The Supreme Court’s Brown decision in 1954 left unresolved the methods by which desegregation should be carried out. Schooling presented especially difficult problems.

Since students have generally been assigned to the school nearest their homes, even if deliberate segregation is not practiced by school boards it may still reflect residential patterns. These patterns may be a legacy of segregation as black neighborhoods often clustered around black schools and white neighborhoods did likewise. But it could also follow from residential practices like restrictive covenants, common in northern cities, which kept African Americans out of certain neighborhoods and so, de facto, kept schools segregated. In a series of decisions (for example, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg, 1971, and Keyes v. School District No. 1, 1972), the Supreme Court determined that students needed to be moved from one school to another in order to desegregate them. Busing became the basis for accomplishing this goal.

The decision to bus children away from their local schools, not merely in the South, caused great anger and led to violent demonstrations, most notably in Boston. It became one of the key elements in the backlash against the Civil Rights movement, provoking the swing of the white ethnic urban vote to the Republican Party and Nixon (who appointed anti-integrationists to the Supreme Court). Often overlooked in discussions of busing is the pivotal case of Milliken v. Bradley, in which the Nixon appointees kept the process of desegregation from extending from the local district to the state level, refusing to acknowledge that suburbs had developed through “white flight” to establish de facto segregation of inner-city residents. Not including the suburbs in the process of integration, the federal courts left the poorest whites and blacks to fight over limited city resources. Busing failed and segregation haunts both urban and suburban public schools.