70 Year Magazine Archive

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■ The Senate has voted unanimously to prohibit those killer bees from entering the country. Glad that’s taken care of.

■ All along the line the signs multiply that forced busing has had it. The city of Detroit may face another round of it this fall because of judicial intransigence, but the black mayor, Coleman A. Young, is opposed, and so is the white editor of the Free Press, who asks editorially: “Have we not reached the point in Detroit, in terms of the shrinkage of the white minority, where the remedies applied in earlier cases are simply irrelevant and, in sober truth, no remedies at all?” Elsewhere, too, white flight has produced resegregation, and the buses are grinding to a halt. In the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood recently, a judge permitted the busing plan to be scrapped because of white flight. In Montgomery, Alabama, the U.S. Court of Appeals refused to review a Federal District judge’s decision that Montgomery could run educational facilities that are 90 per cent black. The New York State Board of Regents is reviewing the situation and will probably try to block enforcement of busing orders in Buffalo, Lackawanna, Mount Vernon, Utica, and Newburgh. James Coleman, the sociologist whose 1966 report provided the leading rationale for busing, has now produced a new report indicating that busing is counterproductive. One more simplistic and visionary scheme, backed by the best and the brightest, appears about to disappear into the dustbin of history. How many people have been needlessly embittered, inconvenienced, injured, or even killed because of this one?

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