The Boy on the Bus

"Things went very smoothly with the kids," he recalled. The teachers had some difficult adjustments. Many were called on a Sunday night and informed that they'd be working at a new school across town the next morning. Some had to teach subjects outside their expertise. Discipline could be tricky; some teachers were reluctant to paddle students of a different race.

Mr. Cliett told me something I'd forgotten: Every bus that first year had an adult along for the ride. To keep an eye on things and to ease parental nerves.

And we did have one incident, it turns out: On the last day of the year, older black kids from a junior high school threw rocks at the cars of some white parents. The cops came. The students were held in the classrooms until we got a police escort to the buses.

But for all the hysteria among adults, and the fulminations by racists, desegregation at Duval didn't prove traumatic for the students. It was, frankly, anticlimactic. Perhaps this is because children at that age have so much in common that race recedes into irrelevance.

Kind of like what you'd want for society writ large.

There were many things I didn't know then, or couldn't appreciate. Like the fact that Duval had been, for decades, a central element of the African American community. The principal, Mr. Jackson, lived in the neighborhood. Then, overnight, a school that was nearly 100 percent black turned something like 65 percent white. Kids who walked to Duval became minorities in their neighborhood school.

Meanwhile the "black" high school, Lincoln, had been closed, amid much protest and rage. Black students were dispersed to white schools amid flaring violence. The smooth transition at Duval wasn't the norm. And the court plan played favorites with elementary school kids: Only the older white kids, in fifth and sixth grade, were bused, but younger black children, in first through fourth grades, had to make the trek across town.

African Americans turned against busing, according to the Rev. Wright. When the schools began to segregate again, he said, "there was no real fight from the African American community."

Nationally, according to stastistics cited by Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer in his dissent in the recent integration case, one in six black students go to schools that are 99 to 100 percent minority. Additionally, three in four black and Latino students go to schools where most students are minority. Whites go to schools that are, on average, 80 percent white.

It's easy to find fault with the ham-fisted ways that the government deals with race. Shaping social interactions by bureaucratic fiat rarely works. There's something absurd about labeling people "white/nonwhite" or "black/other," the binary choices employed by the school systems that recently ran afoul of the Supreme Court. But all the talk about creating a "race-blind" society seems naive, too. Race-blindness can be used as an excuse to ignore difficult racial issues. A way to turn away from troublesome things.

If my 46-year-old self had a frank discussion with my 9-year-old self, I'd probably have to apologize for all that we didn't get done in the past four decades. I'd tell him how we got a little lazy, selfish, cynical. How segregation is oddly persistent after all these years. How we remain, not only in America but around the world, a stubbornly tribal species.

And if the 9-year-old pressed me for a solution?