In Ky., Busing Built Bridges Between Worlds
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On the suburban street where I grew up in Louisville, Ky., children raced through the sprinklers of neighbors’ lawns and looped their bikes around culs-de-sac. Fathers mowed the acres of grass surrounding each house, and mothers baked cookies. Just about everyone there was white.
On my first day of second grade, in 1986, I boarded a school bus that took me far away from that world. As we rumbled along the expressway, the bucolic suburbs of the East End retreated and we entered an alien landscape: the West End.
I peered out the bus window at factories that smelled like old potatoes and brick housing projects with postage-stamp yards littered with broken toys and crack vials. We stopped in my new school’s parking lot, which doubled as the playground, and filed inside a brick box with no visible windows. Just about everyone there was black.
We were ordered there by a 1975 federal court decision forcing the city of Louisville to do something about the segregation that persisted 20 years after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. The busing program set up in response — which is currently being challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court — required that the student body of every public school be between 15% and 50% black.
My life — and the lives of the other white suburban children who went to Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Elementary School — was never the same. The role of the buses was not just to transport us to school. The hour-long ride to and from school was a part of our education, and I absorbed lessons that are imprinted as indelibly as the rules of spelling and long division.
Our playground was divided from the city’s largest and most violent public housing project by a chain link fence. Holding hands on our way to the museums downtown, my classmates and I would skip through poverty-besieged neighborhoods that few white people had ever set foot in. We learned not to be afraid of people who were different from us. The disparities and similarities among the students at the school left us with a lot to think about on the long ride home, and for years to come.
My mother had been a school social worker at Coleridge-Taylor years earlier. It was a troubled school with misspelled spelling words listed on the chalkboards, but she didn’t have a choice about sending me there. Under the first phase of the program, children were sorted by race and assigned to schools that need more racial balance. Later, in the 1990s, the program allowed parents to list first and second choices.
By that time, however, white middle-class parents had gotten involved in Coleridge-Taylor’s PTA. They were allowed to visit classrooms and monitor the teachers. After two years, my parents were given the choice to send me back to my neighborhood school. They chose to keep me enrolled at Coleridge-Taylor. Most of the other white parents did the same thing. Coleridge-Taylor had become one of the city’s best schools.
Kentucky was the last of the Southern states to establish a compulsory school segregation law, so it is something of a miracle that Louisville has become one of the most racially integrated school systems in the country. In 2000, a federal judge determined that Louisville had met its obligation to desegregate its schools, though the city voluntarily kept the program intact.
Busing hasn’t completely dismantled segregation, however. On the inside, my school was just as segregated as it had been before 1975. Children were separated out into regular and advanced classes — Louisville’s version of gifted and talented — and the divisions usually fell along race and class lines. I never had more than two black children in my class at a time.
Busing opponents went to the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday to argue that Louisville’s integration efforts have gone too far. Advocates point out that the West End and the East End are still separated by a deep gulf that so far only school buses have been able to bridge.