The Choice We Face Read online

  7. Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967); James Bryant Conant, Slums and Suburbs: A Commentary on Schools in Metropolitan Areas (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961); Holt quoted in Nat Hentoff, Our Children Are Dying (New York: Viking Press, 1967), ix; Blackboard Jungle, dir. Richard Brooks (1955; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2005).

  8. Matthew F. Delmont, Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 29–48; Jerald E. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 24–26; Adina Back, “Exposing the ‘Whole Segregation Myth’: The Harlem Nine and New York City’s School Desegregation Battles,” in Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980, ed. Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 69–71.

  9. Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 38–43; Fred Powledge, “Busing Still an Issue: Desegregation Disputes Boiling in North,” New York Times, January 13, 1965.

  10. Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 23–25; Matthew Delmont, “‘Jim Crow Must Go’: Thousands of New York City Students Staged a One-Day Boycott to Protest Segregation—and It Barely Made the History Books,” Salon, February 3, 2016, https://www.salon.com/2016/02/03/jim_crow_must_go_thousands_of_new_york_city_students_staged_a_one_day_boycott_to_protest_segregation_and_it_barely_made_the_history_books.

  11. Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 23–25.

  12. Leonard Buder, “275,638 Pupils Stay Home in Integration Boycott,” New York Times, September 15, 1964; Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 48–49.

  13. Joseph Lelyveld, “Keating Position on Busing Praised,” New York Times, September 7, 1964.

  14. Camille Walsh, Racial Taxation: Schools, Segregation, and Taxpayer Citizenship, 1869–1973 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 23–25, 74–78.

  15. Buder, “275,638 Pupils Stay Home in Integration Boycott”; Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 48–49.

  16. Fred Graham, “High Court Backs Pairing in Queens,” New York Times, November 9, 1965.

  17. Krasowski quoted in Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 70.

  18. Frew Powledge, “Poll Shows Whites in City Resent Civil Rights Drive,” New York Times, September 21, 1964; Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 48–49.

  19. Buder, “275,638 Pupils Stay Home in Integration Boycott”; Fred Graham, “High Court Backs Pairing in Queens,” New York Times, November 9, 1965.

  20. Todd-Breeland, A Political Education, 41–44; Danns, Desegregating Chicago’s Public Schools, 31–34; Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 73–75; “Busing Zealots,” Chicago Tribune, June 11, 1968; Nicholas Kryczka, “Building a Constituency for Racial Integration: Chicago’s Magnet Schools and the Prehistory of School Choice,” History of Education Quarterly 59, no. 1 (February 2019): 1–34. The U.S. Office of Education was a bureaucratic entity within the larger U.S. Department of the Interior between 1867 and 1972.

  21. “Busing Zealots,” Chicago Tribune, June 11, 1968.

  22. Todd-Breeland, A Political Education, 42–43; Danns, Desegregating Chicago’s Public Schools, 32–44.

  23. Tager, Boston Riots, 192.

  24. “Busing Zealots”; Todd-Breeland, A Political Education, 42.

  25. Danns, Desegregating Chicago’s Public Schools, 42–43.

  26. Jansen quoted in Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 30.

  27. Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 32.

  28. Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VI, 42 U.S.C. § 2000d et seq.

  29. Civil Rights Act of 1964, Pub. L. 88–352, 78 Stat. 241 (1964); Joseph Crespino, “The Best Defense Is a Good Offense: The Stennis Amendment and the Fracturing of Liberal School Desegregation Policy, 1964–1972,” Journal of Policy History 18, no. 3 (2006): 304–25; Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 49–53.

  30. “Compulsory Busing Opposed by Keating: Keating Announces Opposition to Compulsory Busing of Pupils,” New York Times, September 6, 1964; R. W. Apple Jr., “Kennedy Says He Opposes Distant Busing of Students,” New York Times, September 6, 1964.

  31. “Text of Senator Goldwater’s Address at Madison Sq. Garden in Only Campaign Appearance in City,” New York Times, October 27, 1964; Goldwater Exhorts 18,000 in Garden ‘Victory’ Rally,” New York Times, October 27, 1964; Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 93–94.

