George McGovern advisor Ted Van Dyk: McGovern wanted to "take an anti-busing position."

[wyldwolf]

George McGovern advisor Ted Van Dyk: McGovern wanted to "take an anti-busing position."

School Busing Didn’t Work. And to Say So Isn’t Racist.

Ted Van Dyk is the author of Heroes, Hacks and Fools, University of Washington Press, 2007, a memoir of national politics from 1960 onward. He served as assistant to Vice President Humphrey in the Johnson White House and was a senior policy advisor to Democratic national candidates and his party over a 40-year period. He still writes frequently on national issues.

Principal 1960s civil-rights leaders, including my boss at the time, first Senate Whip and later Vice President Hubert Humphrey, sponsor of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, were dubious from the beginning about compulsory school busing as a tool to advance civil rights and improve education for minorities.

Elected officials—even those strongly in favor of civil rights—began to conclude that busing was a well-meant mistake. Presidential candidate George McGovern, in 1971, proposed to his advisers, of which I was one, that he would straightforwardly take an anti-busing position. We prevailed on him not to do so because we believed that the issue then was so emotion-laden that busing proponents would misunderstand his opposition.

During the period in question I served not only Humphrey and McGovern but represented in Washington, D.C. the Southern Elections Fund, then headed by Julian Bond, which raised money for local-level black candidates in Southern states. I traveled to Mississippi to assist Charles Evers in his gubernatorial campaign. I was in daily contact with Democratic national and congressional leaders and several times served as principal author of the Democratic national platform. From the mid-1970s onward, there was a growing consensus within the party that neither civil rights nor education were being served by busing. Joe Biden represented that consensus; he was not some reactionary outlier.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/school-busing-civil-rights-121077

Forced busing had another surprising opponent, a Southern Democrat who would himself become President in a couple of years.

In Georgia, Governor Jimmy Carter saw that Swann was, in his words, "clearly a one-sided decision; the Court is still talking about the South, the North is still going free." In the 1974 Milliken v. Bradley decision, the U.S. Supreme Court placed an important limitation on Swann when they ruled that students could be bused across district lines only when evidence of de jure segregation across multiple school districts existed....

... During the 1970s, 60 Minutes reported that some members of Congress, government, and the press who supported busing most vociferously sent their own children to private schools, including Senator Edward Kennedy, George McGovern, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Phil Hart, Ben Bradlee, Senator Birch Bayh, Tom Wicker, Philip Geyelin and Donald Fraser. Many of the judges who ordered busing also sent their children to private schools...

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2013/6/26/1219058/-Forced-Busing-and-Other-Unpopular-Court-Orders

[highplainsdem]

1. K&R

[OnDoutside]

2. On the point about Kennedy etc sending their kids to private

schools, it's not an either or.....both can be valid positions. A friend of mine wasn't going to send her son to the same school my son will be going to (one of the top schools in Ireland), because she is quite lefty and didn't feel it right when so many kids don't get the same chances in life. Fortunately she took my advice and is now sending him, as I thought she was foisting her political beliefs on her son's future.

[hlthe2b]

3. Yet more complexity to the issue...

(as I've been saying all along as one who lived its controversies and impacts)

[TwilightZone]

4. I've been a bit perplexed at the claims that this issue is a simple one.

It's nowhere near as cut-and-dried as many insist, and it certainly wasn't the unqualified success that some seem to believe it to be. It makes me wonder if they know about the history, the context, or the alternatives.

[wyldwolf]

6. they DON'T know history. They DO know liberal dogma and silly season faux outrage n/t

[crazytown]

5. So Ted Kennedy was a hypocrite

because his children went to private schools?

[highplainsdem]

7. K&R

[oasis]

8. Kick