Jason Sokol is an associate professor of History at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of All Eyes Are Upon Us: Race and Politics from Boston to Brooklyn.

Forty years ago, a contentious battle over racial justice gripped Capitol Hill, pitting the nation’s lone African American senator against the man who would one day become Barack Obama’s vice president. The issue was school busing, a plan to transport white and black students out of their neighborhoods to better integrate schools—and at the time the most explosive issue on the national agenda.

Ed Brooke, a Massachusetts Republican, was the first black senator ever to be popularly elected; Joe Biden was a freshman Democratic senator from Delaware. By 1975, both had compiled liberal voting records. But that year, Biden sided with conservatives and sponsored a major anti-busing amendment. The fierce debate that followed not only fractured the Senate’s bloc of liberals, it also signified a more wide-ranging political phenomenon: As white voters around the country—especially in the North—objected to sweeping desegregation plans then coming into practice, liberal leaders retreated from robust integration policies.


Biden was at the forefront of this retreat: He had expressed support for integration and—more specifically—busing during his Senate campaign in 1972, but once elected, he discovered just how bitterly his white constituents opposed the method. In 1973 and 1974, Biden began voting for many of the Senate’s anti-busing bills, claiming that he favored school desegregation, but just objected to “forced busing.”

Then, as a court-ordered integration plan loomed over Wilmington, Delaware, in 1974, Biden’s constituents transformed their resistance to busing into an organized—and angry—opposition. So Biden transformed, too. That year, Joe Biden morphed into a leading anti-busing crusader—all the while continuing to insist that he supported the goal of school desegregation, he only opposed busing as the means to achieve that end.

This stance, which many of Biden’s liberal and moderate colleagues also held, was clever but disingenuous. It enabled Biden to choose votes over principles, while acting as if he was not doing so.

History has not been kind to the defenders of school busing. Indeed, busing was problematic—as it transported children long distances away from nearby schools. But to say most whites objected to busing because it was inconvenient would be wrong. The truth is that many of them were not comfortable with the racial change that busing brought.



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By the dawn of the 1970s, Southern schools were finally beginning to integrate. Though the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision had outlawed “separate but equal” schools, it wasn’t until the court’s lesser-known 1969 ruling in Alexander v. Holmes County that many Southern school districts actually implemented desegregation plans. In response to these legal mandates, judges started to order busing plans in some Southern cities.

Meanwhile, Northern schools still remained thoroughly segregated. Housing segregation frequently produced segregated schools, and many urban school boards enacted transfer and redistricting policies to keep them that way. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, African American parents in the North filed lawsuits in protest. They alleged that their children had been denied equal educational opportunity, forced to attend schools that were underfunded and racially segregated. The result of these legal actions in both the North and the South was a truly nationwide debate—spanning from Denver and Detroit to Charlotte and Boston—in which federal district courts often held that busing was the only surefire way to integrate schools.

The first busing case to reach the Supreme Court was Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg County. A district court had ordered busing in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the plan in April 1971, on the grounds that the Constitution required “the greatest possible degree of actual desegregation.” The court admitted that the remedies for segregation might be “awkward, inconvenient, and even bizarre in some situations and may impose burdens on some.” But the Constitution clearly required such impositions. The Swann decision gave lower court judges wide latitude to devise plans for integration, including the use of busing as a tool. In California, Michigan and Colorado, judges promptly ordered citywide busing plans, concluding that in cities shaped by housing segregation it was impossible to disentangle busing from integration.

Even the supporters of busing allowed that such plans were imperfect, and that cities ought to try other integration measures before resorting to busing. Busing was indeed “awkward” and “inconvenient” for students. Today, the anti-busing arguments guide our policies. In many cities, the “neighborhood school”—itself a product of redlining, housing segregation and discriminatory school transfer policies—remains sacrosanct. But we forget that through the 1960s and 1970s, local school boards and urban whites often resisted every other attempt at school and housing integration. With their resistance, they narrowed the options down to two: busing or segregation.

The Swann ruling and the court orders that followed triggered a swift backlash. White parents trembled with rage as they envisioned scenarios in which their children would be bused into African American neighborhoods. Elected officials came out against busing, while still insisting they supported integration. Yet few ever offered an alternative for how to achieve it.

