We All Bleed The Same
In “It Was Never About Busing” by Hannah Jones, the reader gets a glimpse of recent happenings regarding the segregation that exists in the education system even after it has been made a landmark decision that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional through Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Jones explains and addresses what ‘busing’ is in her own words at the beginning, “The term “busing” is a race-neutral euphemism that allows people to pretend white opposition was not about integration but simply about a desire for their children to attend neighborhood schools. But the fact is that American children have ridden buses to schools since the 1920s”(Jones). A reason that brought Jones to this definition is that she later in her text mentions that many children nowadays rarely ride school buses for integration. I agree with her on that because even when I was in elementary school, I would ride the school bus but never paid attention to integration or what it meant. As I now picture it and think back, most of my classmates at the time rode the bus because our parents began work too early and were not able to drop us off at school or they just didn’t have enough time to take us if we were more than one sibling in the family.
In Brown v. Board of Education, justices ruled without opposition that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. Its’ significance was very important especially for the time period it was happening having schools being racially segregated. Brown v. Board of Education was one of the cornerstones of the civil rights movement, and helped establish the precedent that “separate-but-equal” education and other services were not, in fact, equal to all.
Hannah-Jones believes that the truth should be told about the failure to desegregate schools because the only things that are being said are that that was the end of it when it really was not. She says, “They beat children and civil rights activists. They blackballed parents who dared sign their names to lawsuits suing for compliance with Brown, keeping them from employment and evicting them from their homes. Mobs blocked the doors to schoolhouses to keep handfuls of carefully selected black children from entering”(Jones). Many white southerners began creating chaos and bombed schools when busing was stated to be unconstitutional.
Ten years after the case of Brown v. Board of Education had been addressed, many white parents, mostly women created a protest against busing. Jones stated that this was because, “school officials had maintained segregation through racial assignment policies, keeping white schools half empty while black schools in some areas grew so overcrowded that children attended in shifts, half for four hours in the morning, half for four hours in the afternoon, while white children got a full day of instruction”(Jones). This ended up being the “lethal blow” to desegregation in the north. This was significant because desegregation at this time had been successful in the south, “For the first time in the history of American public education, significant numbers of white children were being ordered to attend the schools that had been deemed good enough only for black children, and black children got access to the superior schools this country had always reserved for white children”(Jones). In response to seeing integration be successful in the south, the north wanted to do the same but it was not the case. Jones adds, “The response to integration in places like Boston, where riots broke out and black children who were being bused by federal court orders into white schools were pelted with rocks, beaten and called “niggers,” revealed the lie that the fight was for neighborhood schools and not against integration. These white children were in their neighborhood schools.” Busing had brought up racial tension according to media and politicians during this time like if race had been just fine before when people of color stayed in their place.
The issues of school segregation and structural racism are part of Marin County. As mentioned in the Trusted messenger training we attended during class last week, there is high racial segregation in the Canal area of Marin county which is made up mostly of Asians and Latinxs. These structural issues directly impact the people that Canal Alliance UP! program serves because they aren’t able to have the same privileges or opportunities that kids in other schools or simply being white have. As stated by EdSource, “Marin County had the second-highest gap, at 44 percentage points. San Rafael High School, for example, which is majority Latino, has one college counselor for every 475 students while Sir Francis Drake High, a majority white school in San Anselmo, has a counselor for every 285 students. White-majority schools in Marin also offer more honors and advanced placement tests than San Rafael High, which is 65 percent Latino, according to the schools’ websites.” This gives a little more emphasis of what these Latino youth face such as crucial obstacles in schools by having less access to quality preschools, honors classes, and college counseling than their white peers.
