What is busing?

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

Basically, public school segregation was a problem (still is, but even moreso back then).

Non-white schools tended to get the short end of the stick when it came to funding, disadvantaging the non-white children who went there in the process.

But because neighborhoods were so heavily segregated, redrawing district and feeder zones often wasn't sufficient. So children were bused to schools that were often quite far from where they lived in order to achieve more racial balance. It would also be harder to treat predominantly minority schools differently from a funding standpoint if a sizable number of white kids went there.

Busing was more of a response to white flight than a cause of it. White flight started in the '40s and '50s when public housing in city centers began being developed and housing discrimination became harder to get away with.

Whites in the South tended to respond to busing by pulling their kids out of public school and opening private schools that were implicitly for whites only. These became known as "segregation academies" and were often affiliated with conservative Protestant church congregations. Go to any major city in the South and you'll notice that a lot of their private day schools opened in the 1960s and 1970s - private schools were virtually nonexistent in the South prior to that, save for a handful of elite boarding schools. Most of these schools still exist today and by and large still have disproportionately white student bodies.