Nowhere did the busing wars play out more dramatically than in Boston. Massachusetts had passed a 1965 law that banned segregated schools. But Boston leaders never attempted to comply with the law. Instead, the Boston School Committee continued to pursue policies designed to preserve segregated schools. Black parents filed a lawsuit in 1972, and the NAACP argued their case. On June 21, 1974, federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity found that local officials had deliberately kept Boston’s schools segregated, and that the city must integrate at once. He drew up a busing plan. Black students from Roxbury would attend South Boston High School, while Irish Americans from Southie would board buses to Roxbury.

Police escort a black student off a school bus outside South Boston High School on Sept. 12, 1974, the first day of school busing. | Getty

The first buses rolled through Boston in September 1974—and racial violence engulfed the city. White mobs hurled bricks at school buses with terrified black children inside. Then, on October 7, a Haitian immigrant was beaten savagely by a white mob in South Boston. In the coming months, the list of casualties would grow. The city became a cauldron of racial hatred.

The Boston busing crisis shocked white Northerners. Many had long ignored the segregation and racism that marked their cities, clinging to the notion that their region was a beacon to the nation—that it led the way for racial justice. After all, it was Northern senators who banded together to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, defeating a record-long Southern filibuster. Northern activists had trooped to the deepest reaches of the South, risking their lives for black equality. When Massachusetts passed the Racial Imbalance Act in 1965, residents believed they were making good on their own lofty reputation. And in 1966, Ed Brooke’s election to the U.S. Senate stood as further proof of Northern enlightenment.

But the bloody events in Boston illustrated that in many ways white Northerners were more committed to pretense than progress.



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A few months before white mobs milled in the streets of South Boston, the busing controversy also seized Capitol Hill. Each year from 1966 to 1977, the U.S. House of Representatives passed at least one new law designed to restrain school integration—often in the guise of anti-busing legislation. Until 1974, the Senate rejected those bills. But as white resistance to busing escalated in many cities across the country, the House’s anti-busing majority began to pull more senators to their side.

Ed Brooke found himself in a unique predicament. His home state of Massachusetts had become the center of the anti-busing movement. Yet Brooke retained a deep commitment to integrated education, and to busing.

Brooke’s anti-busing constituents challenged him many times. Over and over, he emphatically explained the moral and legal arguments for busing. He pointed out that the Bay State’s Racial Imbalance Act had been on the books since 1965. Yet white Bostonians had opposed all attempts to integrate the schools. In fact, segregation in Boston’s schools had deepened with each passing year. To do nothing would have been to isolate black children in inferior and segregated schools. This was why, he noted, a federal judge had finally ordered a widespread busing plan.

For Brooke, integration was an absolute imperative. Segregated schools denied black children equal opportunity. “We had all-black schools and all-white schools,” he recalled later. Busing “was the best thing that we had to at least desegregate the schools at that time in our history. And I thought we didn’t have anything better.”

In May 1974, the Senate debated the Gurney Amendment to an omnibus education bill; Sen. Edward Gurney’s provision combined a number of restrictions on busing. The most controversial of the anti-busing clauses allowed locales that had maintained Jim Crow schools—even ones that were under explicit desegregation orders—to reopen their cases and to potentially have those desegregation orders nullified.

On May 15, two days before the 20th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Brooke delivered an emotional address on the Senate floor. Gurney’s amendment would “put us back decades,” he thundered. “For two decades, the course has been sure but slow. And now we ask to hastily and drastically alter it. Why? Because many Americans have become confused by the rhetoric on busing.” Brooke boiled it down for them: “The issue is simple. Shall we or shall we not permit necessary remedies to a constitutional violation? ... The fact is that in many cases, busing is necessary to uphold the law.” Brooke called the amendment “unconscionable and unconstitutional,” and moved to table it. The Senate did so, by a single vote.

