Here's a personal busing story from someone at least your age, and maybe much older.
My story goes back to 1954 (I was in 4th grade) when my dad came home angry as hell, told me and my brother that the Supreme Court had just passed a school integration law, and the first time a black child came into our classroom, we should just push our books off the desk, get up, and walk out of the room and don't look back. (Well, of course the schools didn't integrate till many years later, so I never had to choose my father or my education.)
A couple of years later he and my mother split up, and I went to live with relatives in a very rural section in South Carolina where I was born. I was bused. Yes, indeed, every morning I walked a quarter mile down to the next road where from my bus stop I could see the "colored school" just up the road.
My bus picked me up and drove me about a mile up the road to the modern brick elementary school I attended - right past the old unpainted wooden two room "colored school".
I can still remember my shock and disbelief, even at the age of 12, as my bus drove past numbers of black kids walking to school sometimes singly but often in small groups. Many of them walked long distances, right past the white brick school. And there were no buses for these young African-American students. And their school year didn't even begin until October or November, so they could continue to help get the crops in. And most of them were barefoot until dead of winter - walking all that distance through the hot sandy roads in the hot spring and fall. I can still see them trudging along as my bus sped past them. No, busing was certainly not part of their lives. And even as a 12 year old I remember how hard that hit me. And how my friends wouldn't even talk to me about it. And they laughed and called me a N***** Lover.
The old school building for the black kids didn't have running water or indoor toilets. I can still see the teacher out in the schoolyard pumping water from the old pump to carry into the classrooms. There was only wood heating in an old potbelly stove, one in each of the two classrooms (for all the elementary grades). There were no hot lunches, no music classes, none of the amenities. And there were only the old, beaten up, falling apart books that had been "handed down" to the colored school when the white schools were finished with them and we white kids got new books. (I became aware of most of this only years later, when I moved back to the area and met people who my bus had driven past in those years.)
I left the countryside in 1956 and lived in a large southern city for the rest of my school years. The matter of segregation and busing wasn't part of my personal life during those years. I married young and soon had children of my own. We were very poor, I had to work, and was much too busy and worn out, but not so much I didn't keep up with the world.
Then when my oldest daughter was in 2nd grade, in a less rural area near a large city in North Carolina, Integration finally became a reality. My daughter came home and told me she had a black teacher and black students in her class. That was it. No fuss. No bother. Most of the Carolinas integrated the same way, after long years of putting it off as long as they could.
Later that same year we moved to a large midwestern city, where all my children spent most of their school years. The schools were of course already integrated, and so far as I knew had always been. But that didn't matter much, for there were few black residents outside of the "inner city" so integration on paper meant little in reality. Most black kids went to school in the inner city schools because that's where they lived; white kids went to school in the outlying and suburban schools because that's where they lived. The only busing transpiring for anyone was if a kid finagled city bus fare from his parents and so didn't have to walk to school.
During this time period the schools in the rural community I grew up in were changing and being integrated, too. I later learned that integration and the busing of all the students had transpired here with no major incidents. The black schools were all shut down, and the black students were all enrolled in the heretofore white schools. No white students were sent to the rustic, waterless, toiletless, heatless black schools. Some of the black teachers were transferred to the (now) integrated schools. Most of the black teachers were simply "let go". Soon, private and religious schools began springing up for the white students, and white parents began transferring their children to those with a vengeance.
When my kids were young teens in the mid 1970s, we moved from the Midwest back to North Carolina to a medium sized city. They were in what was then called Middle Shool or Junior High School. And they were bused. This is the busing that Kamala and Joe seem to have been discussing. I got the kids enrolled into school, and two of them were going to be bused across the city to previously black schools, due to the new efforts to effect integration in the southern cities. I guess some of the northern ones, too. Boston comes to mind - I heard about Boston a lot.
My kids were unhappy because they had to spend so much time on the bus, and I must admit I was not happy about it either. But I soon learned that most of the other kids (and especially parents) were unhappy because their little white kids were being bused across town to attend a previously black school.
So I sat them down and we had long talks about it. I explained to them the ghastly wrong that had to be corrected. I described my childhood, riding in my bus past the black kids walking to their dilapidated school, and all those horrors. I explained the Civil Rights movement to them, Brown vs. Board of Education, and so much more. And when I finished there were tears in their eyes. And they never complained about being bused across town again. But I have to admit neither they nor I ever liked that damned commute they had to make.
By the 1980s when I moved back to my childhood home in South Carolina, integration was pretty much a thing of the past. The white kids who could afford it were enrolled in their private (often religious) schools, and the remainder of poor white kids and black kids were left in the (previously) integrated schools. Once again the character of busing had changed, this time black students were being bused to the new, integrated (though in reality now un-integrated) schools, and the white kids for the most part driven to their private schools in their parents' cars. And so it remains today. And some of those black kids who trudged all those miles to school and watched the white kids on their big yellow buses whiz past them on the dirt road, spewing up all the dust or mud - some of them became teachers at the same school they helped to integrate. And some others in our area from a similar background became Congressmen. And I have two friends with similar backgrounds who are Councilwomen in two small nearby towns.
Now, I don't know what any of this has to do with the little Kamala who was bused across her California city. Though it is not clear to me from what she said, I presume she was bused to facilitate integration, and I'm sure it was traumatic for her, just as it was traumatic for mine to be bused across Charlotte to facilitate integration (though not in the same way, of course). But that is not clear to me from what she said. And Joe's role in that is even less clear to me from what he said.
But I don't believe either of them would change places with those young black children I passed in my school bus every single day, hot, cold, wet, or dry. Determined to walk the miles they had to for that education they got from those raggedy schoolbooks. And I think those kids are the ones the fight was fought for. And the busing may have been misguided in some places, but for god's sake, people were attempting to right dreadful wrongs. And no doubt mistakes were made.
None of this is meant to take away anything from Kamala or from Joe. They are both fighters for the people and I am so very proud of both of them (and all our other candidates).
But, hey. That was then, and we were all different people than we became: the little Kamala on the bus; the young politician trying to figure out the best ways to help the kids and perhaps making errors; even the little white girl whose childhood pain and tears for kids walking down a dirt rode as she rode past were also real.
We have to be better than this to defeat Trump and the Republicans.
Eyes on the Prize. Please.
Wat
Congratulations to our presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden!
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If I were to vote in a presidential