Education: The Agonny of Busing Moves North

"We're fighting for our civil rights now!"

—Antibusing sign in Pontiac, Mich.

TO millions of white Americans, there is a new "yellow peril" on the nation's streets and highways this fall. It consists of caravans of that familiar homey vehicle, the yellow school bus. This year, however, the school bus has become a symbol of one of the most controversial developments in American life: the forced transportation of children away from neighborhood schools to distant classrooms, in obedience to court-ordered desegregation plans.

Until recently, judicial rulings that schools must integrate were largely limited to the South, where Jim Crow laws long made segregation of the races in education a reality of life. Now some courts are declaring that segregation in the North must be dismantled as thoroughly as it was in the South, at least where school boards have contributed to keeping classes segregated. The forced busing produced by this stand has caused an explosive outburst of anger and hatred that has vast implications for the future of domestic politics, the public schools and U.S. education itself.

Corrosive Problems

In a way, the school bus is a strangely chosen symbolic target, since without it many American children, particularly in rural areas, might have no access to formal education at all. Nearly 40% of the nation's elementary-school children are bused to class for reasons that have nothing to do with desegregation. Yet millions of white parents are panicked by the thought of using those buses to increase the proportion of blacks in their children's schools.

Some of the protests are clearly motivated by racism and unreason. Other objections, though, stem from parents' not unfounded fears that the buses will bring the corrosive problems of the ghettos to "their" schools, or take their children into the midst of the ghettos' often violent, crime-ridden culture. White parents fear that their children will be exposed to what blacks have learned to hate—the rapes, ripoffs, robberies and dope addiction that have turned all too many inner-city schools into blackboard jungles where learning is less important than learning how to survive. Beyond that, whites who have moved to a suburb for the sake of its school system resent the fact that courts they have never seen and judges they did not elect are telling them that their children cannot use those schools.

"I don't see any reason why they've got a right to come in here and tell me my kids can't use the school I bought and paid for," says Mrs. Mary Jane Marcozzi of Madison Heights, Mich., a Detroit suburb. She and her family will move if busing is brought to their community. ''My kids may be riding a bus," she says, "but it won't be to Detroit. In Detroit there's more dope, more robberies, more rapes, more of everything." That kind of reaction is not untypical of parents when they are first told that their children must be bused away. I'll lay my body in front of any bus. I'll chain myself to the school doors," cried Douglas Easter of Boston's Jamaica Plain, when he was informed that his children would have to attend a school three miles away.

The battle against busing by Northern whites has been observed with a certain degree of cynical amusement in the