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1971 school bussing protest

jypsee
 
Posts: 1247

1971 school bussing protest

Post Sat Jul 28, 2007 12:31 am


I was looking through my old negative files a few days ago and found some of a protest in Washington, DC that I hadn't looked at since I printed them...so I dragged out the scanner and scanned them. WAY easier than using an enlarger. Film is really a whole other realm of beauty, isn't it?

Anyhow, here's the link, if anyone wants to click on over ...

Image

rmlupu
 
Posts: 8

1971 school bussing protest

Post Sat Jul 28, 2007 1:56 pm


It is :D Thanks for putting them up, I looked through them and enjoyed the trip back in time. Which film was it?

llung
 
Posts: 252


Post Sat Jul 28, 2007 3:04 pm


Great photos, but I don't understand the controversy. Did the policy force students to attend schools outside their own neighbourhoods?

jypsee
 
Posts: 1247

answers

Post Sat Jul 28, 2007 5:35 pm


The film is Kodak Plus X Pan, don't know the ASA rating. The lens was a 50mm, which was the only lens I owned. I had a darkroom and developed, enlarged, and printed all my own stuff. That picture of the Black gentleman and the white woman at the top of the stairs about to enter whatever building was assigned for the hearing was published by some, mostly local, newspapers because it illustrated, for the white community, that Negroes had as much to bear as whites did when their children were bussed out of their neighborhoods to schools in another part of town. I was on this bus trip as a member of the people protesting because I had bought a house right across the street from the elementary school my six year old son would be attending and the bussing order meant that he would be going across the street and boarding a city bus that I had to pay for and taken to another neighborhood to go to school. That was my reason for being AGAINST bussing (and I still am against it).

The controversy started in the 1954 Supreme Court decision that schools must be equal, not separate and equal, because the schools relied (and still do) on property taxes to fund them and the neighborhoods with people who made more money had more money for the schools. Anyhow, since just telling school districts to educate kids equally didn't produce any results (whites were on the school boards and in the government roles who distributed the money), the courts in some places ordered children bussed from their neighborhood schools to achieve a better racial balance. Most neighborhoods were fairly homogeneous because people like to live near other people who share their values, whites and blacks alike. (Ethnic neighborhoods is nothing new.)

That's a quickie, nutshell, explanation. You can read more here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._B ... plications

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desegregation_busing

thanks for the comments,
Mary

llung
 
Posts: 252


Post Sat Jul 28, 2007 6:04 pm


Thanks. I'm familiar with the Brown decision and the subsequent (often violent) desegration of schools. I think, though, that the controversy had more to do with combatting systemic racism than coping with the economic peculiarities of the way education is funded in the US. On the other hand, I could be wrong...

jypsee
 
Posts: 1247

economic peculiarities

Post Sat Jul 28, 2007 7:24 pm


are often the result of systemic racism... the way schools are funded is very much a product of a history of not wanting to give any "other" group access to the purse strings because money is power and power derives from information and education provides ways to USE information.

OTOH, groups who push for change often overlook the very real result of how that change impacts the individuals who must live with it. At the heart of the matter is what's good for the "group" is often hard on the "person."

Anyhow, I'm not here to debate public policy or racism or philosophy ... so that's about it from me.

llung wrote:Thanks. I'm familiar with the Brown decision and the subsequent (often violent) desegration of schools. I think, though, that the controversy had more to do with combatting systemic racism than coping with the economic peculiarities of the way education is funded in the US. On the other hand, I could be wrong...


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