1. Round and Round: The Journey of the School Bus

Beginnings

Every year, 450,000 public school buses travel more than 4.3 billion miles, carrying 23.5 million children to and from school and school-related activities.3 These easily recognizable and highly visible bright yellow school buses dot morning and afternoon commutes. In nonpandemic periods, their absence harkens school vacations, and their fall return signals the start of the school year.

The first record of student transport to school in the United States was written in 1886, predating the first automobile by six years. These vehicles were known as kid hacks.4 Kid hacks were made of wood, sometimes out of repurposed farm wagons. No more than twenty children from local farms would board these vehicles, entering and exiting in the rear to avoid scaring the horses that pulled them. Wood benches lined the sides, keeping the center free. A thin tarp protected students from the elements. Students who did not join this transport either walked to school or were taken there in a family’s wagon. These carriages may not seem like much, but they were the beginning of U.S. public school transportation. Twenty years later, kid hacks were motorized as the United States transitioned to automobiles.

Standardization

As the twentieth century unfolded, school buses slowly morphed into the more familiar vehicles that students ride today. Maintaining the basic design of the early models, manufacturers added an additional door in the front and switched to steel framing, while designating the rear door for emergency use only. Buses at this time ranged in colors, including patriotic hues of red, white, and blue. As there were no national safety standards at the time, school bus features were inconsistent. However, all forty-eight states allocated funds for student transportation. Wayne Works in Indiana, International Harvester in Illinois, and the Blue Bird Corporation in Georgia led school bus manufacturing, which thrived even as the economy faltered at the start of the 1930s.5

Enter Frank W. Cyr, a former teacher turned professor with interests in rural education and school transportation. Having received a $5,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Cyr organized a national conference on school transportation and invited representatives from every state—as well as executives from the manufacturing sector, Dupont, and Pittsburgh Paint—to standardize the school bus.6 His goal was to compose a set of minimum regulations that would ensure a uniform school bus that was both safe and economical. It probably goes without saying that “representatives” at this convening did not include the actual passengers of the school bus. The history of the creation of the school bus is devoid of input from its clientele. The world of public education has spent more than a century educating, assessing, and transporting young people largely without the input of young adults and children.

The conference created a forty-six-page report that included sections on the school bus chassis and body as well as a section on the school bus driver. The forty-four agreed-upon regulations covered a range of issues, including requiring a speedometer (regulation 18), a fire extinguisher (regulation 6), a first aid kit (regulation 7), and a toolbox (regulation 20) as well as prohibiting a driver’s side door.7 While these regulations are consistent with modern-day school buses, many of the other regulations have shifted with time as technologies have improved.

The driver-employees on these vehicles were not exempt from regulation either. The portion of the regulations addressing the school bus driver includes recommendations for selecting drivers by ability, such as to “make all ordinary repairs and adjustments and to keep the motor in good working condition.”8 The test for driving includes noting whether the driver is “nervous, overconfident or easily distracted.”9

The Yellow School Bus

The most publicly recognizable regulation to come out of meetings Cyr organized, though, concerned identification (regulation 9):

For purposes of identification school bus bodies:

1. Including hood, cowl and roof, shall be painted a uniform color, National School Bus Chrome, according to the United States Bureau of Standards specifications with the exception of fenders and trim.
2. Fenders and trim shall be black.
3. Shall bear the words, SCHOOL BUS, in black letters at least four inches high on both the front and rear of the body.10

The past one hundred years have seen updates to the interior and exterior of the bus, but the ubiquitous color—“National School Bus Glossy Yellow”—has remained.11 National School Bus Chrome, named after the chemical compounds used to create the paint, was originally several hues, as it was difficult to reproduce the exact shades at the time. It was selected for its high visibility, particularly during the morning and evening hours, contrasting with what Cyr referred to as the “camouflage” colors of red, white, and blue. Cyr regarded these suggestions as well meaning but asserted that “they made the buses less visible. And I don’t think it really had much effect on patriotism.”12 Chromate was eventually removed from the mixture, as it contained lead, leading to a shift in the paint name while retaining a standardized yellow exterior.

