"With All Deliberate Speed."

Busing as a means of transporting students to public schools was nothing new, with about 43 percent of the nation's schoolchildren riding buses each day in the years 1972-1973. Busing children from school to school in order to provide school districts with racial balance, however, was new. Busing for large-scale desegregation purposes was started in 1971, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided that many school districts had not complied with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and its 1955 follow-up, wherein the justices had ordered desegregation "with all deliberate speed." In the South that mandate had produced some "freedom of choice" plans under which students were technically free to choose any school in the district and hence provide racial balance; in practice, however, most students stayed where they were, and most school districts stayed segregated. By 1971, however, in Swann...