Integration Through Busing
During his visit to China between February 21 and 28, 1972, the Chinese government held diplomatic talks with President Richard Nixon and encouraged his tour of monuments. This trip coincided with federal court rulings in support of using busing to integrate American schools. Pat Oliphant drew Nixon sitting down, having some tea, and taking some advice from China's Supreme Chairman Mao Zedong about the school busing problem. He humorously presents a democratic son asking his totalitarian, communist father for advice. The cartoonist may be critiquing Nixon’s anti-busing position because he points out that only Nixon faced re-election.
~Ian Ellis
Before Richard Nixon's first-ever visit to the Peoples' Republic of China (PRC), he gave some opinions on the very controversial use of busing to end school segregation. Nixon declared his opposition to the idea of busing to integrate school children as it gave the federal government more power over people’s lives. While many Americans agreed with Nixon, his statement was not received well by those who had protested in the civil rights movement. To the annoyance of his administration, the issue followed him on his visit to the communist state. MacNelly contrasts the ideological positions between the two men by inferring that Chairman Mao would approach integrated busing much differently than Nixon.
~Ian Ellis
Don Hesse draws a concerned, distraught and weary looking Uncle Sam in his cartoon critical of integrating urban districts by busing students between urban and suburban schools. Uncle Sam symbolizes a worried nation skeptical of the antics of federal court judges behaving as goofy children. The sight gag in this cartoon portrays a judge literally “playing” with buses in order to forcibly integrate schools. These judges supported local governments trying to fulfill the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to end segregation in schools. This was made especially difficult by white Americans leaving the cities to create white-only communities in the suburbs. Hesse reflected the position of these Americans who did not want to solve the problem of racism by busing their children to urban public schools. He also reflected a distrust in the role of federal judges in making decisions impactful of everyday life—an attitude still pervasive in contemporary society.
~ Charles Langeberg
This cartoon by Tom Engelhardt criticizes the use of busing to integrate schools. The cartoonist shows a man dressed as a judge running away from a crashed school bus. The bus first crashed into a school and then struck a building labeled courts. Just as the bus destroyed the buildings, the decision by lower court judges in support of “forced busing” would destroy these institutions. The bus is crashing for dramatic and comedic effect. While the St. Louis school district did not experience conflict over plans to integrate their schools with busing, other communities did. For example, in Detroit, government officials developed a multi-district desegregation plan to integrate schools throughout the metropolitan area via busing children to non-neighborhood schools. The Supreme Court invalidated this plan in the case Milliken v. Bradley in 1974. Essentially, they ruled that because suburban school districts did not cause segregation, they do not have to participate in the resolution of the problem. Ironically, schools today are more segregated than they were in the 1970s.
~ Charles Langeberg