Sunday, June 30, 2019
‘Forced busing’ didn’t fail. Desegregation is the best way to improve our schools. Biden lied in the debate.
Biden Lied In The Debate
"While much has been said about the failure of busing, it’s time to move beyond this myth. In one of the most famous examples of court-ordered desegregation, Boston began busing students between white and black neighborhoods in 1974, sparking violent white protests and boycotts by white students. White families fled to the suburbs. Supporting neighborhood schools and opposing school bus rides became rhetoric to fight desegregation without overtly racist language. But as black activists in Boston noted at the time, “It’s not the bus, it’s us.” Before the court order, nearly 90 percent of high school students rode a bus to school without protest. Today, most children get on a school bus to attend a segregated school. Busing ended because of a combination of white protest, media that overemphasized resistance, and the lack of systematic collection to judge the impact of desegregation. So we need to be sober about our history: Busing didn’t fail; the nation’s resolve and commitment to equal and excellent desegregated schools did."
___________________________________________________________________________________________
"Two miles from my office in Syracuse, N.Y., Westside Academy Middle School has been in need of repairs for decades. Located in one of the nation’s poorest census tracts, 85 percent of its students are black or Latino, and 86 percent are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. The 400 students have limited creative outlets, with no orchestra or band and just two music teachers.
Ten miles away, Wellwood Middle School, in a suburban district, offers students a stately auditorium and well-equipped technology rooms. There, 88 percent of the students are white and only 10 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The 700 students have at least five music teachers, band, orchestra, choir, musical theater and dozens of other clubs and activities.
Fifty percent of Wellwood’s eighth graders passed the state math assessment. At Westwood, none did. The disparate student outcomes are no surprise.
Since the Reagan administration’s “A Nation at Risk” report pronounced that schools across the country were failing, every president has touted a new plan to close the racial academic achievement gap: President Obama installed Race to the Top; George W. Bush had No Child Left Behind; and Clinton pushed Goals 2000. The nation has commissioned studies, held conferences and engaged in endless public lamentation over how to get poor students and children of color to achieve at the level of wealthy white students — as if how to close this opportunity gap was a mystery. But we forget that we’ve done it before. Racial achievement gaps were narrowest at the height of school integration.
U.S. schools have become more segregated since 1990, and students in major metropolitan areas have been most severely divided by race and income, according to the University of California at Los Angeles’s Civil Rights Project. Racially homogenous neighborhoods that resulted from historic housing practices such as red-lining have driven school segregation. The problem is worst in the Northeast — the region that, in many ways, never desegregated — where students face some of the largest academic achievement gaps: in Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.
[Critics say my school district’s new discipline policy is unfair to white students. Here’s why they’re wrong.]
More than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, federal education policies still implicitly accept the myth of “separate but equal,” by attempting to improve student outcomes without integrating schools. Policymakers have tried creating national standards, encouraging charter schools, implementing high-stakes teacher evaluations and tying testing to school sanctions and funding. These efforts sought to make separate schools better but not less segregated. Ending achievement and opportunity gaps requires implementing a variety of desegregation methods – busing, magnet schools, or merging school districts, for instance – to create a more just public education system that successfully educates all children.
Public radio’s “This American Life” reminded us of this reality in a two-part report this summer, called “The Problem We All Live With.” The program noted that, despite declarations that busing to desegregate schools failed in the 1970s and 1980s, that era actually saw significant improvement in educational equity. When the National Assessment of Educational Progress began in the early 1970s, there was a 53-point gap in reading scores between black and white 17-year-olds. That chasm narrowed to 20 points by 1988. During that time, every region of the country except the Northeast saw steady gains in school integration. In the South in 1968, 78 percent of black children attended schools with almost exclusively minority students; by 1988, only 24 percent did. In the West during that period, the figure declined from 51 percent to 29 percent.
But since 1988, when education policy shifted away from desegregation efforts, the reading test score gap has grown — to 26 points in 2012 — with segregated schooling increasing in every region of the country.
Research has shown that integration is a critical factor in narrowing the achievement gap. In a 2010 research review, Harvard University’s Susan Eaton noted that racial segregation in schools has such a severe impact on the test score-gap that it outweighs the positive effects of a higher family income for minority students. Further, a 2010 study of students’ improvements in math found that the level of integration was the only school characteristic (vs. safety and community commitment to math) that significantly affected students’ learning growth.
In an analysis of the landmark 1966 “Coleman Report,” researchers Geoffrey Borman and Maritza Dowling determined that both the racial and socioeconomic makeups of a school are 1¾-times more important in determining a student’s educational outcomes than the student’s own race, ethnicity or social class.
But we continue to think about segregation as a problem of the past, ignoring its growing presence in schools today. Desegregating schools has become a political third rail, even though it is an essential solution to one of our nation’s most persistent problems.
This month, Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced he would step down in December and his deputy, John King, would replace him. King, during his tenure as New York state’s education commissioner, visited both school districts mentioned above to advance the national Race to the Top agenda, but he never acknowledged the increasing school segregation apparent in the region. In 1989, Syracuse city schools were about 60 percent white, and just 20 percent of black and Latino students attended predominately minority schools. Today, the district is 28 percent white, while 55 percent of Latino students and 75 percent of black students attend predominately minority schools.
Racial and economic segregation affects schools in various ways. Federal and state policies that impose sanctions on poor-performing schools — state takeovers and forced replacement of school leaders, for example — often make matters worse. For example, Westside Academy , the Syracuse middle school where no students passed the state eighth-grade math assessment, has has had multiple principals and saw 44-percent teacher turnover in the 2012-2013 school year.
[My son has been suspended five times. He’s 3.]
About a decade ago, the elementary schools that feed into Westside Academy and Wellwood Middle School adopted the same math curriculum program, touted as one of the best standards-based elementary programs available. As is typical, both districts struggled to implement the new curriculum initially. But a decade later, the schools in Wellwood’s district are still using it, with teachers becoming more skilled and comfortable with the new way to teach math. The schools in Westside’s district, however, changed their math program at least two more times, leaving teachers, students, and families in a constant state of churn and undoubtedly affecting student learning and test scores. In this era of accountability, this instability is not forced upon white, upper-middle class families.
While much has been said about the failure of busing, it’s time to move beyond this myth. In one of the most famous examples of court-ordered desegregation, Boston began busing students between white and black neighborhoods in 1974, sparking violent white protests and boycotts by white students. White families fled to the suburbs. Supporting neighborhood schools and opposing school bus rides became rhetoric to fight desegregation without overtly racist language. But as black activists in Boston noted at the time, “It’s not the bus, it’s us.” Before the court order, nearly 90 percent of high school students rode a bus to school without protest. Today, most children get on a school bus to attend a segregated school. Busing ended because of a combination of white protest, media that overemphasized resistance, and the lack of systematic collection to judge the impact of desegregation. So we need to be sober about our history: Busing didn’t fail; the nation’s resolve and commitment to equal and excellent desegregated schools did.
Busing is not the only way to desegregate our schools. We can unify school districts so they encompass racially and economically diverse neighborhoods. The countywide district centered in Raleigh, for instance, has been successful in integrating schools and achieving academic success, in contrast to the 18 schools districts across the metropolitan Syracuse area. Shaping districts like pie pieces, so they cut across urban, suburban and even rural spaces, could have the same effect.
Creating more open-enrollment magnet schools would also bring families of various races and incomes into well-funded and themed schools. For existing public schools, we could merge two neighborhood campuses in segregated communities, so they attend one neighborhood school together from kindergarten through second grade and the other from third through fifth grades. Or we can incentivize school districts to take action, imposing segregation and providing financial resources to districts with aggressive desegregation plans.
Certainly, none of these approaches is easy or perfect, and desegregation alone is not a magic bullet to end the achievement and opportunity gaps. Even integrated schools face racial gaps. Many black and Latino kids end up in lower academic tracks and white parents protect exclusive opportunities for their kids. Still, knowing the benefits of integrated learning environments, we can’t continue to ignore the growing hold segregation has on our schools.
We’ve heard soaring words from Duncan and Obama touting education as the route to a better life, saying it is a moral imperative that we work tirelessly to improve the education of our most vulnerable children. But rhetoric is no match for our failure of will to change the disparate realities of our separate educational systems. It is no match for our failure of courage to call out the persistent segregation of our schools.
Some scholars have argued that King will be good for school integration. Time will tell if we are entering a moment that moves beyond rhetoric toward substantial desegregation.
In this time of transition for the Education Department — in the last year of the Obama administration — are we going to continue ignoring the moral implications of separate schools? Our history shows that policy cannot focus on improving “failing” schools; it needs to also emphasize desegregating them. No matter how much we seek to improve the back of the education bus, it will always be the back."
‘Forced busing’ didn’t fail. Desegregation is the best way to improve our schools.
"While much has been said about the failure of busing, it’s time to move beyond this myth. In one of the most famous examples of court-ordered desegregation, Boston began busing students between white and black neighborhoods in 1974, sparking violent white protests and boycotts by white students. White families fled to the suburbs. Supporting neighborhood schools and opposing school bus rides became rhetoric to fight desegregation without overtly racist language. But as black activists in Boston noted at the time, “It’s not the bus, it’s us.” Before the court order, nearly 90 percent of high school students rode a bus to school without protest. Today, most children get on a school bus to attend a segregated school. Busing ended because of a combination of white protest, media that overemphasized resistance, and the lack of systematic collection to judge the impact of desegregation. So we need to be sober about our history: Busing didn’t fail; the nation’s resolve and commitment to equal and excellent desegregated schools did."