  32. “Nixon Replies,” New Republic, October 26, 1968, 15; Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 118–19; Nixon quoted in James Bolner and Robert Shanley, Busing: The Political and Judicial Process (New York: Praeger, 1974), 141.

  33. Crespino, “The Best Defense Is a Good Offense,” 304–25.

  34. Joyce A. Baugh, The Detroit School Busing Case: Milliken v. Bradley and the Controversy over Desegregation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 103–5; Grundy, Color and Character, 53–56.

  35. Green v. County School Board of New Kent County (no. 695) 391 U.S. 430; Baugh, The Detroit School Busing Case, 103.

  36. Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education 22 Ill. 402 U.S. 1, 91 S. Ct. 1267, 28 L. Ed. 2d 554 (1971).

  37. Tager, Boston Riots, 171–87; Ronald P. Formisano, Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 17, 25.

  38. Hale, The Freedom Schools, 35; Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 85–90; Tager, Boston Riots, 192–93; Jeanne Theoharis, “‘I’d Rather Go to School in the South’: How Boston’s School Desegregation Complicates the Civil Rights Paradigm,” in Theoharis and Woodard, Freedom North, 125–52.

  39. Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 80–83; Tager, Boston Riots, 171–87, 192–93.

  40. Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 77–80, 84 (Garrity quote), 199–200; Tager, Boston Riots, 192–93; Formisano, Boston Against Busing, 66–70; Baugh, The Detroit School Busing Case, 160.

  41. Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 77–80; Tager, Boston Riots, 191–95; Formisano, Boston Against Busing, 53–65.

  42. Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (Oxford: University Press, 2018); 217–40; Theoharis, “‘I’d Rather Go to School in the South,’“ 140.

  43. McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance.

  44. Tager, Boston Riots, 191–95.

  45. Quoted in Tager, Boston Riots, 198.

  46. Tager, Boston Riots, 198–200, 209–14.

  47. Gary McMillan, “Alternative Schools Due to Open in 3 Neighborhoods,” Boston Globe, September 11, 1975; Nick King, “Some Look to Private Schools as Alternative to Busing,” Boston Globe, May 5, 1975.

  48. Robert Jordan, “White Would Discussed [sic] Aid to Private Schools,” Boston Globe, March 5, 1975.

  49. Formisano, Boston Against Busing, 140–41; John Kifner, “White Pupils’ Rolls Drop a Third in Boston Busing,” New York Times, December 15, 1975; Jordan, “White Would Discussed [sic] Aid to Private Schools”; Ken Botwright, “Anrig Presses Fahey on Rules for Academies,” Boston Globe, November 10, 1975.

  50. Kifner, “White Pupils’ Rolls Drop a Third in Boston Busing.”

  51. Tager, Boston Riots, 222–23; Formisano, Boston Against Busing, 2, 211–14; Allan R. Gold, “Boston Ready to Overhaul School Busing Policy,” New York Times, December 28, 1988.

  52. Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 12–20, 191–93.

  53. Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 204–6; Tager, Boston Riots, 196–99; Erickson, Making the Unequal Metropolis.

  54. Todd-Breeland, A Political Education, 43–46.

  55. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC: US Department of Labor, Office of Planning and Research, March 1965).

  56. Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 206–8.

  57. Todd-Breeland, A Political Education, 50.

  58. Russell Rickford, We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination (Oxford: Oxford Univ
ersity Press, 2016), 38.

  59. Hale, The Freedom Schools, 68; Rickford, We Are an African People, 80–82.

  60. Hale, The Freedom Schools, 179–81; Rickford, We Are an African People, 88–97.

  61. Moses quoted in Hale, The Freedom Schools, 173.

  62. Stokely Carmichael, “What We Want,” New York Review of Books 7 (September 22, 1966): 5–8, available via Civil Rights Movement Archive, https://www.crmvet.org/info/stokely1.pdf.

  63. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 73–76; Clarence Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle to Integrate New York City Schools (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 180–91; Richard D. Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 71–72; Heather Lewis, New York City Public Schools from Brownsville to Bloomberg: Community Control and Its Legacy (New York: Teachers College Press, 2013), 26–30.

