by Jim Bovard

While politicians speak of free public education, it is the parents who are paying much, if not most, of the bill for their children’s education. Yet paying for schooling indirectly effectively turns parents from buyers into beggars. Regrettably, there is no way that parents can sue the government officials who forcibly sacrificed their children on an altar of equality.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/forced-busing-biggest-dei-debacle-in-u-s-history/

President Joe Biden seeks to boost government school spending to close the achievement gap between white and black students. According to the Biden administration, disparities in student test scores justify further government intervention. But Biden ignores how previous government education decrees ravaged Americans’ freedom and domestic tranquility.

In a speech earlier this month, Biden touted the 70th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision on Brown v. Board of Education. That decision ruled that “separate but equal” systems that intentionally segregated students by race violated the Fourteenth Amendment. That decision resulted in profound changes in southern states that had created parallel but inferior school systems for blacks, along with other barriers for learning.

In his speech, Biden sniped at Republicans and conservatives, claiming, “We have a whole group of people out there trying…to erase history.” But the biggest erasure involves the largest Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity crusade in American history—the forced busing that disrupted many cities and metropolitan areas from the 1970s onwards.

Ten years after Brown v. Board of Education, Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which specified that “‘desegregation’ means the assignment of students to schools ‘without regard to their race,’ and ‘shall not mean’ assignment ‘to overcome racial imbalance.’”  Regardless of the clear language of the law, the Supreme Court began rubberstamping court decrees that compelled the busing of children far from home to satisfy constantly changing demands for racial balance. As professor Lino Graglia noted in his 1976 classic, Disaster by Decree: The Supreme Court Decisions on Race and the Schools, forced busing was “the compulsory transportation of school children out of their neighborhoods to increase school racial mixing or ‘balance.’”

Though the issue may seem obscure if not archaic to many young voters, forced busing was briefly a hot issue in the Democratic presidential race in 2019. During one of the debates, Kamala Harris attacked Joe Biden for having opposed forced busing in the 1970s, his first decade in Congress. Biden was mentally sharper then than he is now, so he did not falsely claim to have been a heroic civil rights demonstrator who was arrested at the South African embassy after almost being at the famous 1965 Selma protest. In his response to Harris, Biden stressed that busing should have been “a local decision made by your city council.” 

Harris demanded to know: “Do you agree that you were wrong to oppose busing in America?”

Biden denied that he opposed busing per se: “What I opposed was busing ordered by the Department of Education.” Actually, the federal Department of Education was not created until late in the 1970s and it had no power to order busing. The vast majority of busing conflicts stemmed from judicial decrees, which Biden seemed to understand a half century earlier.

According to Harris, forced busing was necessary “because there are moments in history where states fail to preserve the civil rights of all people”—and thus the federal government must intervene.

Biden’s narrative on busing has evolved over the last half century. In 2007, in his first memoir, Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics, Biden called busing a “liberal train wreck” that was “tearing people apart.” He honestly admitted: “White parents were terrified that their children would be shipped into the toughest neighborhoods in Wilmington; black parents were terrified that their children would be targets of violence in the suburban schools. Nobody was happy.” Biden endorsed legislation in the 1970s to limit the power of federal judges to order busing. His position on busing was one of his signature issues before he became one of the most fanatic supporters of the federal War on Drugs the following decade.

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