Safety

The two priorities of the 1933 conference were to ensure a safe and economical school bus. Modern advances, including an additional wave of regulations in the 1970s that sought to reduce injury in accidents by including emergency exits and rollover protection, have increased safety. Seat belts remain a safety feature inconsistently implemented nationwide; only eight states require seat belts.13 Large school buses use what the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration refers to as a “protective envelope” as a means of protecting children. The closely spaced seats with high and cushioned seat backs help absorb crash energy that can occur in larger-capacity school buses.

Additional safety features include amber lights and stop signs affixed to the bus that warn other drivers to slow down or stop. Drivers who ignore the stop sign can be fined up to $1,000.14 Global Positioning System (GPS) units have also been a recent addition to school buses, allowing for dispatch centers to monitor the school bus and its location in real time. GPS units allow dispatch centers to notify families or school sites of delays or accidents and can help prevent notable incidents like the 1976 Chowchilla bus kidnapping from ever happening again. While regulations surrounding the school bus as a means of moving children to and from school occurred beginning in 1933, a different dialogue was about to emerge as busing children took on additional meanings.

Leading to Brown

As a young girl, Linda Brown would leave her house early in the morning, pass Sumner Elementary, cross busy intersections, and walk through an active railyard to reach the bus stop that would take her to her school.15 Regardless of the weather, Linda would make the trek, even when tears from the cold froze to her face. After getting on the bus, she and her classmates were driven to their segregated school, Monroe Elementary. Linda Brown was the eldest daughter of Oliver and Leola Brown, the named plaintiffs in Oliver Brown, et al. v. The Board of Education of Topeka, et al. in 1954.

Though the Brown family lived in an integrated neighborhood, Topeka schools were integrated only at the secondary level, requiring the bus ride away from her neighborhood to Monroe. Monroe was a fine school, with good teachers and facilities on par with the school white students attended, according to the Browns and other families involved in the lawsuit. Their concern was that only four schools were available for Black students to attend, compared with the eighteen schools for white students.16 If Black families became dissatisfied with their schools, or weary of the commute, these eighteen schools would remain inaccessible.

Although the Browns were the titular plaintiffs in the landmark court case, the case itself involved five different lawsuits brought forth by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Thirteen families from Delaware, Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., were the plaintiffs in the case. As a result of the Homer A. Plessy v. John H. Ferguson court case,17 which provided legal ground for racial segregation, school districts were able to establish separate schools for Black and white children. The experiences of these other families paint a vivid picture of what it was like to be educated under Jim Crow. Delaware had only one high school for Black students: Howard. There was no transportation to Howard. Students could ride a city bus with local stops, which took an hour, and then had to walk several blocks to arrive at the school. Brigitte Brown, daughter of one of these bus riders, recalled her mother noting that “they passed a total of three white high schools on the way to Wilmington.”18

In South Carolina, students also walked to inferior schools, while school buses “were shuttling white children to their white schools.”19 Parents faced retribution for seeking an equal education for their children, including being fired from their jobs. Denia Hightower, whose family was among the 107 parents and children to seek better schooling, remembered that her father, “like so many others, had been fired from his job and was told that he could have his job back if he took his name off the list.”20

In Virginia, high school student Barbara Johns led a strike to protest the conditions of her education, remarking that white students “were not cold, they didn’t have to leave one building and transfer to another. Their buses weren’t overcrowded. Their teachers and bus drivers didn’t have to make fires before they could start class.”21 The strike came with consequences. Families were no longer given credit in stores and were threatened with job loss and physical violence. Johns moved in with relatives for her safety; however, the Virginia families remained steadfast. The NAACP appealed each case through circuit courts and then merged the cases into one, which became Brown.22

Brown Decision(s): Enter Busing

In a unanimous decision, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the families, overturning the “separate but equal” doctrine affirmed sixty years prior in Plessy v. Ferguson. They concluded that, “in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”23 The logistics of how desegregation would occur was decided in the second decision, Brown v. Board of Education II. Setting a pace that pleased neither side, the Supreme Court set a guideline of “with all deliberate speed”—allowing for a variety of implementation timelines and models and, most importantly, approving the use of busing as the primary technology for integrating schools.24

This is the general story of schooling in the United States of which most adults are aware: a decision in the 1950s required schools to desegregate, which was a grand move toward equitable learning opportunities for all. This, however, is only the beginning of a very uneven story whose noble outcomes are yet to be achieved. As anyone who’s looked closely at schools today knows, educational opportunity in America is very much still cleaved by divisions in race and class. Buses have played a role in both mitigating and reinforcing racial and class-based discrimination. For all the bluster around educational equity over more than half a century, schools in this country have remained woefully inconsistent when it comes to determining who gets what educational opportunities.