___________________________________________________________________________________________
"Two miles from my office in Syracuse, N.Y., Westside Academy Middle School has been in need of repairs for decades. Located in one of the nation’s poorest census tracts, 85 percent of its students are black or Latino, and 86 percent are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. The 400 students have limited creative outlets, with no orchestra or band and just two music teachers.
Ten miles away, Wellwood Middle School, in a suburban district, offers students a stately auditorium and well-equipped technology rooms. There, 88 percent of the students are white and only 10 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The 700 students have at least five music teachers, band, orchestra, choir, musical theater and dozens of other clubs and activities.
Fifty percent of Wellwood’s eighth graders passed the state math assessment. At Westwood, none did. The disparate student outcomes are no surprise.
Since the Reagan administration’s “A Nation at Risk” report pronounced that schools across the country were failing, every president has touted a new plan to close the racial academic achievement gap: President Obama installed Race to the Top; George W. Bush had No Child Left Behind; and Clinton pushed Goals 2000. The nation has commissioned studies, held conferences and engaged in endless public lamentation over how to get poor students and children of color to achieve at the level of wealthy white students — as if how to close this opportunity gap was a mystery. But we forget that we’ve done it before. Racial achievement gaps were narrowest at the height of school integration.
U.S. schools have become more segregated since 1990, and students in major metropolitan areas have been most severely divided by race and income, according to the University of California at Los Angeles’s Civil Rights Project. Racially homogenous neighborhoods that resulted from historic housing practices such as red-lining have driven school segregation. The problem is worst in the Northeast — the region that, in many ways, never desegregated — where students face some of the largest academic achievement gaps: in Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.
[Critics say my school district’s new discipline policy is unfair to white students. Here’s why they’re wrong.]
More than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, federal education policies still implicitly accept the myth of “separate but equal,” by attempting to improve student outcomes without integrating schools. Policymakers have tried creating national standards, encouraging charter schools, implementing high-stakes teacher evaluations and tying testing to school sanctions and funding. These efforts sought to make separate schools better but not less segregated. Ending achievement and opportunity gaps requires implementing a variety of desegregation methods – busing, magnet schools, or merging school districts, for instance – to create a more just public education system that successfully educates all children.
Public radio’s “This American Life” reminded us of this reality in a two-part report this summer, called “The Problem We All Live With.” The program noted that, despite declarations that busing to desegregate schools failed in the 1970s and 1980s, that era actually saw significant improvement in educational equity. When the National Assessment of Educational Progress began in the early 1970s, there was a 53-point gap in reading scores between black and white 17-year-olds. That chasm narrowed to 20 points by 1988. During that time, every region of the country except the Northeast saw steady gains in school integration. In the South in 1968, 78 percent of black children attended schools with almost exclusively minority students; by 1988, only 24 percent did. In the West during that period, the figure declined from 51 percent to 29 percent.
But since 1988, when education policy shifted away from desegregation efforts, the reading test score gap has grown — to 26 points in 2012 — with segregated schooling increasing in every region of the country.
Research has shown that integration is a critical factor in narrowing the achievement gap. In a 2010 research review, Harvard University’s Susan Eaton noted that racial segregation in schools has such a severe impact on the test score-gap that it outweighs the positive effects of a higher family income for minority students. Further, a 2010 study of students’ improvements in math found that the level of integration was the only school characteristic (vs. safety and community commitment to math) that significantly affected students’ learning growth.
In an analysis of the landmark 1966 “Coleman Report,” researchers Geoffrey Borman and Maritza Dowling determined that both the racial and socioeconomic makeups of a school are 1¾-times more important in determining a student’s educational outcomes than the student’s own race, ethnicity or social class.
But we continue to think about segregation as a problem of the past, ignoring its growing presence in schools today. Desegregating schools has become a political third rail, even though it is an essential solution to one of our nation’s most persistent problems.
This month, Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced he would step down in December and his deputy, John King, would replace him. King, during his tenure as New York state’s education commissioner, visited both school districts mentioned above to advance the national Race to the Top agenda, but he never acknowledged the increasing school segregation apparent in the region. In 1989, Syracuse city schools were about 60 percent white, and just 20 percent of black and Latino students attended predominately minority schools. Today, the district is 28 percent white, while 55 percent of Latino students and 75 percent of black students attend predominately minority schools.
Racial and economic segregation affects schools in various ways. Federal and state policies that impose sanctions on poor-performing schools — state takeovers and forced replacement of school leaders, for example — often make matters worse. For example, Westside Academy , the Syracuse middle school where no students passed the state eighth-grade math assessment, has has had multiple principals and saw 44-percent teacher turnover in the 2012-2013 school year.
[My son has been suspended five times. He’s 3.]
About a decade ago, the elementary schools that feed into Westside Academy and Wellwood Middle School adopted the same math curriculum program, touted as one of the best standards-based elementary programs available. As is typical, both districts struggled to implement the new curriculum initially. But a decade later, the schools in Wellwood’s district are still using it, with teachers becoming more skilled and comfortable with the new way to teach math. The schools in Westside’s district, however, changed their math program at least two more times, leaving teachers, students, and families in a constant state of churn and undoubtedly affecting student learning and test scores. In this era of accountability, this instability is not forced upon white, upper-middle class families.
While much has been said about the failure of busing, it’s time to move beyond this myth. In one of the most famous examples of court-ordered desegregation, Boston began busing students between white and black neighborhoods in 1974, sparking violent white protests and boycotts by white students. White families fled to the suburbs. Supporting neighborhood schools and opposing school bus rides became rhetoric to fight desegregation without overtly racist language. But as black activists in Boston noted at the time, “It’s not the bus, it’s us.” Before the court order, nearly 90 percent of high school students rode a bus to school without protest. Today, most children get on a school bus to attend a segregated school. Busing ended because of a combination of white protest, media that overemphasized resistance, and the lack of systematic collection to judge the impact of desegregation. So we need to be sober about our history: Busing didn’t fail; the nation’s resolve and commitment to equal and excellent desegregated schools did.
Busing is not the only way to desegregate our schools. We can unify school districts so they encompass racially and economically diverse neighborhoods. The countywide district centered in Raleigh, for instance, has been successful in integrating schools and achieving academic success, in contrast to the 18 schools districts across the metropolitan Syracuse area. Shaping districts like pie pieces, so they cut across urban, suburban and even rural spaces, could have the same effect.
Creating more open-enrollment magnet schools would also bring families of various races and incomes into well-funded and themed schools. For existing public schools, we could merge two neighborhood campuses in segregated communities, so they attend one neighborhood school together from kindergarten through second grade and the other from third through fifth grades. Or we can incentivize school districts to take action, imposing segregation and providing financial resources to districts with aggressive desegregation plans.
Certainly, none of these approaches is easy or perfect, and desegregation alone is not a magic bullet to end the achievement and opportunity gaps. Even integrated schools face racial gaps. Many black and Latino kids end up in lower academic tracks and white parents protect exclusive opportunities for their kids. Still, knowing the benefits of integrated learning environments, we can’t continue to ignore the growing hold segregation has on our schools.
We’ve heard soaring words from Duncan and Obama touting education as the route to a better life, saying it is a moral imperative that we work tirelessly to improve the education of our most vulnerable children. But rhetoric is no match for our failure of will to change the disparate realities of our separate educational systems. It is no match for our failure of courage to call out the persistent segregation of our schools.
Some scholars have argued that King will be good for school integration. Time will tell if we are entering a moment that moves beyond rhetoric toward substantial desegregation.
In this time of transition for the Education Department — in the last year of the Obama administration — are we going to continue ignoring the moral implications of separate schools? Our history shows that policy cannot focus on improving “failing” schools; it needs to also emphasize desegregating them. No matter how much we seek to improve the back of the education bus, it will always be the back."
‘Forced busing’ didn’t fail. Desegregation is the best way to improve our schools.
What We Know About Joe Biden’s Record on School Busing. Biden blatantly lied in the debate about his opposition to busing as a tool to implement the Court ordered integration of the schools as a result of the 1954 Brown vs the school board of Topeka Kansas.
Biden blatantly lied in the debate about his opposition to busing as a tool to implement the Court ordered integration of the schools as a result of the 1954 Brown vs the school board of Topeka Kansas.
"Mr. Biden called her remarks “a mischaracterization of my position across the board.” And when Ms. Harris asked moments later whether Mr. Biden would agree that he had been “wrong to oppose busing in America,” Mr. Biden again pushed back on the premise.
“I did not oppose busing in America,” Mr. Biden said. “What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education.”
In reality, Mr. Biden was a leading opponent of busing in the Senate during the 1970s and 1980s, and his opposition went beyond the federal government’s role in the practice.
But speaking at a conference Friday in Chicago, Mr. Biden doubled down, claiming that he had “never, never, never ever opposed voluntary busing” like the program Ms. Harris participated in as a child, implicitly drawing a distinction between voluntary busing allowed by some local governments and the mandatory, court-ordered busing that also took place decades ago.
