Summary Of Busing By Matthew Delmont

Matthew Delmont’s book challenges us to rethink the history of “busing,” Delmont intentionally places in quotation marks to show its importance . Before Brown v. Board of Ed in 1954, riding the bus was only for white children. School integration movement headed up North during the 60’s, and white people did not like this so they made the issue about busing. This allowed white people to stop school integration and use different terms to not sound racist or bigoted. Delmont examines how the media went along with this new racist idea. The media convinced people that the poor blacks would corrupt their children's education and spouted lies throughout every medium of news. Delmont tells us that we need to look past the large cases and national

This is very unique and different from most books, the way it can switch from national to local is very interesting. The book starts with local battles and issues in some of our major cities. New York is interesting because of the large amount of segregation still in its schools, you can not help to think that this might be caused by the busing issue of the 60’s and 70’s. The book then expands to show the national scale and the politics behind the issue of busing, it shows the major networks pushing anti-busing down the throats of the white middle class. The first chapter analyzed New York City minorities coming together to stop school segregation, it also shows the white side which wanted to keep this segregation place. Delmont explains how these minority protests affected the way northern congress members discussed the Civil Rights Act. Northern members of Congress were okay with the desegregation in the South, but fought to keep their states from integrated busing. Southern members of congress pointed out this hypocrisy and made it a part of their counter-argument to stop desegregation in the south. These congressmen were correct, the hypocrisy was unreal and almost laughable. The media would never show these large protests or hear their side of things, they would only show the small white protests. These large minority protests really made noise in their communities but were ignored by the national