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Other cities are under court order to begin busing to desegregate schools by the next school year. Among them: Dallas, Detroit, Indianapolis, Omaha, and Wilmington, Del. Desegregation suits have been filed in still other communities, including Philadelphia, Baltimore, Dayton and St. Louis County. Eventually, suits are likely to be brought to court in Chicago, New York and other cities where schools are largely segregated, even though the cause is most often housing patterns. The chances are very good that these communities will be ordered to bus.
So far the Supreme Court has not upheld the civil rights lawyers' argument that busing should be required between city and suburban schools in cases where the city schools have a majority of nonwhites. In the celebrated case of Detroit, whose schools are 71.5% black, the Supreme Court reasoned in 1974 that since there had been no complicity between the city and its suburbs to segregate schools, the suburbs could not be forced to help remedy the city's problem. In contrast, a federal appellate court last year found that Louisville and its suburbs had deliberately segregated students and for that reason ordered the Jefferson County schools to exchange white pupils for blacks from the city's schools.
Surveys have repeatedly shown that a majority of Americans, both black and white, overwhelmingly favor integration but oppose busing to accomplish it in schools. Part of the opposition is racist; much is based on fears among both black and white parents that desegregation will endanger the children. In addition, white parents fear that busing will lead to lowered academic standards. Compounding parents' worries is that the experience of those cities that have had forced busing is somewhat confusing and contradictory. Examples:
CHARLOTTE, N.C. Tensions ran high when a federal judge ordered cross-district busing to desegregate schools in Charlotte and suburban Mecklenberg County in 1970. Racial fights erupted, sometimes among hundreds of students. One in every six white students transferred to private schools. But whites have gradually if rather grudgingly accepted the busing of 23,000 of the district's 75,000 pupils, in part because there are some limits to the number of years that each pupil will be bused. Lately the racial composition of the merged schools has stabilized at about 35% black. As gauged by national achievement tests in reading and math, student achievement has been unaffected.
PONTIAC, MICH. Racial confrontations, the bombing of buses and a school boycott made Pontiac a national symbol of white resistance to busing in 1971. Since then, tempers have cooled, and School Superintendent Dana Whitmer considers the busing program, which includes 15,500 of the city's 20,193 public school students, a qualified success. He concedes that overall test scores in reading and math have declined slightly because high-achieving white students from affluent families have left the district. But Whitmer maintains that individual achievement for both blacks and whites has remained the same and that "the outlook is good if we can maintain a stable, integrated population." That will be difficult; in four years, the percentage of blacks in Pontiac's schools has risen from 37.3% to 41.9% as a result of a white flight.
JACKSONVILLE. Because of advance