Then he added: “I’ve always been in favor of using federal authority to overcome state-initiated segregation.”
Here’s a look at what we know about Mr. Biden’s record in the 1970s and ’80s, as a senator from Delaware, and how it squares with the claims he made this week.
‘An asinine concept’
Mr. Biden was a liberal on most civil rights issues, but he did not support integrating schools through busing from the 1970s to the 1980s.
In 1975, Mr. Biden supported a sweeping anti-busing measure offered by the segregationist Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, and he offered his own less stringent anti-busing amendment to an appropriations bill.
“I oppose busing,” he said in an interview in 1975. “It’s an asinine concept, the utility of which has never been proven to me.”
“The new integration plans being offered are really just quota-systems to assure a certain number of blacks, Chicanos, or whatever in each school,” he added. “That, to me, is the most racist concept you can come up with; what it says is, ‘in order for your child with curly black hair, brown eyes and dark skin to be able to learn anything, he needs to sit next to my blond-haired, blue-eyed son.’ That’s racist! Who the hell do we think we are, that the only way a black man or woman can learn is if they rub shoulders with my white child?”
He went on: “The problem, you see, is that the courts have gone overboard in their interpretation of what is required to remedy unlawful segregation. It is one thing to say that you cannot keep a black man from using this bathroom, and something quite different to say that one out of every five people who use this bathroom must be black.”
He concluded: “I do not buy the concept, popular in the ’60s, which said, ‘We have suppressed the black man for 300 years and the white man is now far ahead in the race for everything our society offers. In order to even the score, we must now give the black man a head start, or even hold the white man back, to even the race.’”
More anti-busing legislation
Mr. Biden introduced another proposal in 1976 that blocked the Justice Department from seeking busing as a desegregation tool, and co-sponsored an amendment in 1977 that limited federal funding of busing efforts. He continued his efforts that year with a bill curbing court-ordered busing.
In February 1982, he voted for an amendment to a Justice Department appropriations bill described as the “toughest anti-busing rider ever approved by either chamber of Congress.” A month later, he voted in favor of another amendment that allowed the Justice Department to participate in litigation “to remove or reduce the requirement of busing in existing court decrees or judgments.”
A spokesman for Mr. Biden recently told The New York Times that he had always supported integration, but that he did not think busing was the right mechanism to achieve it. The spokesman also said Mr. Biden thought busing placed an undue burden on African-American families. In an attempt to highlight other aspects of Mr. Biden’s record on civil rights, he pointed to comments in 1975 calling for housing and employment integration, and in 1986 pressing Justice William H. Rehnquist on integration.
Dismal support for busing in ’70s
To some extent, Mr. Biden’s opposition to busing reflected the majority of the country at the time. Polling in the 1970s found only single-digit support for the practice.
“Busing is unpopular for many reasons,” The New York Times reported in 1978. “Some parents say they fear that their children will be unsafe or get an inferior education; many parents and children say they sincerely prefer the neighborhood school concept; the comments of some are racist.”
Research has shown that nationwide, the segregation of black students in public schools declined significantly between 1968 and 1980, the period during which the courts decided that busing could be used to aid school integration. And indeed, a 1999 Gallup poll showed that Americans believed busing had served a positive historical purpose in improving the education of African-American students.
But by that time, most busing plans had been dismantled and were considered by some to be a vestige of a different era. In line with that sentiment, the majority of respondents to the Gallup poll said they would prefer to integrate schools through methods other than busing.
A ‘liberal train wreck’ in Delaware
In his 2007 memoir, Mr. Biden discussed a cross-district busing effort in the 1970s aimed at desegregating schools in a county in Delaware — his home state.
Busing, Mr. Biden said, was a “liberal train wreck” that was “tearing people apart” there. In the book, he argued that it was forcing some students to travel great distances and some teachers to transfer and take pay cuts. Black and white parents alike, he said, were “terrified.”
He spoke out publicly against Delaware’s court-ordered school-busing program, arguing that the money spent on transportation could be better spent on other educational needs, and that it made no sense to stop students from attending a school just blocks away from their homes.
He would later recount telling constituents that “I was against busing to remedy de facto segregation owing to housing patterns and community comfort, but if it was intentional segregation, I’d personally pay for helicopters to move the children.”
Drawing a distinction
Mr. Biden’s remarks on Friday about never having been opposed to “voluntary” busing appeared to echo an argument he made the night before, on the debate stage.
At one point during his exchange with Ms. Harris, Mr. Biden noted that she had been able to participate in a busing program because of “a local decision” made by a City Council to allow it.
“That’s fine,” he said. “That’s one of the things I argued for.”
Ms. Harris pushed back, saying that it had been almost two decades since Brown v. Board of Education and that states had largely failed to integrate public schools. As a result, she argued, it was the federal government’s responsibility to step in.
On Friday, Mr. Biden told the crowd gathered in Chicago: “Folks, the discussion in this race today shouldn’t be about the past.”
What We Know About Joe Biden’s Record on School Busing
What We Know About Joe Biden’s Record on School Busing. Biden blatantly lied in the debate about his opposition to busing as a tool to implement the Court ordered integration of the schools as a result of the 1954 Brown vs the school board of Topeka Kansas.
Biden blatantly lied in the debate about his opposition to busing as a tool to implement the Court ordered integration of the schools as a result of the 1954 Brown vs the school board of Topeka Kansas.
"Mr. Biden called her remarks “a mischaracterization of my position across the board.” And when Ms. Harris asked moments later whether Mr. Biden would agree that he had been “wrong to oppose busing in America,” Mr. Biden again pushed back on the premise.
“I did not oppose busing in America,” Mr. Biden said. “What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education.”
In reality, Mr. Biden was a leading opponent of busing in the Senate during the 1970s and 1980s, and his opposition went beyond the federal government’s role in the practice.
But speaking at a conference Friday in Chicago, Mr. Biden doubled down, claiming that he had “never, never, never ever opposed voluntary busing” like the program Ms. Harris participated in as a child, implicitly drawing a distinction between voluntary busing allowed by some local governments and the mandatory, court-ordered busing that also took place decades ago.
Then he added: “I’ve always been in favor of using federal authority to overcome state-initiated segregation.”
Here’s a look at what we know about Mr. Biden’s record in the 1970s and ’80s, as a senator from Delaware, and how it squares with the claims he made this week.
‘An asinine concept’
Mr. Biden was a liberal on most civil rights issues, but he did not support integrating schools through busing from the 1970s to the 1980s.
In 1975, Mr. Biden supported a sweeping anti-busing measure offered by the segregationist Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, and he offered his own less stringent anti-busing amendment to an appropriations bill.
“I oppose busing,” he said in an interview in 1975. “It’s an asinine concept, the utility of which has never been proven to me.”
“The new integration plans being offered are really just quota-systems to assure a certain number of blacks, Chicanos, or whatever in each school,” he added. “That, to me, is the most racist concept you can come up with; what it says is, ‘in order for your child with curly black hair, brown eyes and dark skin to be able to learn anything, he needs to sit next to my blond-haired, blue-eyed son.’ That’s racist! Who the hell do we think we are, that the only way a black man or woman can learn is if they rub shoulders with my white child?”
He went on: “The problem, you see, is that the courts have gone overboard in their interpretation of what is required to remedy unlawful segregation. It is one thing to say that you cannot keep a black man from using this bathroom, and something quite different to say that one out of every five people who use this bathroom must be black.”
He concluded: “I do not buy the concept, popular in the ’60s, which said, ‘We have suppressed the black man for 300 years and the white man is now far ahead in the race for everything our society offers. In order to even the score, we must now give the black man a head start, or even hold the white man back, to even the race.’”
More anti-busing legislation
Mr. Biden introduced another proposal in 1976 that blocked the Justice Department from seeking busing as a desegregation tool, and co-sponsored an amendment in 1977 that limited federal funding of busing efforts. He continued his efforts that year with a bill curbing court-ordered busing.
In February 1982, he voted for an amendment to a Justice Department appropriations bill described as the “toughest anti-busing rider ever approved by either chamber of Congress.” A month later, he voted in favor of another amendment that allowed the Justice Department to participate in litigation “to remove or reduce the requirement of busing in existing court decrees or judgments.”
A spokesman for Mr. Biden recently told The New York Times that he had always supported integration, but that he did not think busing was the right mechanism to achieve it. The spokesman also said Mr. Biden thought busing placed an undue burden on African-American families. In an attempt to highlight other aspects of Mr. Biden’s record on civil rights, he pointed to comments in 1975 calling for housing and employment integration, and in 1986 pressing Justice William H. Rehnquist on integration.
Dismal support for busing in ’70s
To some extent, Mr. Biden’s opposition to busing reflected the majority of the country at the time. Polling in the 1970s found only single-digit support for the practice.
“Busing is unpopular for many reasons,” The New York Times reported in 1978. “Some parents say they fear that their children will be unsafe or get an inferior education; many parents and children say they sincerely prefer the neighborhood school concept; the comments of some are racist.”
Research has shown that nationwide, the segregation of black students in public schools declined significantly between 1968 and 1980, the period during which the courts decided that busing could be used to aid school integration. And indeed, a 1999 Gallup poll showed that Americans believed busing had served a positive historical purpose in improving the education of African-American students.