Prior to the Brown decision, students rode segregated buses to segregated schools across segregated areas of the nation. Riding on buses meant they were bused to school. With the Brown decision, the term busing took on this meaning and use, becoming synonymous with desegregation efforts. Advocates for desegregation used the word busing to refer to the means by which students were transported to school; however, opponents of desegregation used the term busing—as well as forced busing and mandatory busing—to signify the transport of students as part of a desegregation program.25

White opposition to desegregation took on many forms, including boycotting schools and opening private segregated schools. Arkansas governor Orval Faubus famously called in the National Guard to block Black students’ entry.26 Some cities even went so far as to shut down entire school districts to avoid court-ordered desegregation.27

Desegregation Busing

To help illustrate the ongoing impact of busing, three communities show how districts responded to the Brown decision. The first district, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) in North Carolina, would eventually receive praise for its successful school integration. CMS played a key role in busing becoming a primary way to achieve desegregation. However, initially, like many districts in the south, CMS failed to integrate the schools, necessitating Black families to seek remedy through the court system. The case of Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education in 1964 eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1971, driven by the central question of how much jurisdictional power the Court had in overseeing desegregation. In addition to deciding that the Court did indeed have the jurisdictional power, the Court also affirmed the use of busing as a means of desegregation.

White residents of Charlotte were not pleased. Wealthier families responded by enrolling their children in private segregation academies or moving to majority-white towns still unconcerned with busing. Other families participated in coalitions like the innocuous sounding Concerned Parents Association,” which adopted practices from the civil rights movement, including staging sit-ins, singing “We Shall Overcome,” and electing three anti-busing school board members. They strategically framed opposition to busing as an issue of choice. Newly elected senator Jesse Helms spoke out against busing, labeling it as “discrimination in reverse.”28

It is important to note that not all Black families were pro-busing. George Leake, a pastor in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, was staunchly anti-busing. Years prior to the Swann decision, he was vocal about being concerned only with the education of Black children, seeing no need for integrated schools. Echoing Du Bois, Leake found it more important that Black children had quality facilities and a good education. He hated “the loss of the identity of any predominantly black school.”29 However, as the Court’s decision loomed, he was willing to concede that should the Court rule against the district, he would support busing. Later, when opposition to busing decreased, Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools were praised as examples of how integration could work.

Together, Black and white students in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools were bused to their new school sites. The bus taking students to West Charlotte High, a historically Black school, transported both Black and white children. Betsy Hagart, a white student who rode the West Charlotte bus, lived in East Charlotte. She was picked up with others from their predominantly white neighborhood and driven west, as the bus continued to add students. By the time the bus reached Black communities, it was often full. According to Hagart, white students gave up their seats because they were intimidated by Black students who entered with a perceived “tough attitude.” White students read their body language as being rooted in a sense of insecurity being around white students, “who are, well . . . you know, fairly well dressed and they are not because they came from a project.”30 Hagart’s interpretation of her Black classmates’ stance fails to consider that the Black students on the bus might resent the now crowded bus or the presence of white students in their formerly all-Black school.

Like Charlotte, the Boston Public School District was a site of a significant court case about busing. In 1965, the state legislature passed the Racial Imbalance Act, which made it illegal for schools to have more than 50 percent minority students. When Boston schools refused to comply, the NAACP again filed suit. District Court judge W. Arthur Garrity determined that when schools in Boston remained segregated, it created a situation that allowed for two distinct and unequal school systems: one for Black students and one for white. With only eleven weeks to prepare, Boston implemented a busing plan that brought white students to predominantly Black schools and Black students to predominantly white schools.

