Peniel Joseph is the Barbara Jordan chair in ethics and political values and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor of history. He is the author of several books, most recently " Stokely: A Life ." The views expressed here are his. View more opinion articles on CNN.

(CNN) Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive front-runner for the Democratic Party's presidential race, is under fire for his opposition to "forced busing" during the 1970s. US Sen. Kamala Harris of California, one of the two most visible African-Americans running for president, placed this issue in stark relief during the recent Democratic presidential debate by personalizing this history. She characterized herself as a little girl who was part of the second racially integrated class at Berkeley, California public schools, desegregation made possible by legally sanctioned busing.

Busing proved to be one of the most controversial -- and at times most effective -- policy solutions to the court-ordered racial integration of schools. In the two decades following the Brown v. Board of Education decision, "busing" emerged as the descriptive shorthand used to effectively thwart the racial integration of American public schools. In many historical narratives of the civil rights era, the promise of Brown in 1954 is bookended by the resounding defeat of integration amid the Boston public schools crisis over busing in 1974 that featured black children from Roxbury being violently assaulted by white South Boston residents screaming racial slurs. As historians have noted, using the term "busing" to describe the transportation of black students into white school districts itself obscured the fact that white students in rural, urban, and suburban school districts had been historically bused to elementary and high schools. In an era of deeply entrenched housing segregation, court-ordered and voluntary busing policies offered one avenue of remediation to the nation's school desegregation crisis.

Although court-ordered busing affected only a small percentage of all public schoolchildren, the idea of busing became the literal bête noire of political conservatives and organized white resistance to racial justice and the pursuit of black equality. By transforming the bread-and-butter issues of school integration, racial justice, and equal citizenship into a debate over "neighborhood schools" and "civil rights" for white Americans, busing became synonymous with liberal contempt for working class whites and the political overreach of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society liberalism. Grassroots opposition to racially integrated schools turned activists such as Boston's Louise Day Hicks and Pontiac, Michigan's Irene McCabe into major political influencers and media stars of the day. Openly borrowing civil rights tactics of mobilizing local political supporters, cultivating influential politicians, and crafting a sympathetic media narrative, racial segregationists found that by couching their advocacy of white supremacy as "anti-busing" protests, they were able to successfully halt racial integration in public schools.

Activists such as Hicks and McCabe were joined by an all-star cast of political leaders, none more effective than President Richard Nixon, who cast himself as the moderate between extremists on both sides who advocated either instant racial integration or permanent segregation.

Joe Biden, the youthful and telegenic senator from Delaware, also played an important role in this history. According to historian Matthew F. Delmont in his indispensable book "Why Busing Failed," Biden labeled busing a "bankrupt concept" that defied "common sense" and would go on to sponsor anti-busing amendments in the Senate. Biden faced the dilemma of Northern liberals of the era who generally supported national civil rights legislation, yet found themselves on unstable ground when these issues struck closer to home. Biden chose, like many of his political contemporaries, to be on the wrong side of history. In 1974, the year after Biden came to the Senate, the Supreme Court -- in Milliken v. Bradley -- struck down a busing plan in Detroit, saying it was " wholly impermissible " to bus white children who lived in the suburbs into inner-city schools to integrate them. Their ruling made it illegal to compel adjacent communities to send their kids across city or county lines for desegregation, so even if Biden had changed course to support busing, there would have been limited options for him to pursue.

And while historical context helps explain why so many may have opposed busing, it does nothing to temper the harsh reality that Biden, when offered an opportunity to speak to how he -- and much of America -- may have evolved since the 1970s, instead stubbornly and wrongly doubled down on his record. By saying he only opposed "forced busing" imposed by the federal government, Biden essentially offered a "states' rights" defense of a racist political position -- not an approach with a sterling track record in American history.

At the time, Biden's choice to oppose busing revolved around the fallacious assumption that one could oppose de jure racial segregation which the Supreme Court ruled illegal and unconstitutional but could do nothing about de facto racial segregation, which occurred because of things like residential and economic segregation, that could not be controlled by policy or politics. As Delmont argues, a wide body of historical scholarship and practical evidence reveals the "distinction between de jure segregation and de facto segregation to be false."

The judges who ordered busing as a remedy also understood this distinction to be false and accordingly sought policy measures that might ensure equal citizenship. But that crisis remained one largely manufactured at the local level by white parents who feared the loss of racial privilege, elected officials who proved morally bankrupt when faced with losing positions of power, and national leaders, including a sitting President, who cynically utilized the simmering undercurrent of white racial resentment to build political majorities. Victory against busing came at the high cost of America's moral soul.

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The young Kamala Harris represented perhaps the least recognized face of the era of busing: the young black child in search of a quality education and equal opportunity to citizenship, freedom, and the American Dream. African-American parents, activists, educators, and political leaders spent decades before and after the Brown decision pursuing creative measures to ensure educational opportunities for black children being purposefully mistreated, disregarded, and demonized by the education system. Despite great obstacles, students like Harris were able to not only survive the onslaught of racial hatred that cloaked itself as respectable activism, they thrived and flourished all the way to the United States Senate and beyond.

Biden could have recognized Harris as such and empathized with her experience. Instead, in his exchange with her and since, he has abdicated the responsibility any presidential front-runner has to account for the moral cost of his (and many other Americans') previous beliefs and decisions about race. He could have said he was wrong or that his views have evolved. He did not.

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Vice President Biden made his political bones in some of the most tumultuous decades in recent American history, something he proudly recognizes and has shared in both formal and unscripted settings. Some of his recollections of having forged political friendships with white supremacist senators he personally loathed have raised eyebrows, with many accusing Biden of minimizing the harm these politicians did to black communities of the time and the wider nation. The bigger question beyond these transactional relationships remains Biden's own voting record on busing, an issue that proved to be a referendum on black citizenship that failed to pass at the expense of millions of young people who continue to pay the cost in their time as well as our own.