its critics as forced busing) was the practice of assigning and transporting students to schools within or outside their local school districts in an effort to diversify the racial make-up of schools. While the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, many American schools continued to remain largely uni-racial due to housing inequality. In an effort to address the ongoing de facto segregation in schools, the 1971 Supreme Court decision, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, ruled that the federal courts could use busing as a further integration tool to achieve racial balance. Busing met considerable opposition from both white and black people. The policy resulted in the movement of large numbers of white families to suburbs of large cities, a phenomenon known as white flight, which further reduced the effectiveness of the policy. Many whites who stayed moved their children into private or parochial schools; these effects combined to make many urban school districts predominantly non-white, reducing any effectiveness mandatory busing may have had. Prior to World War II, most public schools in the country were de jure or de facto segregated. All Southern states had Jim Crow Laws mandating racial segregation of schools. Northern states and some border states were primarily white (in 1940, the populations of Detroit and Chicago were more than 90% white) and existing black populations were concentrated in urban ghettos partly as the result of restrictive covenants. The origins of desegregation busing can be traced back to two major developments that occurred in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s. Starting in 1940, the Second Great Migration brought five million blacks from the agrarian South to the urban and manufacturing centers in Northern and Western cities to fill in the labor shortages during the industrial buildup of World War II and for better opportunities during the post-war economic boom.
