SCHOOLS: The Busing Dilemma

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Northern and Border-state cities like Boston and Louisville as racist and no different from the Deep South's efforts to block school desegregation in the 1950s and early 1960s. As the title of a bitter N.A.A.C.P. report put it: It's Not the Distance, It's the Niggers. Observes Kenneth Clark, a black psychologist and leading education theorist: "The North is trying to get away with what the South tried. If the North succeeds, and I don't think that it will, it will make a mockery of our courts and laws." But other black leaders are far less certain and wonder whether busing really moves their cause forward.

The cruel dilemma over busing has caused parents, both black and white, to raise a series of legitimate questions to which there are no easy answers: Is forced busing to balance schools racially worth all the uproar? Does it produce better schooling for disadvantaged black youngsters and no loss for the white youngsters?

Once, the answer to both was widely thought to be yes. But researchers have raised gnawing doubts about these propositions—without necessarily disproving them. Moreover, forced busing or the threat of it has accelerated the white flight to the suburbs, leaving the inner cities increasingly nonwhite. In this situation, urban desegregation may mean little more than spreading a dwindling white minority among overwhelmingly black and increasingly mediocre schools, with minimal benefit for either race. In short, does school desegregation improve or worsen race relations? Are there alternatives to busing for achieving desegregation and improving the education of black children?

Questions such as these have profoundly shaken the formerly strong national coalition of support for school integration. Besides, moral backing for busing long ago disappeared from the White House. Echoing his predecessor's doubts, President Ford recently observed: "I don't think that forced busing to achieve racial balance is the proper way to get quality education." Instead he called for "better school facilities, lower teacher-pupil ratios, the improvement of neighborhoods as such." Similarly, local politicians like Louisville Mayor Harvey I. Sloane and Boston Mayor Kevin White have misgivings about busing. Says White: "To pursue blindly a means that may not be correct is to use one wrong to correct another." Even black mayors like Coleman Young of Detroit and Maynard Jackson of Atlanta have reservations about busing, largely because they want to avoid driving out the small minority of whites who remain in their cities' public schools.

Given the supercharged atmosphere in Louisville and Boston, law-enforcement authorities feared that last week's relative calm might be only temporary. In Louisville, officials were sternly determined that the previous weekend's violent antibusing protests by whites (TIME, Sept. 15) would not be repeated. The rioting, burning of buses and looting of stores badly damaged the great political ambitions of the county's chief executive, Judge Todd Hollenbach, who delayed calling on city and state police for help until after the rampaging crowds were out of control. U.S. District Court Judge James Gordon, who had originally ordered an exchange of 22,600 students between the largely black schools in the city and the predominantly white schools of suburban