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.
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At 32 years old, and sporting long sideburns, Joe Biden was the youngest member of the Senate. During his initial 1972 campaign, Biden advocated racial equality. He questioned the motives of anti-busing leaders and charged that Republicans had exploited the busing issue in order to win white votes. He also supported the Swann decision, and opposed a constitutional amendment banning busing—as did the Republican incumbent he defeated, J. Caleb Boggs.
But during the campaign, Biden had begun to develop a convoluted position in which he supported busing as a remedy for “de jure segregation” (as in the Jim Crow South), while he opposed busing in cases of “de facto segregation” (as in Northern cities). Through his first two years in the Senate, he supported most—but not all—of the anti-busing legislation. In two crucial exceptions, he voted to table the Gurney Amendment in May 1974—and he also voted in favor of the Scott-Mansfield compromise. He sided with Brooke on both votes, and on both occasions their side prevailed by a single vote.
For these few votes, Biden attracted the fury of his white constituents. Delaware residents had formed the New Castle County Neighborhood Schools Association in order to resist desegregation. In June 1974, the group organized an event at the Krebs School in Newport, Delaware—as Brett Gadsden details in Between North and South. The event’s coordinator had recently declared, “We’re going to hound Biden for the next four years if he doesn’t vote our position.” Standing before a Krebs School auditorium packed with angry white parents, Biden explained that he supported busing only as a remedy for “de jure” segregation. He assured the crowd that any segregation in Delaware was “de facto,” and therefore—he claimed—beyond the authority of the courts. The crowd jeered him anyway until he departed. The ugly incident clearly left its mark on the senator.
A year later, in the summer of 1975, Boston erupted in more racial violence and braced for its second year of busing. Meanwhile, Brooke and Biden steeled themselves for a showdown on Capitol Hill.
Sen. Jesse Helms, a Republican from North Carolina, was the first to strike. On September 17, 1975, when a larger education bill came up for debate, Helms offered a crippling anti-integration amendment. It would prevent the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from collecting any data about the race of students or teachers. In addition, HEW could not “require any school … to classify teachers or students by race.” Thus, HEW could not withhold funding from school districts that refused to integrate. “This is an antibusing amendment,” Helms explained. “This is an amendment to stop the current regiments of faceless, federal bureaucrats from destroying our schools.”
Biden rose to support Helms’ amendment. “I am sure it comes as a surprise to some of my colleagues … that a senator with a voting record such as mine stands up and supports [the Helms amendment].” Helms replied that he was happy to welcome Biden “to the ranks of the enlightened.” After the laughter died down, Biden launched an anti-busing screed. “I have become convinced that busing is a bankrupt concept.” The Senate should declare busing a failure and focus instead on “whether or not we are really going to provide a better educational opportunity for blacks and minority groups in this country.” He praised Ed Brooke’s initiatives on housing, job opportunities and voting rights. In one breath, Biden seemed to reject busing in the North and the South, and claimed that he was committed to equal opportunity for African Americans.
A few other senators spoke briefly about the amendment, then Brooke sprung to action. The Helms amendment would eviscerate Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Brooke said, which enabled HEW to cut off funding to school districts that refused to integrate. Brooke asserted that the federal government should attempt other integration remedies before resorting to busing. “But if compliance with the law cannot be achieved without busing, then busing must be one of the available desegregation remedies.” Brooke introduced a motion to table Helms’ amendment. Brooke’s motion passed, 48-43. Biden wouldn’t budge, and voted with Jesse Helms and the anti-bussers.
Brooke had fought this fight before, but he would face a more formidable adversary in Joe Biden. When a Southern conservative like Helms led the anti-busing forces, Ed Brooke could still rally his troops. But it would be tougher to combat the anti-busing faction when its messenger was a young liberal from a border state.
From the beginning, a certain set of circumstances had to exist in order for America’s white majority to stomach forceful measures for integration. Public support depended upon the perception of a fight between good and evil. White Americans had to see desegregation as morally right and segregation as morally wrong. With the onset of busing in Northern cities, the situation started to appear ambiguous. Few white Northerners viewed busing as a way to provide equal opportunity for black children. In fact, by the mid-1970s, whites viewed themselves as the aggrieved party when it came to busing. They believed that African Americans had already won their rights with the civil rights bills of the previous decade. With little regard or care for whether African American children would be confined to segregated schools, whites thought their rights were violated if their children couldn’t attend “neighborhood schools.”
