Subject: Re: How a Young Joe Biden Helped Turn Liberals Against Integration - Jason Sokol - POLITICO Magazine
From: "Eric Schwerin" <[email-masked]>
To: "Hunter Biden" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Aug 2015 21:14:15 -0400

You know him better than me but I would think if they think hit pieces and
the opposition research is going to convince him not to run they are not
very smart.  In fact, the opposite.   They'd be much better off praising
him and calling off the dogs.

Also, there was another piece mentioning that HRC supported the Bin Laden
raid while JRB didn't.

Eric D. Schwerin
[email-masked]

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 4, 2015, at 9:10 PM, Hunter Biden <[email-masked]> wrote:

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:

How a Young Joe Biden Helped Turn Liberals Against Integration - Jason
Sokol - POLITICO Magazine

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.

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.

***

*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.

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.

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.

*****

*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 re-open their cases and to
potentially have those desegregation orders nullified.

*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
<http://www.amazon.com/All-Eyes-are-Upon-Us/dp/046502226X>.

Eric D. Schwerin
[email-masked]

Sent from my iPhon