Much of the anti-busing organizing in Boston was done by white women motivated by a concern for property rights and parents’ rights. Women’s groups, such as NAG (National Action Group) and ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights), were concerned with property rights, as they feared integration would decrease their home values. As mothers, they felt desegregation limited their ability to care for their children, for example, by rendering them unable to walk them to and from school. Framing opposition to busing in these ways allowed white women to present themselves, not as racists, but as concerned parents. Their organizing was aided and encouraged by southern support. They visited North Carolina to learn from organizers there and invited leaders like George Wallace and members of the Ku Klux Klan to speak to these women’s groups.31 As McRae notes, “‘motherhood’ was understood to elevate their concerns and grant them a kind of moral supremacy. Maternal politics could be invoked for liberal or conservative causes. But the motherhood claimed by segregationist women—in 1940s Jackson, Mississippi or 1970s Boston, Massachusetts—was tied to their whiteness and class position.”32

The buses carrying Black children were pelted with bricks, bottles, and rotten eggs on the first day of school. White people yelled at the children on the bus and called them racial slurs. Police dressed in riot gear stood along the roads to school to protect students from the abusive parents. The National Guard was put on alert, and news crews from the major networks covered the story. At the end of the first day, a fourteen-year-old girl named Regina Williams told her mother that she would not go back to the school unless she had a gun to protect her.33 She did not return to that school. A white teenager weaponized a flagpole by swinging it toward a Black lawyer entering Boston’s city hall. The incident was captured by photographer Stanley Forman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his iconic photo.

Unlike the previous two busing plans, Berkeley, California’s, policy did not come about through a court mandate but through voluntary action. Given that there was one public high school, the focus of desegregation efforts centered on kindergarten through ninth grade. The work to move toward desegregation involved support from the NAACP and the Congress of Racial Equity, as well as community organizers. When the school board voted to desegregate the junior high schools in 1964, some segments of the population threatened to recall the board. Although the recall measure failed, it was enough to cause the district to hold back on integrating the elementary schools. When the district eventually moved toward full desegregation, it implemented a busing plan similar to Boston’s. Wealthy white students from the hills were bused to the flatlands, predominantly occupied by Black and poorer families, and vice versa.34 This method was intended to allow for the burden of desegregation to be spread across all students, rather than overtaxing Black children. However, this was not the case, as proponents of segregation simply enrolled their children in private schools or moved their families to majority-white suburban areas.

Busing in Berkeley was different than it was in Charlotte and Boston because the district was much smaller, so bus rides were shorter. Doris Alkebulan was a third grader when desegregation busing began. Her reflections on being a bus rider walk us through the steps the district took to prepare families for desegregation. On the first day of busing, she was not as nervous as her classmates because her parents had enrolled her in a pilot program the year prior. Dean Fukawa only recalled there being more students on the bus who he didn’t know. Anna Clark Foote described it as feeling normal to take a bus to school. Her comment evokes the reflections of Vice President Harris, who also participated in Berkeley’s busing program. The vice president described her experience in her memoir, writing, “All I knew was that the big yellow bus was the way I got to school.”35

Although Berkeley’s busing program had a more successful beginning than those in other parts of the United States, it bears remembering why busing was necessary to begin with. Berkeley was a segregated city, with Grove Street (now Martin Luther King Jr. Way) marking the border of the redline districts. When the city banned housing discrimination, three white high school students burned a cross on the lawn of a mayoral candidate. Berkeley High School, the only public high school in the district, was featured in a 1996 documentary that drew attention to academic experiences of students who fell along racial lines: Black students were funneled into one track and white into another. It also documented the tension and violence that often boiled over, reminding viewers that racial strife still existed in the perceived liberal haven of Berkeley.

The “End” of Busing

Looking across the long history of busing, we recognize that the answer to whether busing “works” is far from simple. Several events have undermined efforts to desegregate schools. In the 1970s, a provision was added to the General Education Provisions Act about the use of federal funds for busing. The provision reads, “To overcome a racial imbalance in any school or school system or to carry out a plan of racial desegregation.”36 This provision was only recently repealed by the House of Representatives.

