Ed Brooke, a Massachusetts Republican, was the first black senator ever to be popularly elected; Joe Biden was a freshman Democratic senator from Delaware. By 1975, both had compiled liberal voting records. But that year, Biden sided with conservatives and sponsored a major anti-busing amendment. The fierce debate that followed not only fractured the Senate’s bloc of liberals, it also signified a more wide-ranging political phenomenon: As white voters around the country—especially in the North—objected to sweeping desegregation plans then coming into practice, liberal leaders retreated from robust integration policies.
Biden was at the forefront of this retreat: He had expressed support for integration and—more specifically—busing during his Senate campaign in 1972, but once elected, he discovered just how bitterly his white constituents opposed the method. In 1973 and 1974, Biden began voting for many of the Senate’s anti-busing bills, claiming that he favored school desegregation, but just objected to “forced busing.”
Then, as a court-ordered integration plan loomed over Wilmington, Delaware, in 1974, Biden’s constituents transformed their resistance to busing into an organized—and angry—opposition. So Biden transformed, too. That year, Joe Biden morphed into a leading anti-busing crusader—all the while continuing to insist that he supported the goal of school desegregation, he only opposed busing as the means to achieve that end.
This stance, which many of Biden’s liberal and moderate colleagues also held, was clever but disingenuous. It enabled Biden to choose votes over principles, while acting as if he was not doing so.
History has not been kind to the defenders of school busing. Indeed, busing was problematic—as it transported children long distances away from nearby schools. But to say most whites objected to busing because it was inconvenient would be wrong. The truth is that many of them were not comfortable with the racial change that busing brought.
By the dawn of the 1970s, Southern schools were finally beginning to integrate. Though the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision had outlawed “separate but equal” schools, it wasn’t until the court’s lesser-known 1969 ruling in Alexander v. Holmes County that many Southern school districts actually implemented desegregation plans. In response to these legal mandates, judges started to order busing plans in some Southern cities.
Meanwhile, Northern schools still remained thoroughly segregated. Housing segregation frequently produced segregated schools, and many urban school boards enacted transfer and redistricting policies to keep them that way. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, African American parents in the North filed lawsuits in protest. They alleged that their children had been denied equal educational opportunity, forced to attend schools that were underfunded and racially segregated. The result of these legal actions in both the North and the South was a truly nationwide debate—spanning from Denver and Detroit to Charlotte and Boston—in which federal district courts often held that busing was the only surefire way to integrate schools.