African Americans viewed it differently. As Boston NAACP leader Tom Atkins put it in March 1975, “An anti-busing amendment is an anti-desegregation amendment, and an anti-desegregation amendment is an anti-black amendment.”
In October 1975, U.S. News and World Report published a special feature on busing, in which they interviewed a political leader from each side of the issue. Ed Brooke was the face of the pro-busing side. Joe Biden represented anti-busing.
The article read like a tale of the tape. A photo of a youthful Biden topped the left column. If the courts and HEW “continue to handle busing in the manner in which it has been handled,” said Biden, “I would eliminate forced busing under any circumstances.” When asked whether busing caused more harm than good, Biden answered: “Absolutely.” Biden explained that he had examined the arguments used to justify busing. They “seem to me to be profoundly racist.” He claimed that busing reinforced the idea of black inferiority. Busing implied that African Americans could “cut it educationally” only if they sat next to white students. “It implies that blacks have no reason to be proud of their inheritance and their own culture.”
Biden’s logic—that anti-busing was the way to respect African American culture— allowed the political center-left to coalesce around this brand of opposition to busing. Further, Biden insisted that the majority of white Americans had no objection “to their child sitting with a black child, eating lunch with a black child—all the things that were the basis for the racist movement in the past.” Biden thus divorced the anti-busing position from the racial hatred that occasioned it. To clinch his case, Biden expressed pride in the fact that several Senate liberals had supported his amendment. The anti-busing position was “becoming more respectable,” a development for which he happily took credit.
Brooke offered a nuanced defense of busing. “It is not necessarily the best way,” he said, “but in certain instances busing is the only way to achieve desegregation.” Brooke favored the building of new schools and the consolidation of old ones, for example, if such measures could bring integration. “But when these fail or are inappropriate, busing is a constitutional tool that should be used, and is being used, but only as a last resort.” Brooke realized that the voters disagreed with him on the busing issue. “It’s not popular—certainly among my constituents. I know that. But, you know, I’ve always believed that those of us who serve in public life have a responsibility to inform and provide leadership for our constituents.” The rights of a minority were on the line. Brooke could not bend; he had to lead.
He paid for it. Brooke and Biden were like ships passing in the night. From that point forward, their political careers followed opposite trajectories. In 1978, Brooke ran for a third term. In the six years since his previous reelection campaign, Boston had become not only the center of the anti-busing movement but also a hotbed of anti-abortion activity. Brooke clung to his pro-busing and pro-choice convictions nonetheless. To complicate matters, he endured a messy divorce and was accused of improper financial dealings. Democrat Paul Tsongas defeated Brooke in 1978. Brooke never returned to public office.
Joe Biden was just beginning his political ascent. While he campaigned for reelection in 1978, a busing plan was finally being implemented in Wilmington. Biden’s most rabid anti-busing constituents still perceived him as too liberal on the issue, though Biden denounced the busing plan in Delaware. In the end, Biden’s anti-busing crusades in the Senate had convinced the majority of white voters. He won reelection by a sizable margin.
As Biden settled in for a long Senate career, that body was fast losing its liberal lions. Progressives like Brooke, Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Philip Hart and Jacob Javits had retired, been defeated or passed away. With the Reagan Revolution in the offing, their absence both reflected and enabled the larger conservative trend. The Reagan administration relaxed enforcement of civil rights laws, and few leaders advocated increased spending or legislation on behalf of racial minorities.
Gradually, busing plans would peter out. Busing had brought a measure of integration to many urban school systems. But without the strong support of leading liberals, and amid whites’ accelerating retreat to the suburbs, many locales soon ditched their busing plans. Conservatives succeeded in writing the first draft of history, in which busing is cited as the exemplar of social engineering run amok.
Biden agreed, and he still does. In his 2007 memoir (titled Promises to Keep), Biden called busing “a liberal train wreck.” Alas, Biden was a product—and a symbol—of his times. He was a liberal in the age of the white backlash and the Reagan Democrats. In order to sustain a long political career, it was often necessary to avoid difficult stands—especially when it came to issues of racial equality.
Elected officials drew an important lesson from the busing ordeal of the 1970s: Bold pushes for racial change entailed political death. It was better to abandon them.
There was no one from the democratic party who was better suited for the job. Somehow, he's just uncle joe now though because of short memories and punditry. Wild.