But by that time, most busing plans had been dismantled and were considered by some to be a vestige of a different era. In line with that sentiment, the majority of respondents to the Gallup poll said they would prefer to integrate schools through methods other than busing.
A ‘liberal train wreck’ in Delaware
In his 2007 memoir, Mr. Biden discussed a cross-district busing effort in the 1970s aimed at desegregating schools in a county in Delaware — his home state.
Busing, Mr. Biden said, was a “liberal train wreck” that was “tearing people apart” there. In the book, he argued that it was forcing some students to travel great distances and some teachers to transfer and take pay cuts. Black and white parents alike, he said, were “terrified.”
He spoke out publicly against Delaware’s court-ordered school-busing program, arguing that the money spent on transportation could be better spent on other educational needs, and that it made no sense to stop students from attending a school just blocks away from their homes.
He would later recount telling constituents that “I was against busing to remedy de facto segregation owing to housing patterns and community comfort, but if it was intentional segregation, I’d personally pay for helicopters to move the children.”
Drawing a distinction
Mr. Biden’s remarks on Friday about never having been opposed to “voluntary” busing appeared to echo an argument he made the night before, on the debate stage.
At one point during his exchange with Ms. Harris, Mr. Biden noted that she had been able to participate in a busing program because of “a local decision” made by a City Council to allow it.
“That’s fine,” he said. “That’s one of the things I argued for.”
Ms. Harris pushed back, saying that it had been almost two decades since Brown v. Board of Education and that states had largely failed to integrate public schools. As a result, she argued, it was the federal government’s responsibility to step in.
On Friday, Mr. Biden told the crowd gathered in Chicago: “Folks, the discussion in this race today shouldn’t be about the past.”
What We Know About Joe Biden’s Record on School Busing
Saturday, June 29, 2019
Joe Biden’s record on school desegregation busing, explained - Vox
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"The second round of the first Democratic primary debates on Thursday included a revealing — and at times tense — discussion of race between several candidates. But a defining moment was when Sen. Kamala Harris took former Vice President Joe Biden to task over his recent comments about segregationist senators, as well as his opposition to using federally mandated busing to racially integrate schools in the 1970s. She pointed directly to how it affected her life as a young child.
“You also worked with [those segregationist senators] to oppose busing,” Harris said, speaking directly to Biden. “And there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”
“I did not oppose busing in America,” Biden responded. “What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education. That’s what I opposed.”
There was a little girl in California who was bussed to school. That little girl was me. #DemDebate
In raising busing specifically, Harris hit on a part of Biden’s record that Biden hasn’t really discussed publicly. And as Vox’s Ella Nilsen reported on Thursday, his campaign swiftly moved to push back on Harris’s argument, issuing a statement that Biden’s busing stance had been misrepresented at the debate.
“When Biden said it wasn’t true that he supported anything that would have stopped the busing program that impacted her, he was correct,” the Biden campaign said. “None of [Biden’s] votes would have negatively impacted the Berkeley School Busing Program.”
Since the debates, Harris, as well as Sen. Cory Booker, has continued to press Biden on the issue, saying that his stance is troubling given how many states had to be forced into following civil rights rulings and legislation. “I literally leaned back in my couch and couldn’t believe that one moment,” Booker, who participated in the debates on Wednesday, said of Biden and Harris’s exchange during a CNN interview on Friday.
“I think that anybody that knows our painful history knows that on voting rights, on civil rights, on the protections from hate crimes, African Americans and many other groups in this country have had to turn to the federal government to intervene because there were states that were violating those rights,” he added.
In an election cycle where Democratic candidates have issued a flurry of policy proposals that are far more progressive than previously seen, these critiques of Biden are clearly intended to make a broader point: that the former vice president, in continuing to defend his stance on busing, is out of step with the current Democratic electorate on issues of race and fighting racism. And that could be an issue for many of the black voters Biden is counting on for support.
In reality, though, things are more complicated. In polling, there’s been little indication that white attitudes about busing have changed all that much from when Biden was a young US senator. Opposition to actions that would forcefully desegregate America’s increasingly segregated schools remains high in places like New York City, for example, where white parents have opposed some proposals to diversify schools.
It suggests that Biden’s view — that desegregation is an important goal, but the federal government should only intervene in cases of segregation deliberately created by policy — might not be a problem for many voters.
But even if Biden’s stance aligns with part of the electorate, this part of his record, and his current struggle to defend it — still reveals important details about how Biden approaches larger issues of fighting racism. And it suggests that even as Biden leads the field, his record opens him up to criticism from other candidates, particularly when it comes to race.
America’s history of busing, explained
When the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education found school segregation unconstitutional, schools had to begin the process of integrating. But due to high amounts of state-sanctioned residential segregation and many cities and states’ outright refusal to integrate, the courts and the federal government had to intervene.
There were a number of ways to address this issue, but the one that caught public attention most was “busing” — a process where black students were driven to predominantly white schools in neighboring communities, and white students were driven to predominantly black ones. Many busing orders were mandated in the late 1960s and early 1970s after civil rights groups like the NAACP filed — and later won — school desegregation lawsuits.
Busing was often used as a last resort for cities and districts that clearly showed little interest in desegregation. It was used to immediately integrate schools in the hopes of not only ending state-sanctioned segregation of blacks and whites, but to also give black and white students equal access to resources and opportunities. Many of these opportunities had been isolated to white schools in white communities. Predominantly black and Latino schools, meanwhile, struggled with overcrowding, outdated materials, and dilapidated buildings.
But busing — one of many tools used to secure black students’ constitutional right to equal education — was often strongly opposed by white parents, many of whom did not want their children in integrated schools. Some parents and lawmakers stated that outright, others used different anti-busing arguments: saying that long bus rides to different schools were burdensome, and that their children were being placed in lower-quality schools (ignoring that schools in predominantly black neighborhoods had fewer resources and that per capita spending on black students was smaller).
Parents also claimed that “forced busing” wouldn’t work to bring about racial equality and would merely function as quotas. (To be fair, there were black people who also criticized busing, but their opposition was complex, and contrary to white Americans, their critiques of busing and the political attention it received were not rooted in a desire to maintain segregation, but rather a hope to see deeper investment in black schools and communities.)
Busing programs weren’t opposed just in Southern states. In fact, they were often met with even more resistance in the North due to the region’s avoidance of civil rights issues and efforts to claim moral superiority over the South. Busing was heavily criticized in Detroit, for example, where white families boycotted it in 1960 and continued to oppose it in the years after. In Boston, politicians campaigned and won on anti-busing platforms, arguing that black students’ struggles to access a quality education and succeed in schools were not affected by segregation, but were instead the result of pathology. The city also saw a series of violent riots in the 1970s after schools were ordered to desegregate by a court.
As opposition continued, anti-busing proponents argued that their criticism of busing was not opposition to school desegregation as a whole. But it was also true that in districts that had been the most resistant to integration, the absence of busing programs would leave many schools segregated.
Critics of busing were assisted by lawmakers and legislators who argued that Northern states weren’t segregated intentionally but were rather just “racially imbalanced,” a framing that ignored how policy in many of these states was used to keep white people separated from African Americans.
Here’s how Matthew Delmont, a Dartmouth historian and author of Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation explained things in a 2016 Atlantic article on the history of opposition to busing in Boston:
With busing, Northerners had found a palatable way to oppose desegregation without appealing to the explicitly racist sentiments they preferred to associate with Southerners. “I have probably talked before 500 or 600 groups over the last years about busing,” Los Angeles Assemblyman Floyd Wakefield said in 1970. “Almost every time, someone has gotten up and called me a ‘racist’ or a ‘bigot.’ But now, all of the sudden, I am no longer a ‘bigot.’ Now I am called ‘the leader of the antibusing effort.’” White parents and politicians framed their resistance to school desegregation in terms like “busing” and “neighborhood schools,” and this rhetorical shift allowed them to support white schools and neighborhoods without using explicitly racist language.
“Describing opposition to busing as something other than resistance to school desegregation was a move that obscured the histories of racial discrimination and legal contexts for desegregation orders,” Delmont added.
Still, even as cities like Boston protested busing, lawsuits led to Northern cities being subjected to busing programs in the late ’60s and 1970s. And in the mid-1970s, early into Biden’s first term as a US senator, a part of Delaware soon found itself facing the prospect of such an order.
Busing was one of the first issues to define Joe Biden’s early political career
In 1974, a federal court panel ruled that state housing and education policies had been used to keep the school systems of the city of Wilmington, Delaware (which was predominantly black), and its predominantly-white suburbs segregated. The court had not yet ruled that a busing program must be implemented, but white suburbanites still panicked over the prospect of having to follow a busing plan.
It presented a challenge for Biden, who had supported busing during his campaign a few years before. But in 1973 and 1974, Biden had begun to vote for anti-busing measures after feeling pressure from his constituents. However, in two key exceptions, he voted to table two anti-busing measures, killing their chances of moving forward in the Senate by one vote.
His constituents were outraged at those latter votes and, facing the looming prospect of a formal busing mandate in Delaware, pushed Biden to take a stronger stance on busing. Biden did so, going on to vote for eliminating policies that would provide federal oversight of busing.
