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My Experience of School Desegregation in the 80s
Racial desegregation via cross town bussing in public schools
I remember the first day I started high school in Massachusetts. I had moved from Virginia, where I had spent most of my childhood. Something seemed odd, and then I realized what it was. Almost everyone in my school was white.
I had grown up in Norfolk, Virginia, and I was used to going to schools that were more racially integrated, so it felt weird.
From the fifth grade I had been bussed to downtown Norfolk, almost a 45-minute bus ride from where I lived. It was a controversial decision rolled out in several cities in America that peaked in the 1980s. It had been attempted in the 50s, and again in the 70s, where it was hugely unpopular in Boston particularly.
Some kids from my grade school were sent to private local schools because their parents weren’t happy with the plan. Much of the argument against it was that the bussed kids were perceived as being sent to schools that weren’t the best available in favor of the cross-town bussing plan. Most of the blue-collar kids like me just went where we were sent. But the systemic undercurrent of racism was surely also a factor.
My first “boyfriend” in the fifth grade was a boy named Marcus*. We were just friends…
