The Collapse of the Civil Rights Coalition: Congress and the Politics of Antibusing Legislation
Keywords:
responsible, segregation, implement, separate but equalAbstract
The legislative coalition responsible for passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act did not set out to use busing as a means to end school segregation. When it came time to implement relevant portions of the law, however, busing became the primary method for reversing “separate but equal” education. In this paper, we provide a legislative policy history detailing the unanticipated, but nearly two-decade long, congressional battle over busing. Through a detailed examination of congressional hearings, floor debate, and roll-call votes, we shed light on the collapse of the pro-civil rights coalition responsible for the landmark achievements of the early 1960s. In its place emerged a new, bipartisan, and interregional bloc of lawmakers—led by southern Democrats and Republicans but joined by a pivotal group of (ostensibly liberal) northern Democrats—who were opposed to efforts by the Supreme Court and administrative state to end school segregation in the North as well as the South.
References
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E.g., see Lassiter, The Silent Majority; Geismer, Don't Blame Us; Ronald P. Formisano, Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
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16
E.g., see Paul Frymer, “Acting When Elected Officials Won't: Federal Courts and Civil Rights Enforcement in U.S. Labor Unions, 1935–1985,” American Political Science Review 97 (August 2003): 483–99; Nicholas Pedriana and Robin Stryker, “The Strength of a Weak Agency: Enforcement of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Expansion of State Capacity, 1965–1971,” American Journal of Sociology 110 (November 2004): 709–60; Robert C. Lieberman, Shaping Race Policy: The United States in Comparative Perspective (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Sean Farhang, “The Political Development of Job Discrimination Legislation, 1963–1976,” Studies in American Political Development 23 (April 2009): 23–60.
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19
For more on Congress’ decision to embrace “separate but equal” schools, see Jeffery A. Jenkins and Justin Peck, “The Blair Education Bill: A Lost Opportunity in American Public Education,” Studies in American Political Development 35 (April 2021): 146–70.
20
Gerald Rosenberg, The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 42.
