Experiment in Integration

Joel Achenbach has a meditation on being the nine-year-old Boy on The Bus in Gainesville Florida in 1970. It's more personal than political, but I think he is disappointed at how little was accomplished as a result. Segregation has returned to a significant extent and now the Roberts court has rejected much of the premise.

Every morning when I was in fifth grade, I walked a mile down the road to Stephen Foster Elementary, my neighborhood school. Then I got on a yellow school bus and rode across town. The Supreme Court had issued a desegregation order. It was 1970. Men had landed on the moon twice. Now white kids and black kids would go to the same schools.

...

It was, in retrospect, an ambitious social experiment. It was also clumsy, and at some level outrageous, reducing all of us to a single characteristic of white or black.

For me it was ultimately a good experience, a chance to

get outside the bubble of the white Southern Baptist neighborhood where my eccentric Unitarian, single-parent family had always lived.

Joel Achenbach's long feature articles are some of the best stuff that appears in the WaPo. I wish there were more of them.

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