Joe Biden: School Busing

Here are the main points to know about busing (documented below):

1. Joe Biden never opposed community-based busing, the type that Kamala Harris experienced.
2. Half or more of blacks (depending on the survey) opposed the court-ordered busing that Biden opposed.
3. The most radical and prestigious black lawyer who specialized in school integration had views similar to Biden’s.

It wasn’t racist for Blacks to hold these views and it wasn’t racist for Joe Biden.

1. Biden never opposed Harris’s type of busing.

The New York Times reports, that voluntary busing “is the type of desegregation method Ms. Harris experienced as a child, and Mr. Biden’s [current] position is not a shift: He has never opposed voluntary busing.”

What Biden opposed was court-ordered busing in cases where there was no law regarding school attendance that was based on race. Such court-ordered busing was what happened in Boston and led to a great deal of racial animosity and significant violence. In this case, Black children were bused to poor White schools and vice versa. 

From the New York Times

“The anti-busing fervor sweeping American cities erupted into violence in the fall of 1974, when buses carried black children into white neighborhoods in Boston for the first time. Crowds jeered, throwing bricks and rocks at the buses as terrified students huddled inside. Black children were greeted at school with racial epithets.”

2. Many if not most blacks opposed busing

When asked what should be done to improve the quality of education for minority students, the vast majority of Americans oppose busing programs. Eighty-two percent of those polled say letting students go to their neighborhood schools would be better than achieving racial balance through busing. Support for this position is highest among whites (87%), while blacks are split on the question — 48% would prefer to keep students in neighborhood schools, while 44% support busing of students to achieve racial balance.  Gallup Poll

3. The most radical, black, school-integration lawyer

Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court Justice recruited Derek Bell to join the NAACP Legal Defense Fund where he oversaw 300 school desegregation cases. He became the first African American to become a tenured professor at Harvard Law School. He is also known as the founder of Critical Race Theory and as one of the most radical black legal scholars past or present.

“Those who espouse alternative remedies are deemed to act out of suspect motives.” [He’s talking about people like Biden and suggesting this assumption can be wrong.]

Brown is the law, and racial balance plans are the only means of complying with the decision. That position reflects courage, but it ignores the frequent and often complete failure of programs which concentrate solely on achieving a racial balance.

Some black educators, however, see major educational benefits in schools where black children, parents, and teachers can utilize the real cultural strengths of the black community to overcome the many barriers to educational achievement.

Harvard Law Review, [Vol. 93, No. 3 (Jan. 1980), pp. 518-533]

Some of Biden’s History in Wilmington

Jim Baker, a former black mayor of Wilmington, said he urged Biden to actively fight the busing plan — even if he had to work with racists. Baker didn’t care “about someone’s philosophy if they were working with you to get the job done.”

“Joe has always been right in the community with us. I mean, in the black community,” said Maurice Pritchett, a black Wilmington education leader who remembered when a 19-year-old Mr. Biden was the only white lifeguard at a public pool in an African-American neighborhood. “He was always right there. And we accepted him.”

Richard “Mouse” Smith, the longtime president of the Wilmington N.A.A.C.P., has known Mr. Biden since the 1960s, when both were young men interested in politics.

“Joe didn’t choose” the black community, Mr. Smith said. “We chose him.”