In 1975, shortly after Boston residents protested and rioted over the city’s desegregation order, Biden came out in favor of an amendment introduced by North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms, an ardent segregationist and white supremacist. Helms’s amendment would bar the then-active Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from collecting data about the race of students or teachers, and also prevented the department from requiring schools “to classify teachers or students by race.” Helms proudly announced that the measure would effectively end any federal oversight or enforcement of busing.
“I have become convinced that busing is a bankrupt concept,” Biden said as he stood to support Helms’s amendment. He added that the Senate should instead focus on “whether or not we are really going to provide a better educational opportunity for blacks and minority groups in this country.”
The Helms amendment was defeated, but Biden then introduced a similar amendment. Here’s how University of New Hampshire historian Jason Sokol described Biden’s proposal in a 2015 Politico Magazine article:
Biden proposed his own amendment to the $36 billion education bill, stipulating that none of those federal funds could be used by school systems “to assign teachers or students to schools … for reasons of race.” His amendment would prevent “some faceless bureaucrat” from “deciding that any child, black or white, should fit in some predetermined ratio.” He explained, “All the amendment says is that some bureaucrat sitting down there in HEW cannot tell a school district whether it is properly segregated or desegregated, or whether it should or should not have funds.” Finally, Biden called busing “an asinine policy.”
The measure passed, outraging Massachusetts Republican Edward Brooke, the only black person in the Senate. Brooke called the Biden amendment “the greatest symbolic defeat for civil rights since 1964.” Biden later introduced a second amendment that explicitly barred the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from ordering busing, but left other integration measures intact.
The second amendment easily passed the Senate, but both of Biden’s proposals were stripped out of the bill later in the process.
In the years that followed, Biden would cast other votes and propose other anti-busing legislation. The New York Times recently described many of these votes:
Mr. Biden introduced another proposal in 1976 that blocked the Justice Department from seeking busing as a desegregation tool, and co-sponsored an amendment in 1977 that limited federal funding of busing efforts. He continued his efforts that year with a bill curbing court-ordered busing.
In February 1982, he voted for an amendment to a Justice Department appropriations bill described as the “toughest anti-busing rider ever approved by either chamber of Congress.” A month later, he voted in favor of another amendment that allowed the Justice Department to participate in litigation “to remove or reduce the requirement of busing in existing court decrees or judgments.”
And on Friday afternoon, NPR reported on a recently unearthed 1975 interview where Biden said that if legislation failed, he would be open to using a constitutional amendment to end mandated busing.
Busing would largely fall from the federal spotlight by the late 1980s, as fewer legislators actively pushed for measures supporting it. And Biden has maintained that his stance on busing was the right one, saying that he supports busing only when there is proof of intentional segregation in an area.
On Friday, the Biden campaign pointed to a quote Biden gave in 1975 explaining his stance. “In cases where a school system has racially segregated by gerrymandering district lines or by other legalistic means, Biden said he supports desegregation by any legal means at hand — including busing,” the Wilmington News Journal reported at the time. “However, for school districts which are all white or all black ‘because of historical pattern not involving segregation practices disapproved by a court’ he is against busing.”
But Sokol has said that Biden’s comments ignore the fact that by the 1970s the lines on the issue were not as clearly drawn as Biden says. “By that point in history, there were very few school districts voluntarily integrating by other means, which is why judges were ordering busing,” the historian told Politifact on Friday. “He is using disingenuous logic.”
Biden says his stance on busing isn’t controversial. His critics disagree.
Speaking to Vox on Friday, an adviser to the Biden campaign argued that Biden’s comments had been misconstrued to suggest that he opposed busing in its entirety, when he actually only opposed federal enforcement of busing in certain districts.
On Friday afternoon, addressing the renewed controversy over his busing record since the debates, Biden told the audience during an appearance at the Rainbow PUSH Coalition Convention in Chicago, “I want to be absolutely clear about my record and position on racial justice. I never, never, ever opposed voluntary busing.”
But for some, that claim is simply a distinction without a difference. “He wasn’t just a silent supporter of anti-busing, he was out there crafting bills,” Noliwe Rooks, a professor of Africana studies and director of American studies at Cornell University, told EdWeek recently. “As a standalone, [his opposition to busing] probably wasn’t going to be that big a deal. But when you put that in tandem with his more recent comments about these white segregationists, it’s a problem.”
While questions about Biden’s record on busing continue to circulate in the news, it’s still unclear if the issue will actually resonate with voters in general, or Biden’s base of black support in particular. But it is clear that Biden’s primary opponents see weakness in this part of his record, especially when coupled with the controversy over Biden’s recent comments about segregationist senators and his role in the passage of the 1994 crime bill. At times, discussion of Biden’s lead in primary polling has treated his campaign as if it was unstoppable. Harris showed on Thursday that he can be bruised."
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/28/18965923/joe-biden-school-desegregation-busing-democratic-primary
'Joe Biden’s record on school desegregation busing, explained - Vox
Joe Biden’s record on school desegregation busing, explained - Vox
"The second round of the first Democratic primary debates on Thursday included a revealing — and at times tense — discussion of race between several candidates. But a defining moment was when Sen. Kamala Harris took former Vice President Joe Biden to task over his recent comments about segregationist senators, as well as his opposition to using federally mandated busing to racially integrate schools in the 1970s. She pointed directly to how it affected her life as a young child.
“You also worked with [those segregationist senators] to oppose busing,” Harris said, speaking directly to Biden. “And there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”
“I did not oppose busing in America,” Biden responded. “What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education. That’s what I opposed.”
There was a little girl in California who was bussed to school. That little girl was me. #DemDebate
In raising busing specifically, Harris hit on a part of Biden’s record that Biden hasn’t really discussed publicly. And as Vox’s Ella Nilsen reported on Thursday, his campaign swiftly moved to push back on Harris’s argument, issuing a statement that Biden’s busing stance had been misrepresented at the debate.
“When Biden said it wasn’t true that he supported anything that would have stopped the busing program that impacted her, he was correct,” the Biden campaign said. “None of [Biden’s] votes would have negatively impacted the Berkeley School Busing Program.”
Since the debates, Harris, as well as Sen. Cory Booker, has continued to press Biden on the issue, saying that his stance is troubling given how many states had to be forced into following civil rights rulings and legislation. “I literally leaned back in my couch and couldn’t believe that one moment,” Booker, who participated in the debates on Wednesday, said of Biden and Harris’s exchange during a CNN interview on Friday.
“I think that anybody that knows our painful history knows that on voting rights, on civil rights, on the protections from hate crimes, African Americans and many other groups in this country have had to turn to the federal government to intervene because there were states that were violating those rights,” he added.
In an election cycle where Democratic candidates have issued a flurry of policy proposals that are far more progressive than previously seen, these critiques of Biden are clearly intended to make a broader point: that the former vice president, in continuing to defend his stance on busing, is out of step with the current Democratic electorate on issues of race and fighting racism. And that could be an issue for many of the black voters Biden is counting on for support.
In reality, though, things are more complicated. In polling, there’s been little indication that white attitudes about busing have changed all that much from when Biden was a young US senator. Opposition to actions that would forcefully desegregate America’s increasingly segregated schools remains high in places like New York City, for example, where white parents have opposed some proposals to diversify schools.
It suggests that Biden’s view — that desegregation is an important goal, but the federal government should only intervene in cases of segregation deliberately created by policy — might not be a problem for many voters.
But even if Biden’s stance aligns with part of the electorate, this part of his record, and his current struggle to defend it — still reveals important details about how Biden approaches larger issues of fighting racism. And it suggests that even as Biden leads the field, his record opens him up to criticism from other candidates, particularly when it comes to race.
America’s history of busing, explained
When the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education found school segregation unconstitutional, schools had to begin the process of integrating. But due to high amounts of state-sanctioned residential segregation and many cities and states’ outright refusal to integrate, the courts and the federal government had to intervene.
There were a number of ways to address this issue, but the one that caught public attention most was “busing” — a process where black students were driven to predominantly white schools in neighboring communities, and white students were driven to predominantly black ones. Many busing orders were mandated in the late 1960s and early 1970s after civil rights groups like the NAACP filed — and later won — school desegregation lawsuits.
Busing was often used as a last resort for cities and districts that clearly showed little interest in desegregation. It was used to immediately integrate schools in the hopes of not only ending state-sanctioned segregation of blacks and whites, but to also give black and white students equal access to resources and opportunities. Many of these opportunities had been isolated to white schools in white communities. Predominantly black and Latino schools, meanwhile, struggled with overcrowding, outdated materials, and dilapidated buildings.
But busing — one of many tools used to secure black students’ constitutional right to equal education — was often strongly opposed by white parents, many of whom did not want their children in integrated schools. Some parents and lawmakers stated that outright, others used different anti-busing arguments: saying that long bus rides to different schools were burdensome, and that their children were being placed in lower-quality schools (ignoring that schools in predominantly black neighborhoods had fewer resources and that per capita spending on black students was smaller).
Parents also claimed that “forced busing” wouldn’t work to bring about racial equality and would merely function as quotas. (To be fair, there were black people who also criticized busing, but their opposition was complex, and contrary to white Americans, their critiques of busing and the political attention it received were not rooted in a desire to maintain segregation, but rather a hope to see deeper investment in black schools and communities.)