Under Nixon, the U.S. Supreme Court took a more conservative turn and began to weigh in on (or decline to hear) busing appeals. One example of the Court’s influence returns to where busing began—CMS. In 1991, Bill Capacchione, a parent whose daughter was denied entry into a magnet school, sued CMS on the grounds that she was denied because she was white. The case advanced through the system, and U.S. district judge Robert Potter ruled in favor of Capacchione, overturning the Swann decision. The Supreme Court decided not to hear the appeal, leaving Swann overturned and rendering busing no longer an acceptable means of desegregation. This case undermined the Brown decision, as did others, such as Miliken v. Bradley in 1974, which banned forced busing across government boundaries, and Freeman v Pitts, which loosened oversight over which schools could be deemed sufficiently desegregated.

Assuming there has been an “end” to busing is tied to perspectives of how this verb functions and one’s stance toward school integration in the decades since Brown. For instance, the nature of U.S. communities could be interpreted as one factor allowing for an understanding of the end of desegregation busing. Massachusetts’s Racial Imbalance Law is an example of a legal attempt to redress segregation in clearly segregated schools. In response to the busing mandate, parents moved to predominantly white suburban areas where busing would not affect schooling, or they enrolled their children in private schools. As a result of the decrease in enrollment, school districts with population shifts ceased busing programs. Working around the legislative mandates for desegregation, individuals, cities, and states have found ways to maintain school segregation by retaining the efficacy of busing. Like any technology, buses can be as much a means to reinforce educational inequality as they might alleviate it.

Impact

When we talk about “impact” and vehicles, the results can be gruesome, harrowing, and unforgettable. An impact from or with a school bus is exactly what driver’s education courses train young drivers to avoid. In this way, let us consider what kind of social impact these vehicles have made across the landscape of American education. Examining the lasting role of desegregation busing reveals both positive and negative outcomes related to the academic achievement and personal growth of millions of students. More importantly, there are less obvious yet still directly related outcomes.

Multiple studies document the benefits all students receive from attending integrated schools, alongside specific benefits for Black youths. Rucker C. Johnson noted that Black students having access to school resources like smaller class sizes uplifts their socioeconomic status.37 In later research, he found that students who were in desegregated schools attended college at higher rates, earned greater incomes, and experienced less poverty.38 Vice President Harris pointedly acknowledged the impact of busing on her life trajectory in a tweet on July 9, 2018: “Two decades after Brown v. Board, I was only the second class to integrate at Berkeley public schools. Without that decision, I likely would not have become a lawyer and eventually be elected a Senator from California.”39 This sentiment led to her personal critique in the presidential debate that opened this book. Additional benefits bused students have noted include feeling comfortable in predominantly white workspaces, specifically not feeling intimidated.40 Such nonacademic opportunities for learning might be seen as benefits of desegregation as an educational intervention. We can interpret these findings as speaking to how school buses—as forms of technology—orient students of color into white cultural practices. However, they do so with little consideration of what might be lost, sacrificed, or suppressed by naturalizing white spaces. In this way, we can interpret the “wins” of desegregation as an embrace of whiteness rather than as achieving the multicultural values typically celebrated by politicians and the media. Although students who were bused to school benefited in the long term from improved facilities and extracurricular activities, they suffered in the short term from being in schools that were hostile toward them. Many of the first waves of Black students who desegregated schools regretted having been part of that class and later attended historically Black colleges.41

Perhaps the greatest loss coming out of desegregation is related to Black staff and faculty. Prior to Brown, segregated schools were staffed mostly by Black teachers and administrators. With the Brown decision, many Black students were able to access schools that had improved facilities and better materials than those that they had previously attended. However, when administrators at these predominantly white schools hired additional teachers for the increased enrollment, they did not look to Black teachers. Black teachers had predominantly supported the Brown decision because they wanted their students to gain access to better resources. However, as Siddle Walker describes, these teachers “traded aspiration and advocacy for access to the resources white schools had.”42 Even in cases in which districts used both facilities, white families would opt for private schools or move before sending their students to historically Black schools. Their decisions decreased enrollment and, again, resulted in a loss of jobs for Black teachers. Even though the Green v. County School Board case in 1968 outlined markers (thereafter known as the Green factors) that indicated whether a school district was desegregated, the focus was primarily on student enrollment. Black teachers can also offer social-emotional support for Black students, particularly students who are not attending predominantly Black schools. But Black teachers have never recovered from the loss of employment stemming from the Brown decision.

