My mother’s cousins all grew up here in the city of Columbus. I first heard about the “busing” system of the 1980s from them as I sat with them around the dining room table listening to their stories from high school. In the late 1970s a supreme court case concluded that the city of Columbus still had segregated schools and that a program was mandatory in which buses would transport kids from predominantly white neighborhoods to predominantly black schools and vice versa. My mother’s cousins were among those sent to a previously predominantly black school.
This week as we discussed place while reading Lisa Ko’s The Leavers, I was reminded of my mother’s cousins’ stories and the history of our very own city less than 40 years ago. Place impacts us more than we may know. It can define and shape our ideas, perspectives, and experiences. The goal of the busing program was to bring diversity to the schools. Yet as Lia Eastep records in her article (link below), this was only semi-successful. Sure, it encouraged students to encounter other students of different races, cultures, and backgrounds, but it also removed them from their homes and friends. Eastep recalls the pride of her home high school that she was able to attend and wondered if she would have felt that same way if she got bused to a high school across the city.
Integrated Columbus school class in 1979
https://www.dispatch.com/story/lifestyle/2020/12/03/desegregation-columbus-ohio-schools-black-students-stories/3635484001/
www.columbusmonthly.com/lifestyle/20191216/my-memories-of-busing-in-columbus
Does simply changing the location of where someone goes to school change the system of segregation? After about 15 years the program was fazed out and the schools went back to being separated by location and neighborhood, both of which were for the most part still segregated. This raises many more questions around whether the problem was neighborhood and the more pressing problem of do all schools receive equal funding and opportunity regardless of the demographic of students? With desegregation the city walks a fine line between finding equality and uprooting cultural neighborhoods, how can that best be done? I personally do not know the answers, but I am grateful to hear from various perspectives to educate myself on a topic that I previously knew very little about.
Works Cited
Eastep, Lia. “My Memories of Busing in Columbus.” Columbus Monthly, Columbus Monthly, 16 Dec. 2019, www.columbusmonthly.com/lifestyle/20191216/my-memories-of-busing-in-columbus.
Ko, Lisa. The Leavers. Little, Brown, 2018.
Wagner, Mike. “Stories of Desegregation in Columbus Schools, as Told by Black Residents Who Were There.” The Columbus Dispatch, The Columbus Dispatch, 7 Dec. 2020, www.dispatch.com/story/lifestyle/2020/12/03/desegregation-columbus-ohio-schools-black-students-stories/3635484001/.
I had not previously heard about this system in Columbus. I am from St. Louis, and this makes me curious if the same thing happened in St. Louis. I live in the St. Louis suburbs and I went to a predominately white high school. Kids were bussed in from the St. Louis city to attend my high school and other schools in my district. I was always told that this was so they had the opportunity to attend better schools than were available to them in the city. I am not curious to look into the history of the St. Louis bussing and see if the reasoning behind it was similar; to try to desegregate schools. I completely agree that bussing is not solving the problem. I always felt bad that the kids who were bussed in from the city had to ride the bus for over an hour. The city schools should receive just as much funding as my school in the suburbs did, so that kids do not have to make a longer commute just to attend a better school.