Busing programs weren’t opposed just in Southern states. In fact, they were often met with even more resistance in the North due to the region’s avoidance of civil rights issues and efforts to claim moral superiority over the South. Busing was heavily criticized in Detroit, for example, where white families boycotted it in 1960 and continued to oppose it in the years after. In Boston, politicians campaigned and won on anti-busing platforms, arguing that black students’ struggles to access a quality education and succeed in schools were not affected by segregation, but were instead the result of pathology. The city also saw a series of violent riots in the 1970s after schools were ordered to desegregate by a court.
As opposition continued, anti-busing proponents argued that their criticism of busing was not opposition to school desegregation as a whole. But it was also true that in districts that had been the most resistant to integration, the absence of busing programs would leave many schools segregated.
Critics of busing were assisted by lawmakers and legislators who argued that Northern states weren’t segregated intentionally but were rather just “racially imbalanced,” a framing that ignored how policy in many of these states was used to keep white people separated from African Americans.
Here’s how Matthew Delmont, a Dartmouth historian and author of Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation explained things in a 2016 Atlantic article on the history of opposition to busing in Boston:
With busing, Northerners had found a palatable way to oppose desegregation without appealing to the explicitly racist sentiments they preferred to associate with Southerners. “I have probably talked before 500 or 600 groups over the last years about busing,” Los Angeles Assemblyman Floyd Wakefield said in 1970. “Almost every time, someone has gotten up and called me a ‘racist’ or a ‘bigot.’ But now, all of the sudden, I am no longer a ‘bigot.’ Now I am called ‘the leader of the antibusing effort.’” White parents and politicians framed their resistance to school desegregation in terms like “busing” and “neighborhood schools,” and this rhetorical shift allowed them to support white schools and neighborhoods without using explicitly racist language.
“Describing opposition to busing as something other than resistance to school desegregation was a move that obscured the histories of racial discrimination and legal contexts for desegregation orders,” Delmont added.
Still, even as cities like Boston protested busing, lawsuits led to Northern cities being subjected to busing programs in the late ’60s and 1970s. And in the mid-1970s, early into Biden’s first term as a US senator, a part of Delaware soon found itself facing the prospect of such an order.
Busing was one of the first issues to define Joe Biden’s early political career.
In 1974, a federal court panel ruled that state housing and education policies had been used to keep the school systems of the city of Wilmington, Delaware (which was predominantly black), and its predominantly-white suburbs segregated. The court had not yet ruled that a busing program must be implemented, but white suburbanites still panicked over the prospect of having to follow a busing plan.
It presented a challenge for Biden, who had supported busing during his campaign a few years before. But in 1973 and 1974, Biden had begun to vote for anti-busing measures after feeling pressure from his constituents. However, in two key exceptions, he voted to table two anti-busing measures, killing their chances of moving forward in the Senate by one vote.
His constituents were outraged at those latter votes and, facing the looming prospect of a formal busing mandate in Delaware, pushed Biden to take a stronger stance on busing. Biden did so, going on to vote for eliminating policies that would provide federal oversight of busing.
In 1975, shortly after Boston residents protested and rioted over the city’s desegregation order, Biden came out in favor of an amendment introduced by North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms, an ardent segregationist and white supremacist. Helms’s amendment would bar the then-active Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from collecting data about the race of students or teachers, and also prevented the department from requiring schools “to classify teachers or students by race.” Helms proudly announced that the measure would effectively end any federal oversight or enforcement of busing.
“I have become convinced that busing is a bankrupt concept,” Biden said as he stood to support Helms’s amendment. He added that the Senate should instead focus on “whether or not we are really going to provide a better educational opportunity for blacks and minority groups in this country.”
The Helms amendment was defeated, but Biden then introduced a similar amendment. Here’s how University of New Hampshire historian Jason Sokol described Biden’s proposal in a 2015 Politico Magazine article:
Biden proposed his own amendment to the $36 billion education bill, stipulating that none of those federal funds could be used by school systems “to assign teachers or students to schools … for reasons of race.” His amendment would prevent “some faceless bureaucrat” from “deciding that any child, black or white, should fit in some predetermined ratio.” He explained, “All the amendment says is that some bureaucrat sitting down there in HEW cannot tell a school district whether it is properly segregated or desegregated, or whether it should or should not have funds.” Finally, Biden called busing “an asinine policy.”
The measure passed, outraging Massachusetts Republican Edward Brooke, the only black person in the Senate. Brooke called the Biden amendment “the greatest symbolic defeat for civil rights since 1964.” Biden later introduced a second amendment that explicitly barred the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from ordering busing, but left other integration measures intact.
The second amendment easily passed the Senate, but both of Biden’s proposals were stripped out of the bill later in the process.
In the years that followed, Biden would cast other votes and propose other anti-busing legislation. The New York Times recently described many of these votes:
Mr. Biden introduced another proposal in 1976 that blocked the Justice Department from seeking busing as a desegregation tool, and co-sponsored an amendment in 1977 that limited federal funding of busing efforts. He continued his efforts that year with a bill curbing court-ordered busing.
In February 1982, he voted for an amendment to a Justice Department appropriations bill described as the “toughest anti-busing rider ever approved by either chamber of Congress.” A month later, he voted in favor of another amendment that allowed the Justice Department to participate in litigation “to remove or reduce the requirement of busing in existing court decrees or judgments.”
And on Friday afternoon, NPR reported on a recently unearthed 1975 interview where Biden said that if legislation failed, he would be open to using a constitutional amendment to end mandated busing.
Busing would largely fall from the federal spotlight by the late 1980s, as fewer legislators actively pushed for measures supporting it. And Biden has maintained that his stance on busing was the right one, saying that he supports busing only when there is proof of intentional segregation in an area.
On Friday, the Biden campaign pointed to a quote Biden gave in 1975 explaining his stance. “In cases where a school system has racially segregated by gerrymandering district lines or by other legalistic means, Biden said he supports desegregation by any legal means at hand — including busing,” the Wilmington News Journal reported at the time. “However, for school districts which are all white or all black ‘because of historical pattern not involving segregation practices disapproved by a court’ he is against busing.”
But Sokol has said that Biden’s comments ignore the fact that by the 1970s the lines on the issue were not as clearly drawn as Biden says. “By that point in history, there were very few school districts voluntarily integrating by other means, which is why judges were ordering busing,” the historian told Politifact on Friday. “He is using disingenuous logic.”
Biden says his stance on busing isn’t controversial. His critics disagree.
Speaking to Vox on Friday, an adviser to the Biden campaign argued that Biden’s comments had been misconstrued to suggest that he opposed busing in its entirety, when he actually only opposed federal enforcement of busing in certain districts.
On Friday afternoon, addressing the renewed controversy over his busing record since the debates, Biden told the audience during an appearance at the Rainbow PUSH Coalition Convention in Chicago, “I want to be absolutely clear about my record and position on racial justice. I never, never, ever opposed voluntary busing.”
But for some, that claim is simply a distinction without a difference. “He wasn’t just a silent supporter of anti-busing, he was out there crafting bills,” Noliwe Rooks, a professor of Africana studies and director of American studies at Cornell University, told EdWeek recently. “As a standalone, [his opposition to busing] probably wasn’t going to be that big a deal. But when you put that in tandem with his more recent comments about these white segregationists, it’s a problem.”
While questions about Biden’s record on busing continue to circulate in the news, it’s still unclear if the issue will actually resonate with voters in general, or Biden’s base of black support in particular. But it is clear that Biden’s primary opponents see weakness in this part of his record, especially when coupled with the controversy over Biden’s recent comments about segregationist senators and his role in the passage of the 1994 crime bill. At times, discussion of Biden’s lead in primary polling has treated his campaign as if it was unstoppable. Harris showed on Thursday that he can be bruised."
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/28/18965923/joe-biden-school-desegregation-busing-democratic-primary
Joe Biden’s record on school desegregation busing, explained - Vox
Kamala Harris just changed the direction of the presidential race | Cliff Albright
"In several commanding moments, she distinguished herself from her rivals and positioned herself to lead the fight against Trump
‘Kamala Harris turned out to be the breakout performance of the evening.’
‘Kamala Harris gave what turned out to be the breakout performance of the evening.’ Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
As the second round of Democratic presidential debates approached, one of the major questions on the minds of voters and political commentators was whether the candidates would focus on trying to differentiate themselves from each other, as was done the previous night, or whether they would focus on critiquing Donald Trump.
Senator Kamala Harris chose to do both, and she did so effectively, in what turned out to be the breakout performance of the evening.
Very early in the debate, when asked how the candidates planned to pay for their various proposals, Harris put the question back on the moderators. “Where was that question when the Republicans and Donald Trump passed a tax bill that benefits the top 1% and the biggest corporations in this country?”
At another point, as the candidates seemed to be squabbling and talking over one another, Harris brought it to an end by stating: “America does not want to witness a food fight – they want to know how we’re going to put food on the table.”
But without a doubt, the debate’s most memorable moment was an exchange between Harris and the former vice-president Joe Biden on race. First, Harris shared how “hurtful” she found Biden’s warm remarks last week about working with the segregationist senator James Eastland. Then she proceeded to challenge Biden’s well-documented opposition to bussing – a policy of the 1960s and 70s designed to integrate schools still segregated more than 20 years after the historic Brown v Board of Education decision.
