Kamala Harris Wants to Bring Back Forced Busing

This is at the New York Times, via Memeorandum, "Kamala Harris and Classmates Were Bused Across Berkeley. The Experience Changed Them."

She's on record as supporting a return to the failed desegregation polices of the 1970s.

And at the Los Angeles Times, "School busing in Berkeley during Kamala Harris’ childhood was both voluntary and volatile":

Kamala Harris, Berkeley and busing >>> "Even in a city that had become a worldwide symbol of 1960s counterculture revolt, systemic racial prejudice in education and housing remained deeply entrenched." https://t.co/3sBXbF6yHe Excellent @LATSeema @melmason @finneganLAT

— Shelby Grad (@shelbygrad) July 1, 2019

.@KamalaHarris: “I support busing. Listen, the schools of America are as segregated, if not more segregated, today than when I was in [school]...need to put every effort, including busing, into play to de-segregate the schools...fed govt has a role & a responsibility to step up." pic.twitter.com/a7ujueP0Bu

— Vaughn Hillyard (@VaughnHillyard) June 30, 2019

The school bus ride was less than three miles from one side of Berkeley to the other, but from 1969 to 1973 it transported Carole Porter to an entirely different world.

Like her neighbor and friend Kamala Harris, Porter was one of thousands of black children bused into predominantly white neighborhoods to learn. It was part of Berkeley’s bold experiment in desegregation.

But even in a city that had become a worldwide symbol of 1960s counterculture revolt, systemic racial prejudice in education and housing remained deeply entrenched.

“That’s a really hard thing to reconcile,” said Porter, 55. “Berkeley was an oxymoron. It was a contradiction in many ways.”

Harris’ three years of busing from her family’s mainly black working-class neighborhood to a prosperous white enclave in the hills overlooking San Francisco Bay was at once universal and uniquely Berkeley.

As in many American cities, the discriminatory housing policy known as redlining kept blacks from moving into white neighborhoods in Berkeley and busing fueled some white flight to the suburbs.

But unlike other sizable cities, Berkeley undertook its busing program voluntarily and required both white and black families to travel into unfamiliar neighborhoods. Rapid demographic and political changes shielded the community from the most extreme pushback, including violence, that hobbled busing efforts nationwide.

More than 50 years after Berkeley launched its busing program, Harris, one of its most famous participants, thrust it back into the spotlight in last week’s Democratic presidential debate.

As California’s first black senator chastised her rival Joe Biden for his fight against forced busing in the ’70s, she leaned on her personal history in Berkeley, portraying herself as a beneficiary of the charged battle for educational equality.

“There was a little girl in California who was a part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day,” Harris said. “And that little girl was me.”

Contrary to its enduring reputation as a progressive mecca, the Berkeley of Harris’ childhood was more politically muddled. The conservative John Birch Society operated two bookstores in the area. It wasn’t until the early 1960s that Democrats cracked a Republican stronghold on the city council. Black residents were restricted to living to the southern and western flats, while whites resided in the northern hills.

Thelette A. Bennett, 71, a retired vice principal of Berkeley High School, grew up in the same neighborhood as Harris.

Bennett’s father, a black World War II Navy veteran, was an airplane mechanic at a local naval air station in 1945, when redlining blocked him and his wife from buying a house in a white neighborhood. Even in the black neighborhood where they settled, she said, they needed to get a white real estate agent to buy a home and transfer it to them.

“There were only certain areas where they could buy a home,” Bennett said. “We lived where they allowed us to live.”

But a large influx of African Americans during and after World War II and whites affiliated with UC Berkeley were pulling the local politics to the left, paving the way for desegregation. Black leaders raised concerns about segregation in the city starting in the late 1950s.

In response, the school board studied the matter, concluding that all but three of the district’s 17 elementary schools and two of the three junior high schools were segregated. (Berkeley High, the city’s only high school, was integrated by default.) In 1964, the school board voted to desegregate its junior high schools.

Residents’ reactions were not as extreme as the segregation battles elsewhere in the country, such as the South, but “it wasn’t as far from that as you might assume,” said Natalie Orenstein, a reporter for local news site Berkeleyside. “There were definitely really angry parents and hours-long school meetings.”

Desegregation opponents launched recall campaigns of multiple school board members over the junior high busing program, but lost by a wide margin.