How We Became Part of “White Flight”

So, there we were, living in the house that Daddy built which was odd, eccentric, and would never, never fall down. (It’s still there. Daddy could have taught NASA about redundancies. If one size of lumber was called for, he got the next bigger size. Except for that dead rabbit in the water tank, nothing ever failed.)

This memory doesn’t really fit here, but it is also worth noting that Daddy got my mother the newest and best of everything for the house. We had one of the very first dishwashers – a top-loading beast that had a long, mirrored tube in the middle that rotated and sprayed the water. I’ve tried to find pictures but so far haven’t been successful – just trust me on this. We also had a GE Flair stove and oven - magnificent. The cooktop pulled out from the stove unit like a drawer. There is one just like ours in Graceland and that pleases me almost as much as Elvis’s jungle room.

But, anyway, back to the late 50s and early 60s when things started to change and I was old enough to notice. Lots of things were happening, but the Civil Rights Movement touched everyone in one way or another. No matter what you think should have been done by whom and when, the upshot was a tremendous amount of dislocation and reorientation for lots of individuals.

My sister was told at the end of the 1960 school year that she was one of the white kids who would be bused into a city high school for her freshman year. Up until this point, we had gone to an all-white suburban school district, which had been annexed by the city.

At that time, children were largely assigned to schools by where they lived. Because most neighborhoods were segregated by practice, so were the schools. However, as I read up on the history of this dreadful business, there were some areas that required busing of black children from their home district to the “black” school, to maintain segregation, even if the child lived closer to the neighborhood “white” school. Shameful.

The Supreme Court’s decision that “separate but equal” was no longer satisfactory turned over a lot of apple carts. Separate they certainly were, but equal no doubt they were not. So, as politicians will do, they decided to fix this with as many moving parts as possible, as expensively as possible, without improving anyone’s educational experience, probably.

They went to work on the “separate” side of the equation. I wonder what things would be like today if the “educators” had invested that time and money into improving the bad schools, rather than coming up with unwieldy plans to transport students from one school to another, based on nothing but the color of their skin.

I personally think the whole business was insulting for all involved. For the black kids who were bused to predominantly white schools – was the message that the sheer whiteness of the other students would be the defining factor of improved education? The implicit assumption here is that because white students attended these schools they (the schools) had more resources. They were, by definition, “better”. They probably were, I don’t know, but if so, the only students who would “benefit” from busing would only be the black kids who were actually bused. Their home schools, filled with their friends, would still be (I presume) “bad”.

The “educators” put on the shoulders of these school kids the entire weight of desegregation.  

Similarly, dropping the white kids into city schools (mostly black but not entirely) – exactly what was the message? The only possible message was that their whiteness was a commodity that could be moved around via a yellow school bus, and the school they were going to would be improved just because of their presence. Nonsense.

The upshot is that in the last fifty years millions and millions of dollars have been spent on nothing but buses and gasoline. Really? Is that the best they could do?

I’ve never believed anybody cared a damn about the education of any of the kids – black, white, purple, or green. It’s interesting, looking back on those times – comparing what I was experiencing as a kid and what I know now from history and from being a parent. I think every adult was demonstrating that they had lost their minds.

Just in case you need proof of that – reading about busing history I found the nugget that there were some black classes bused “intact” to white schools – that is, they stayed in the same classroom with each other, just in a different building after a long bus ride.

The only school district I’ve ever heard about that used any sense was in a smaller city in Texas. They decided that everyone in one grade level would go to one school. Then, eventually, everyone went to the same high school because there was just one.

But, all these reflections were long in the future back then. In the fall of 1961, my sister was stepping on a bus at 6:15, returning home late in the afternoon. There was a lot of worry about safety on the road and safety at the school. Mother and daddy worried about not “knowing” the school Susan was going to. (They’d always been involved in school activities and knew some of the teachers at our area high school.)

But, they tried to make the best of a confusing situation until a girl with a log chain in her purse threatened Susan in the restroom. (This is a very clear memory. I thought the End Of The World was commencing.)

And that’s when mother started house hunting.