“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bussed to school every day, and that little girl was me,” Harris said.
The moment was powerful not only because of the imagery of the seasoned politician coming face-to-face with the adult version of a little girl directly affected by his policy positions. It was also powerful because of the brief debate which followed over the role of the federal government in intervening when states fail to protect civil rights. In that exchange, Biden demonstrated not only his age but his political inclinations by defending local authority over federal remedies such as bussing.
In doing so, Biden was essentially echoing the “states’ rights” arguments of the avowed segregationists whom he was accused of praising just one week earlier.
Harris was not the only one to challenge Biden, which was to be expected given Biden’s status as the clear frontrunner at this stage of the campaign. Representative Eric Swalwell reminded Biden of his own words from 32 years earlier as he challenged the former vice-president to “pass the torch” to younger generations. Senator Bernie Sanders criticized Biden for his 2002 vote in favor of the Iraq war, and Senator Michael Bennet undermined Biden’s 2012 example of his negotiation skills by raising the point that Biden helped Republicans to extend the controversial Bush tax cuts.
Biden had some self-inflicted wounds as well. On two occasions as the moderators asked direct yes or no questions to the candidates, Biden’s responses were confusing. One such question was on whether the candidates would decriminalize immigrants who crossed the US border, and the moderator José DÃaz-Balart was forced to ask the question not once, not twice, but three times before getting an answer from Biden.
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His response – that immigrants who had not committed any other crimes “should not be the focus of deportation” – never truly answered the question, as Biden left open the possibility that although such immigrants might not be the focus of deportation, they could still be thrown out of the country.
Sanders, who among those on the stage Thursday night was trailing only Biden in most polling data, was well situated to take advantage of Biden’s missteps. However, Sanders often seemed to give the same answer regardless of the question. From healthcare to climate change, Sanders provided his trademark responses about the need to take on Wall Street, the insurance companies and billionaires. In fact, in his closing remarks he reminded the audience that “nothing will ever change” unless we have the guts to take on big business.
It is not likely that Sanders lost ground during the debate, but neither did he do much to strengthen his case. Given the recent surge of Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is largely assumed to be picking off some of Sanders’ support, this means that his performance was unsuccessful.
Meanwhile, South Bend’s mayor, Pete Buttigieg, had a steady night as he gave clear and thoughtful answers to most questions. When asked a tough question regarding the recent shooting of a black man by a member of Buttigieg’s police force, Buttigieg admitted that he had failed to get the job done in his response. It could have been one of the more memorable moments from the debate, but the moment was lost when Swalwell asked the question that is on the mind of many black residents in the city of South Bend: “Why didn’t you fire the police chief?”
Buttigieg did not have a persuasive answer, and what had been a moment of sincerity became a painful reminder that too often those who have the power to address the ills of structural racism simply fail to use all of the tools at their disposal.
It was that question to Buttigieg which led to the exchange between Harris and Biden, as Harris reminded the moderators that as the only black person on the stage she certainly had something to say. And what she went on to say could very well change the direction of the campaign.
Cliff Albright is the cofounder of the Black Voters Matter Fund"
Kamala Harris just changed the direction of the presidential race | Cliff Albright
Opinion | Trump’s Ignorant Comments About Japan Were Bad Even for Him
"President Trump reserves some of his worst behavior for foreign trips, such as abasing himself before President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Helsinki a year ago, skipping a ceremony in France last fall to honor American soldiers killed in World War I (too rainy, the White House said) and insulting the mayor of London earlier this month. Yet even by Mr. Trump’s dismal standards, his performance this week before the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, should take everyone’s breath away. More than yet another demonstration of his erratic behavior, this was also an object lesson in the dangers of his context-free hostility to the world beyond the United States.
Before arriving in Japan, Mr. Trump had reportedly been musing about withdrawing the United States from the security treaty with Japan signed in 1951 and revised in 1960 — the cornerstone of the alliance between the United States and Japan and a pillar of American foreign policy. On Wednesday, asked about the treaty on Fox News, Mr. Trump sneered, “If Japan is attacked, we will fight World War III.” Then he added: “But if we’re attacked, Japan doesn’t have to help us at all. They can watch it on a Sony television.”
Mr. Trump’s comment demonstrates a strategic cluelessness and historical ignorance that would disqualify a person from even a modest desk job at the State Department.
Though Mr. Trump implied that the security treaty favors Japan, it was largely dictated by the United States. After Imperial Japan surrendered to the Allies in August 1945, ending World War II, the country was placed under an American-led occupation overseen by the domineering Gen. Douglas MacArthur. When that occupation ended in April 1952, Japan had turned away from militarism to embrace ideals of pacifism and democracy. Under Article 9 of a new Constitution that was originally drafted in English at MacArthur’s headquarters, Japan renounced war and pledged never to maintain land, sea or air forces.
In the 1951 security treaty that Mr. Trump apparently disparages, the United States, from a position of extraordinary dominance over Japan, got pretty much what it wanted. Japan granted the United States the exclusive right to post land, air and sea forces in and around Japan, which the United States could use to defend Japan against armed attack or against Soviet-instigated riots. In a revised 1960 treaty, it was made clear that if Japan was attacked, the United States would defend it. For much of the Cold War, a democratic Japan became the core of American alliances in Asia, a bulwark against Communism in the Soviet Union and China.
Furthermore, Mr. Trump insults his Japanese hosts by overlooking how Japan actually responded when the United States was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. The Japanese public grieved for their American allies after the terrorist attacks, which also killed some Japanese citizens. Japan’s conservative and pro-American prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, took the massacre as an opportunity to reconsider Article 9 and urge his country to shoulder more international responsibilities. His government rammed through an antiterrorism law which enabled Japan’s Self-Defense Force to provide support for the American campaign in Afghanistan, although — because of the country’s official pacifism — without fighting or directly supporting combat operations.
When President George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, Mr. Koizumi was one of his staunchest foreign supporters. Although Japan remained constitutionally forbidden from joining in the invasion or taking a direct military role, Mr. Koizumi’s government passed a special law allowing the Self-Defense Force to help in humanitarian support missions in postwar Iraq. Hundreds of Japanese ground troops in Iraq provided water and medical help, and fixed roads and buildings. One might reasonably fault Mr. Koizumi, as plenty of Japanese do, for going along with Mr. Bush’s disastrous invasion — but it is far harder to blame Japan, as Mr. Trump does, for not standing alongside the United States.
Mr. Trump’s words are also a pointless slap to Japan’s right-wing prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who has ardently sought to cultivate a relationship with Mr. Trump and is trying to mediate a way out of the crisis between the United States and Iran. The 1960 treaty was signed by Mr. Abe’s grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, another prime minister. During a four-day state visit to Japan in May, Mr. Abe flattered Mr. Trump with an extraordinary meeting with Japan’s new emperor, a sumo wrestling match and a lavish state banquet at the Imperial Palace. Yet standing next to Mr. Abe at a news conference in Tokyo, Mr. Trump shrugged off Japanese fears about North Korea’s recent tests of short-range ballistic missiles that could kill thousands of Japanese civilians.
What could Mr. Trump possibly hope to gain from his ignorant, ungrateful and antagonistic behavior? He is unlikely to withdraw from the security treaty. Yet by questioning the alliance with Japan, Mr. Trump encourages North Korea and a rising China to test that bond. His words undercut an essential alliance for no evident reason and erode the stability of a strategic region torn by rivalry.
And we are all so used to it by now that it barely registers.
Gary J. Bass is a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton and the author, most recently, of “The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide.”
Opinion | Trump’s Ignorant Comments About Japan Were Bad Even for Him
Friday, June 28, 2019
Why Black Voters Will Vote for Biden - The Atlantic
"When Kamala Harris laid into Joe Biden in last night’s debate, she knew what she was doing. In a speech earlier this month, the former vice president had reminisced about being able to work with die-hard segregationists when he was a young senator from Delaware. In sharply criticizing those remarks, and his past position against school busing, Harris was trying to convince the Democratic Party’s most reliable voters—African Americans—that Biden isn’t as strong on civil rights as many of them thought.
In early polls of the 2020 Democratic presidential field, Biden has held a strong lead among African American voters—an outcome that, to some, might seem surprising when two black senators, Harris and Cory Booker, are also running. While progressives on Twitter were appalled by Biden’s speech, many in the Congressional Black Caucus downplayed the former vice president’s comments or defended him outright. Nor did the dustup hurt Biden at the grassroots level, either. In a recent report from South Carolina, a key primary state where nearly two-thirds of Democratic-primary voters are black, CNN found that support for the former vice president was holding steady.
These are signs that the controversies that blow up on social media haven’t changed the fundamental political calculations of African American voters—calculations whose savviness and complexity are only dimly understood and often entirely ignored by campaigns, political commentators, and the voting public alike. The historically large and diverse 2020 presidential field provides a unique opportunity to observe the process by which the black electorate settles on candidates."
More by Theodore R. Johnson
Why Black Voters Will Vote for Biden - The Atlantic
Rev. Jesse Jackson says Biden was on 'the wrong side of history' with busing
"In my judgment, it was the wrong side of history," the Rev. Jesse Jackson said about Joe Biden's past stance against busing. | Streeter Lecka/Getty Images
The Rev. Jesse Jackson knocked Joe Biden for his past views on busing, saying the former vice president used to be on "the wrong side of history."