On May 16, Republican Sen. Robert Griffin of Michigan attempted to revive the anti-busing amendment—without the clause that allowed for the reopening of court orders. Liberals tried to table this proposal, but they failed by one vote. Minority Leader Hugh Scott (R-Pa.) and Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.) then offered a compromise: They’d leave intact the text of Griffin’s amendment—which included various anti-busing restrictions but excised the section about the court orders—and added the qualifier that such legislation was not intended to weaken the judiciary’s power to enforce the Fifth and 14th Amendments.

Anti-busing leaders denounced the Scott-Mansfield compromise, which passed 47 to 46. Brooke voted for the compromise, satisfied that the language about the Fifth and 14th Amendments was a sufficient safeguard of minority students’ rights. The larger omnibus bill, which Brooke also supported, then gained passage by a wide majority.

In the coming months, as busing beset Boston, the ranks of pro-busing senators would shrink even more. But Ed Brooke remained a vocal defender of busing, even as he was vanquished by a young senator who hitched his rising star to the anti-busing movement.



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At 32 years old, and sporting long sideburns, Joe Biden was the youngest member of the Senate. During his initial 1972 campaign, Biden advocated racial equality. He questioned the motives of anti-busing leaders and charged that Republicans had exploited the busing issue in order to win white votes. He also supported the Swann decision, and opposed a constitutional amendment banning busing—as did the Republican incumbent he defeated, J. Caleb Boggs.

But during the campaign, Biden had begun to develop a convoluted position in which he supported busing as a remedy for “de jure segregation” (as in the Jim Crow South), while he opposed busing in cases of “de facto segregation” (as in Northern cities). Through his first two years in the Senate, he supported most—but not all—of the anti-busing legislation. In two crucial exceptions, he voted to table the Gurney Amendment in May 1974—and he also voted in favor of the Scott-Mansfield compromise. He sided with Brooke on both votes, and on both occasions their side prevailed by a single vote.

For these few votes, Biden attracted the fury of his white constituents. Delaware residents had formed the New Castle County Neighborhood Schools Association in order to resist desegregation. In June 1974, the group organized an event at the Krebs School in Newport, Delaware—as Brett Gadsden details in Between North and South. The event’s coordinator had recently declared, “We’re going to hound Biden for the next four years if he doesn’t vote our position.” Standing before a Krebs School auditorium packed with angry white parents, Biden explained that he supported busing only as a remedy for “de jure” segregation. He assured the crowd that any segregation in Delaware was “de facto,” and therefore—he claimed—beyond the authority of the courts. The crowd jeered him anyway until he departed. The ugly incident clearly left its mark on the senator.

A year later, in the summer of 1975, Boston erupted in more racial violence and braced for its second year of busing. Meanwhile, Brooke and Biden steeled themselves for a showdown on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Jesse Helms, a Republican from North Carolina, was the first to strike. On September 17, 1975, when a larger education bill came up for debate, Helms offered a crippling anti-integration amendment. It would prevent the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from collecting any data about the race of students or teachers. In addition, HEW could not “require any school … to classify teachers or students by race.” Thus, HEW could not withhold funding from school districts that refused to integrate. “This is an antibusing amendment,” Helms explained. “This is an amendment to stop the current regiments of faceless, federal bureaucrats from destroying our schools.”

Biden rose to support Helms’ amendment. “I am sure it comes as a surprise to some of my colleagues … that a senator with a voting record such as mine stands up and supports [the Helms amendment].” Helms replied that he was happy to welcome Biden “to the ranks of the enlightened.” After the laughter died down, Biden launched an anti-busing screed. “I have become convinced that busing is a bankrupt concept.” The Senate should declare busing a failure and focus instead on “whether or not we are really going to provide a better educational opportunity for blacks and minority groups in this country.” He praised Ed Brooke’s initiatives on housing, job opportunities and voting rights. In one breath, Biden seemed to reject busing in the North and the South, and claimed that he was committed to equal opportunity for African Americans.

Sen. Brooke campaigning for Richard Nixon in 1968. | Getty

A few other senators spoke briefly about the amendment, then Brooke sprung to action. The Helms amendment would eviscerate Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Brooke said, which enabled HEW to cut off funding to school districts that refused to integrate. Brooke asserted that the federal government should attempt other integration remedies before resorting to busing. “But if compliance with the law cannot be achieved without busing, then busing must be one of the available desegregation remedies.” Brooke introduced a motion to table Helms’ amendment. Brooke’s motion passed, 48-43. Biden wouldn’t budge, and voted with Jesse Helms and the anti-bussers.

