Is Busing the Real Issue?

T he struggle over busing has become almost as familiar a feature of our social landscape as was the Vietnam war in the late 1960s or the civil rights movement a bit earlier. But there are significant differences. One is that the civil rights and antiwar movements began at the grass roots, and the masses of people involved framed the issues themselves; in fact, the busing struggle arises on the ruins of the black movement of the 1960s. Busing is not carried out to meet the demands of a mass movement. It is, rather, imposed by the courts at the behest of such organizations as the NAACP. If masses of people become involved in the dispute over busing it is later, only after school districts carry it out in keeping with court...