Ahead of Biden's Friday afternoon appearance at the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, Jackson said on CNN that he would press the Democratic front-runner on his positions and defense of states' rights when it comes to civil rights.
The heightened scrutiny of Biden's stance on busing comes after the second round of debates Thursday night, when California Sen. Kamala Harris hit him on his record, referring to her own experience as a child bused to a better school.
As a senator in the 1970s, Biden stood against federally mandated busing as the best way to integrate schools. In the debate, he reiterated: “I did not oppose busing in America. What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education.” Biden had also recently talked to wealthy donors about finding common ground when he was a U.S. senator to work with known segregationists in the Senate.
"I don't know why he took that side of history, but I think he's changed," Jackson said. "The oldest show of dismissing, of being insensitive of the need to heal, exalting Clarence Thomas was a big mistake."
He went on to say about Biden's past stance against busing: "In my judgment, it was the wrong side of history."
In his CNN appearance, Jackson also equated the protection of states' rights to "when Trump says 'make America great again.'" He pointed to the lynching of black Americans, voting rights and health care, and said it was necessary for the federal government to intervene to stop human rights violations.
Jackson and Biden have history: After a failed presidential campaign in 1984, Jackson launched a second run in 1988, when he faced off with Biden, who had told a mostly black audience to reject Jackson's candidacy. But Jackson said that over the years, Biden has grown in the positions he's taken — and that the former vice president just wasn't prepared for an attack from Harris.
"We hope he's outgrown those problems, but his competition will force him in the primary to deal with that," Jackson said."
Rev. Jesse Jackson says Biden was on 'the wrong side of history' with busing
Joe Biden's controversial history with school busing. Biden clearly opposed court-ordered busing and sided with segregationists.
. Biden clearly opposed court-ordered busing and sided with segregationists.
Thursday, June 27, 2019
Who’s behind the law making undocumented immigrants criminals? An ‘unrepentant white supremacist.’
Migrants mainly from Central America guide their children through the entrance of a World War II-era bomber hangar in Deming, N.M. (Cedar Attanasio/AP)The provision of federal law criminalizing unlawful entry into the United States — which some Democratic presidential candidates now want to undo — was crafted by an avowed white supremacist who opposed the education of black Americans and favored lynching, which he justified by saying, “to hell with the Constitution.”
The law, referred to as Section 1325, became a flash point in the first of two Democratic presidential debates this week, when Julián Castro, a former secretary of housing and urban development, challenged his rivals to back its repeal. The measure’s little-known history did not arise on Wednesday night in Miami, where the first cohort of Democrats vying to compete against President Trump took the stage. No one mentioned Sen. Coleman Livingston Blease.
But the legacy of the criminal lawyer and neo-Confederate politician from South Carolina hangs over the 2020 election. Blease was the architect of Section 1325, the part of Title 8 of the United States Code that makes it a misdemeanor to enter the country without authorization.
The statute, adopted in 1929, is the basis for Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which his administration used to justify separating families at the border. And as the contestants in Wednesday’s debates sought to burnish their images as opponents of that policy, it was the call for Section 1325′s repeal that became one of the starkest dividing lines in a crowded field.
Castro’s quest for the statute’s annulment forms part of his “People First Immigration” plan unveiled in April. Some, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Cory Booker of New Jersey, have backed the idea.
“The reason that they’re separating these little children from their families is that they’re using Section 1325 of that act, which criminalizes coming across the border, to incarcerate the parents, and then separate them,” Castro said from the debate stage. “Some of us on this stage have called to end that section, to terminate it.”
Others, he added, singling out his fellow Texan, former congressman Beto O’Rourke, have not.
That Section 1325 got airtime on Wednesday indicates its significance in American political history, according to Kelly Lytle Hernández, a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles and the author of a 2017 book that exposes the explicit racial motivations for the statute.
“I’m thankful to hear it’s being brought to the surface,” Hernández, author of “City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965,” said in an interview with The Washington Post. “One of the things that this president has gifted us is the opportunity to finally talk about what immigration control and immigration law is in the United States. There is no immigration reform without grappling with the hold that Jim Crow has on our immigration regime.”
The influence of Jim Crow on the nation’s immigration laws is personified by Blease, whom Hernández called an “unrepentant white supremacist.” His ideas gained currency as part of a larger effort to enforce racial exclusion a century ago, including through national origin quotas and a complete ban on immigrants from Asia. That system was scrapped during the civil rights era, but criminal penalties for unlawful entry remain.
“The world that Blease imagined in 1929 is very much the world in which we’re living,” Hernández said.
Coleman Livingston Blease was a state legislator, governor and Democratic senator from South Carolina. (Library of Congress)Coleman Livingston Blease was born in 1868 in the foothills of South Carolina, raised near the mill town of Newberry. Tall and slender, he walked with a swift gait. A felt hat with a broad rim covered a shock of dark hair, which matched his prominent mustache.
Asking voters to call him “Coley,” Blease entered politics as a protege of Benjamin Tillman, the white supremacist governor and senator from South Carolina who would go on to denounce his former disciple for his extreme populism, saying, “Catiline among the Romans and Aaron Burr among the Americans are the only other men I have ever read of who were equal to Blease in bamboozling the people.”
“He is a past master in the arts of a demagogue,” Tillman added. “He knows full well that when the angry passions of the masses are aroused they lose their reason.”
Casting himself as an ally of poor whites, including textile workers in upper South Carolina, Blease became a state legislator in 1890 and the governor in 1911. He was a Southern Democrat, in favor of segregation, before party realignment in the second half of the 20th century.
Blease defended violence against people he called racially inferior, saying a band of white men had done “exactly right” for whipping blacks, saying that “the morals and the mode of living between colored people are not up to the standard adopted and lived up to by the white people.”
Blease defended lynching, dismissing legal concerns with vigilante justice.
“Whenever the Constitution comes between me and the virtue of the white women of the South, I say to hell with the Constitution,” he argued.
Blease had similar scorn for the judgments of courts, which he said served mainly to prop up the rich. Before resigning the governorship in 1915, he pardoned more than 1,000 state prisoners, among them a man convicted of murdering his wife, as well as many of his former clients who had enlisted his services as a well-known defense attorney.
Blease won election to the Senate in 1924, bringing his campaign of racial agitation in Washington. He proposed prohibiting interracial marriage by constitutional amendment. Incensed by the decision of the first lady, Lou Hoover, to invite the black wife of a congressman to tea at the White House, he offered a resolution demanding that the president and his wife “remember that the house in which they are temporarily residing is the ‘White House.' "
Many of Blease’s efforts were fool’s errands, Hernández notes in her book. He was less intent on shaping policy than on riding a “wave of anti-black racism” coursing through the country. One of his biographers wrote that he harbored “Negro-phobia that knew no bounds.”
In 1929, however, as Congress strained to develop a policy on Mexican immigration, Blease became the broker of a compromise between nativists and a faction protective of business interests that required cheap labor.
As a result, he was able to transform American immigration law, which bears his imprint to this day.
“Blease shifted the conversation to controlling unauthorized Mexican migration rather than capping authorized migration,” as Hernández’s account explains. “Citing the large number of unauthorized border crossings made by Mexicans each year, Senator Blease proposed criminalizing unlawful entry into the United States.”
His bill was approved in March 1929, yielding Section 1325. By 1939, United States attorneys had prosecuted more than 44,000 cases of unlawful entry, as Hernández chronicles.
In the decades that followed, law enforcement often pursued other priorities, deciding that prosecuting a stream of misdemeanor cases was not worth the time or resources. Immigrants caught crossing the border without authorization could still be returned, as they were before criminalization.
Prosecution was stepped up during the George W. Bush administration, in response to an increase in border crossings. Supporters of such an approach argue that it is necessary to deter unlawful entry, said Tom K. Wong, an associate professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego and an adviser to the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders during the Obama administration. But the evidence is not conclusive on that point, he maintained, while the costs have been significant.
Meanwhile, abandoning the criminal classification of unlawful entry, and treating it instead as a civil infraction, could be “immensely consequential for undocumented immigrants,” Wong said. For one, it would prevent large-scale detention and end the practice of separating children from their parents, as the adults would no longer face criminal proceedings.
Critics of Section 1325 also argue that the statute deters migrants from turning themselves in to immigrant officials, which is necessary to claim asylum. Those who do not favor its repeal say it is possible to overhaul the country’s immigration system and do away with “zero tolerance,” while maintaining criminal penalties.
“You’re looking at just one small part of this,” O’Rourke told Castro. “I’m talking about a comprehensive rewrite of our immigration laws. And if we do that, I don’t think it’s asking too much for people to follow our laws when they come to this country.”
Hernández sees benefit in the discussion, which could cast light on the “extraordinary power of federal law enforcement” in the area of immigration, she said, where “what we presume to be people’s constitutional rights can be violated.”
But she is ultimately skeptical about the likelihood of ambitious changes.
“I think it’s more likely that we would satisfy ourselves with fairly moderate reforms to our immigration laws rather than thinking more broadly about how the economic system, political system and military system dictate the flow of human beings around the globe,” she said.
Blease’s transgressions are easy to recognize today. And yet, Hernández said, “there are many Bleases.”
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