Subject: Re: How a Young Joe Biden Helped Turn Liberals Against Integration - Jason Sokol - POLITICO Magazine
From: "Hunter Biden" <[email-masked]>
To: "Eric Schwerin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Aug 2015 00:10:18 +0200

Wow- just a taste of what's to come- JRB the racist VP of the first African American president. They have no shame.

RHB
202.333.1880

> On Aug 4, 2015, at 1:37 PM, Eric Schwerin <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> 
> http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/joe-biden-integration-school-busing-120968.html#.VcCjzlL3anN
> 
> How a Young Joe Biden Helped Turn Liberals Against Integration
> 
> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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 re-districting policies to keep them that way. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> But the bloody events in Boston illustrated that in many ways white northerners were more committed to pretense than progress.
> 
> ***
> 
> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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 re-open their cases and to potentially have those desegregation orders nullified.
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> 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.
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> 
> Eric D. Schwerin
> [email-masked]
> 
> Sent from my iPhon