Brooke had fought this fight before, but he would face a more formidable adversary in Joe Biden. When a Southern conservative like Helms led the anti-busing forces, Ed Brooke could still rally his troops. But it would be tougher to combat the anti-busing faction when its messenger was a young liberal from a border state.



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Immediately after the Helms amendment was tabled, Biden proposed his own amendment to the $36 billion education bill, stipulating that none of those federal funds could be used by school systems “to assign teachers or students to schools … for reasons of race.” His amendment would prevent “some faceless bureaucrat” from “deciding that any child, black or white, should fit in some predetermined ratio.” He explained, “All the amendment says is that some bureaucrat sitting down there in HEW cannot tell a school district whether it is properly segregated or desegregated, or whether it should or should not have funds.” Finally, Biden called busing “an asinine policy.”

Brooke pointed out that the amendment would do much more than Biden claimed. Like the Helms gambit, it would still gut Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. But this time, a number of liberal senators that had opposed Helms’ amendment now supported Biden: Warren Magnuson and Scoop Jackson of Washington, where Seattle faced impending integration orders; and Thomas Eagleton and Stuart Symington of Missouri, where Kansas City confronted a similar fate. Mike Mansfield, the majority leader from Montana, also jumped on board. Watching his liberal colleagues defect, Republican Jacob Javits of New York mused, “They’re scared to death on busing.” The Senate approved Biden’s amendment. Biden had managed to turn a 48-43 loss for the anti-busing forces into a 50-43 victory.

In a seminal moment, the Senate thus turned against desegregation. The Senate had supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act, 1965 Voting Rights Act and 1968 Fair Housing Act. In the early 1970s, as President Richard Nixon and the House of Representatives encouraged the anti-busing movement, the Senate remained the last bastion for those who supported strong integration policies. Biden stormed that bastion, and it seemed to be falling. On September 23, another border-state Democrat moved against busing. Robert Byrd, the West Virginian who had since repudiated his Klan past, offered a perfecting amendment. It would prohibit busing beyond a student’s nearest school. It passed the Senate by a vote of 51-45.

Brooke was outraged. He called the vote on Biden’s amendment “the greatest symbolic defeat for civil rights since 1964.” He argued that Biden’s amendment would eliminate virtually every remedy for segregation, as school systems would be prohibited from assigning students on the basis of race no matter what the method. Brooke accused Biden of effectively leading an assault on integration.

Brooke attempted one last maneuver. He tried to nullify the Biden and Byrd riders, but failed to force a vote on the matter. Biden then proposed another amendment, a concession to his liberal critics. It barred HEW from ordering busing, while leaving other integration measures intact. Defending his own civil rights record, Biden explained that his original aim had been only to stop busing, not to hamstring every other attempt at desegregation. This measure, “Biden II,” sailed through the Senate. On September 26, the Senate passed the larger education bill—with Byrd’s rider as well as Biden II—by a margin of 60-18.

Perhaps Brooke foresaw the new political consensus that would take shape in the ensuing decades: Liberals would pay homage to the civil rights movement and its dream of integration, but refrain from championing the legislation that would make that dream a reality. “It is just a matter of time before we wipe out the civil rights progress of the last decade,” Brooke lamented after the passage of the education bill. The clock was turning back.



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From the beginning, a certain set of circumstances had to exist in order for America’s white majority to stomach forceful measures for integration. Public support depended upon the perception of a fight between good and evil. White Americans had to see desegregation as morally right and segregation as morally wrong. With the onset of busing in Northern cities, the situation started to appear ambiguous. Few white Northerners viewed busing as a way to provide equal opportunity for black children. In fact, by the mid-1970s, whites viewed themselves as the aggrieved party when it came to busing. They believed that African Americans had already won their rights with the civil rights bills of the previous decade. With little regard or care for whether African American children would be confined to segregated schools, whites thought their rights were violated if their children couldn’t attend “neighborhood schools.”