  64. Todd-Breeland, A Political Education, 69–78.

  65. Baugh, The Detroit School Busing Case, 71–74; Angela D. Dillard, “Religion and Radicalism: The Reverend Albert B. Cleage, Jr., and the Rise of Black Christian Nationalism in Detroit,” in Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, ed. Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (New York: Palgrave 2003), 153–76.

  66. Quoted in Jeffrey Mirel, The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System: Detroit, 1907–81 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 331.

  67. Mirel, The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System, 334–37.

  68. Kahlenburg, Tough Liberal, 121; Lewis, New York City Public Schools, 56–61.

  69. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 75–77; Lewis, New York City Public Schools, 52–53.

  70. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 81.

  71. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 87–89; Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door, 191–93.

  72. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 83.

  73. Quoted in Mirel, The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System, 309.

  74. Jeanne Theoharis, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018), 89.

  75. Diana D’Amico, “Teachers’ Rights Versus Students’ Rights: Race and Professional Authority in the New York City Public Schools, 1960–1986,” American Educational Research Journal 53, no. 3 (June 2016): 541–72; Podair, Strike That Changed New York, 89–92; Kahlenburg, Tough Liberal, 71–75.

  76. D’Amico, “Teachers’ Rights Versus Students’ Rights,” 546–51; Kahlenburg, Tough Liberal, 93–124; Podair, Strike That Changed New York, 81–102; Lewis, New York City Public Schools, 31–54.

  77. Kahlenburg, Tough Liberal, 71–72; Brittney Lewer, “Pursuing ‘Real Power to Parents’: Babette Edwards’s Activism from Community Control to Charter Schools,” unpublished manuscript, in possession of author.

  78. Todd-Breeland, Political Education, 50–51; Lewer, “Pursuing ‘Real Power to Parents.’“

  79. “More Were Killed and Jailed in Watts in ‘65 Than in Newark,” New York Times, July 17, 1967. See also Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995); Jerry Cohen and William S. Murphy, The Lost Angeles Race Riot, August 1965 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966); Robert Bauman, Race and the War on Poverty: From Watts to East L.A. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 31–43.

  80. Horne, Fire This Time, 286–98; Daniel Nabors, “Manic Depression: Lyndon Johnson and the 1965 Watts Riots” (MA thesis, Baylor University, 2009), 58; Bauman, Race and the War on Poverty, 43.

  81. Gene Roberts, “U.S. Troops Sent Into Detroit; 19 Dead; Johnson Decries Riots,” New York Times, July 25, 1967; Joe T. Darden and Richard W. Thomas, Detroit: Race Riots, Racial Conflicts, and Efforts to Bridge the Racial Divide (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013), 1–3; Theoharis, A More Beautiful and Terrible History, 71–73.

  82. Cleage, Freedom North; Darden and Thomas, Detroit, 2–6; Mirel, The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System, 308–10.

  83. Clay Risen, A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009); Peter Levy, The Great Uprising: Race Riots in Urban America During the 1960s (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018); J. Samuel Walker, Most of 14th Street Is Gone: The Washington, DC Riots of 1968 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018).

  84. Mirel, The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System, 330–33; Dara Walker, “Black Power, Education, and Youth Politics in Detroit, 1966–1973” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2018); Dara Walker, “Black Power and the Detroit High School Organizing Tradition,” Black Perspectives, August 16, 2018, https://www.aaihs.org/Black-power-and-the-detroit-high-school-organizing-tradition-2.

  85. Muriel Cohen, “What’s Going on at South Boston High School? Overcrowding, Discipline the Major Problems,” Boston Globe, October 12, 1976.

  86. Jon N. Hale, “Future Foot Soldiers or Budding Criminals? The Dynamics of High School Student Activism in the Southern Black Freedom Struggle,” Journal of Southern History 84, no. 3 (August 2018): 615–52; Gael Graham, Young Activists: American High School Students in the Age of Protest (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), 5–6; Judith Kafka, “The History of ‘Zero Tolerance,’“ in American Public Schooling (London, UK, 2011), 56–58, 99–103; Judith Kafka, “‘Sitting on a Tinderbox’: Racial Conflict, Teacher Discretion, and the Centralization of Disciplinary Authority,” American Journal of Education 114, no. 3 (May 2008): 247–70.