Driving Away from Technologically Deterministic Solutions

The kid hacks at the beginning of this chapter—proto-buses cobbled together in rural areas—were sparked by technological innovation. As buses turned into motorized carriages of an eponymous yellow hue, these vehicles became the fundamental form of school transportation that persists today. Likewise, in becoming the mechanism for legal jurisprudence, the school bus became the innovative form for addressing (often ineffectively) racial inclusion in this country. As a form of social technology focused on addressing school integration (e.g., “busing”) and as a modernized vehicle indicative of twentieth-century progress (e.g., the bus as an object), the histories of busing technology developed in parallel. As a result, the school bus’s twinned forms of technological progress were fused in its ongoing role in schools today.

Determining the effectiveness of busing to bring about desegregated schooling requires asking what busing’s end goal was. If it was only to transport students, that absolutely happened. Buses successfully brought students to and from school, even when the National Guard was required to protect the route. But if this technological intervention was intended to be a vehicle to provide equitable education—to meet students’ academic needs while affirming their inherent value as people—then it failed. Once students arrived at school, though they may have learned required academic content, they were not protected from physical and emotional abuse by their peers and teachers. Though busing did provide all students, Black and white, with opportunities to engage in cross-cultural friendships and expand their racial awareness,43 is that enough to counter the “frequent discrimination, hostility and rejection” they also endured?44

More than sixty-five years after Brown, vestiges of redlining remain, school demographics mimic pre-Brown racial demographics, and students continue to ride buses to get to school. All three branches of the federal government have undercut the fiscal and legislative support for integration. Alternative plans that replaced busing—magnet schools, charter schools, and student placement plans—have not achieved the Green factor for measuring full desegregation.

There are other possibilities for addressing structural inequalities linked to segregated schooling. Richard Rothstein suggests that it is inconceivable to think that education reform can happen without addressing neighborhood segregation.45 Mathew Delmont suggests that large cities can revise school district lines. He notes that redrawing district lines is controversial even in liberal places like New York—let alone conservative places—because “primarily white parents and upper-middle-class parents, purposely buy homes in areas where they know they’re going to be sending their children to schools that are largely segregated.”46 These measures require dismantling historic systems of inequality at a local level, and the technology of school busing has proven ill equipped to combat the resilience of wealth and whiteness in this country. Reverting the interventions of busing technology is not easily done; unlike stripping a computer for parts or uninstalling a series of apps, the journeys paved by the school bus cannot be rerouted quickly or seamlessly.

Jesse Jackson summed up the congressional opposition to desegregation in a 1982 opinion piece. His opposition to busing wasn’t about legal overreach or fiscal responsibility. In Jackson’s opinion, it wasn’t the bus that was Congress’s problem. The problem they had was with Black people. Du Bois’s essay on whether Black children would benefit more from separate schools sets up a binary that Black families still face in the fight for equity of schooling. He wrote that a “mixed school with poor and unsympathetic teachers, with hostile public opinion, and no teaching of truth concerning black folk, is bad. A segregated school with ignorant placeholders, inadequate equipment, poor salaries, and wretched housing, is equally bad.”47 There are ways of providing Black students with education that supports their academic needs and affirms their cultural background. Busing Black youths and other youths of color across cities in an attempt to diversify and desegregate schools has not been the solution to the problems that civil rights activists have sought to redress. Instead, the role of educational technology has simply muddled the shape, context, and operations of schools for generations. The millions of hours that students cumulatively spend sitting on buses each day can be thought of as an educational tax extracted from students of color in a country still anxious about accountability and student presence. As we explore in the following chapter, their hours on buses are not, however, devoid of meaning. Students learn complex lessons about schooling and socialization in the hours riding to and from school every day.