African Americans viewed it differently. As Boston NAACP leader Tom Atkins put it in March 1975, “An anti-busing amendment is an anti-desegregation amendment, and an anti-desegregation amendment is an anti-black amendment.”

In October 1975, U.S. News and World Report published a special feature on busing, in which they interviewed a political leader from each side of the issue. Ed Brooke was the face of the pro-busing side. Joe Biden represented anti-busing.

The article read like a tale of the tape. A photo of a youthful Biden topped the left column. If the courts and HEW “continue to handle busing in the manner in which it has been handled,” said Biden, “I would eliminate forced busing under any circumstances.” When asked whether busing caused more harm than good, Biden answered: “Absolutely.” Biden explained that he had examined the arguments used to justify busing. They “seem to me to be profoundly racist.” He claimed that busing reinforced the idea of black inferiority. Busing implied that African Americans could “cut it educationally” only if they sat next to white students. “It implies that blacks have no reason to be proud of their inheritance and their own culture.”

Biden’s logic—that anti-busing was the way to respect African American culture— allowed the political center-left to coalesce around this brand of opposition to busing. Further, Biden insisted that the majority of white Americans had no objection “to their child sitting with a black child, eating lunch with a black child—all the things that were the basis for the racist movement in the past.” Biden thus divorced the anti-busing position from the racial hatred that occasioned it. To clinch his case, Biden expressed pride in the fact that several Senate liberals had supported his amendment. The anti-busing position was “becoming more respectable,” a development for which he happily took credit.

Brooke offered a nuanced defense of busing. “It is not necessarily the best way,” he said, “but in certain instances busing is the only way to achieve desegregation.” Brooke favored the building of new schools and the consolidation of old ones, for example, if such measures could bring integration. “But when these fail or are inappropriate, busing is a constitutional tool that should be used, and is being used, but only as a last resort.” Brooke realized that the voters disagreed with him on the busing issue. “It’s not popular—certainly among my constituents. I know that. But, you know, I’ve always believed that those of us who serve in public life have a responsibility to inform and provide leadership for our constituents.” The rights of a minority were on the line. Brooke could not bend; he had to lead.

He paid for it. Brooke and Biden were like ships passing in the night. From that point forward, their political careers followed opposite trajectories. In 1978, Brooke ran for a third term. In the six years since his previous reelection campaign, Boston had become not only the center of the anti-busing movement but also a hotbed of anti-abortion activity. Brooke clung to his pro-busing and pro-choice convictions nonetheless. To complicate matters, he endured a messy divorce and was accused of improper financial dealings. Democrat Paul Tsongas defeated Brooke in 1978. Brooke never returned to public office.

Joe Biden was just beginning his political ascent. While he campaigned for reelection in 1978, a busing plan was finally being implemented in Wilmington. Biden’s most rabid anti-busing constituents still perceived him as too liberal on the issue, though Biden denounced the busing plan in Delaware. In the end, Biden’s anti-busing crusades in the Senate had convinced the majority of white voters. He won reelection by a sizable margin.

As Biden settled in for a long Senate career, that body was fast losing its liberal lions. Progressives like Brooke, Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Philip Hart and Jacob Javits had retired, been defeated or passed away. With the Reagan Revolution in the offing, their absence both reflected and enabled the larger conservative trend. The Reagan administration relaxed enforcement of civil rights laws, and few leaders advocated increased spending or legislation on behalf of racial minorities.

Gradually, busing plans would peter out. Busing had brought a measure of integration to many urban school systems. But without the strong support of leading liberals, and amid whites’ accelerating retreat to the suburbs, many locales soon ditched their busing plans. Conservatives succeeded in writing the first draft of history, in which busing is cited as the exemplar of social engineering run amok.

Biden agreed, and he still does. In his 2007 memoir (titled Promises to Keep), Biden called busing “a liberal train wreck.” Alas, Biden was a product—and a symbol—of his times. He was a liberal in the age of the white backlash and the Reagan Democrats. In order to sustain a long political career, it was often necessary to avoid difficult stands—especially when it came to issues of racial equality.

Elected officials drew an important lesson from the busing ordeal of the 1970s: Bold pushes for racial change entailed political death. It was better to abandon them.