  87. ACLU, Bullies in Blue: The Origins and Consequences of School Policing (New York: American Civil Liberties Union, 2017), https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/aclu_bullies_in_blue_4_11_17_final.pdf; Hale, “Future Foot Soldiers or Budding Criminals?,” 641–51; Kafka, “The History of ‘Zero Tolerance,’“ 6–7, 92–94; Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Macmillan, 1983), 67–69, 160–61; Gerald Grant, The World We Created at Hamilton High (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 49–53.

  88. Breeland, A Political Education, 35.

  89. Mirel, The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System, 220.

  90. Mirel, The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System, 359.

  91. Christine H. Rossell, “Boston’s Segregation and White Flight,” Equity and Excellence in Education 15, no. 1 (1977): 36.

  92. Formisano, Boston Against Busing, 210–11.

  93. Bella English, “12 Years Under Desegregation: She Saw Opportunity as Well as White Flight,” Boston Globe, April 27, 1986.

  94. Todd-Breeland, A Political Education, 36.

  95. Bonnie V. Winston, “Meanwhile, Many Parents Are Finding Alternatives,” Boston Globe, April 13, 1986.

  96. Formisano, Boston Against Busing, 210–11.

  97. Mirel, The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System, 345–46; Baugh, The Detroit School Busing Case, 77–80, 127–30.

  98. Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 140–41.

  99. Wilfred Keyes et al. v. School District no. 1, Denver, Colorado, et al. 413 U.S. 189 (more) 93 S. Ct. 2686; 37 L. Ed. 2d 548; Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 128.

  100. Potter quoted in Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 140.

  101. Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974).

  102. James E. Ryan, “Brown, School Choice, and the Suburban Veto,” 90 Virginia Law Review 90, no. 6 (2004): 1635–47; James E. Ryan, Five Miles Away, a World Apart: One City, Two Schools, and the Story of Educational Opportunity in Modern America (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010); Ansley Erickson, “The Rhetoric of Choice: Segregation, Desegregation, and Charter Schools,” in Public Education Under Siege, ed. Michael Katz and Mike Rose (Philadelphia; University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 122–30.

  103. Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974).

  104. Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974); Baugh, The Detroit School Busing Case, 171.

  105.
Rakes quoted in Wren, “Stars and Strife.”

  CHAPTER FOUR: FEDERAL SUPPORT OF THE SCHOOL CHOICE MOVEMENT

  1. Lyndon B. Johnson, “Johnson’s Remarks on Signing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act,” April 11, 1965, LBJ Presidential Library, http://www.lbjlibrary.org/lyndon-baines-johnson/timeline/johnsons-remarks-on-signing-the-elementary-and-secondary-education-act.

  2. Wayne Urban, More Than Science and Sputnik: The National Defense Act of 1958 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010).

  3. Gary Orfield and Susan Eaton, “Back to Segregation,” Nation, February 13, 2003; Erica Frankenberg, Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, Jongyeon Ee, and Gary Orfield, Southern Schools More Than a Half-Century After the Civil Rights Revolution (Civil Rights Project, May 2017), https://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research/k-12-education/integration-and-diversity/southern-schools-brown-83-report, 8; Erwin Chemerinsky, “The Segregation and Resegregation of American Public Education: The Courts’ Role,” in School Resegregation: Must the South Turn Back?, ed. John Charles Boger and Gary Orfield (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 29.

  4. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education, 136–46; Bolton, The Hardest Deal of All, 118–28; Danns, Desegregating Chicago’s Public Schools, 1–3.

  5. Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 114–29; Joseph Crespino, Strom Thurmond’s America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 207–10; Frank Brown, “Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’ and Forces Against Brown,” Journal of Negro Education 73, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 201–2.

  6. Kevin P. Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969), 25.

  7. Walter Rugaber, “Wallace off the Critical List; Sweeps Primary in Michigan and Wins Handily in Maryland,” New York Times, May 17, 1971; Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 114–15.

  8. Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 253–56; Philips, The Emerging Republican Majority, 473–74.