The Week

Viking II beams back the information that the Plains of Utopia on which it landed are a barren, rocky, forbidding desert strikingly similar to the utopias of this planet.

Back to school, and how is busing doing? Just fine, says the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, in a bulletin of unaccustomed sweetness and light. It lists eight cities where desegregation-by-busing is proceeding apace, and in only two of those—Boston and Louisville—has there been any violence. Not so fine, says Joseph Kraft (who, incidentally, favors desegregation-by-busing). He compares the Commission’s cities with other cities which, with no explanation given, were left out of the survey. He finds that most of those studied had upward-moving “economies; none had a black population of more than 24 per cent. Had the Civil Rights Commission chosen to study Detroit, says Kraft, it would have found that the present court order “does not even touch the central part of the city where over 90 per cent of the blacks live”; in Baltimore, half the blacks go to schools that are 90 per cent or more black; in Philadelphia, there has never even been an attempt to mix the schools by court order. “By omission, accordingly, the commission report makes its true point. School desegregation, as we all know in our bones, is a basket case.”

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Viking II beams back the information that the Plains of Utopia on which it landed are a barren, rocky, forbidding desert strikingly similar to the utopias of this planet.

Back to school, and how is busing doing? Just fine, says the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, in a bulletin of unaccustomed sweetness and light. It lists eight cities where desegregation-by-busing is proceeding apace, and in only two of those—Boston and Louisville—has there been any violence. Not so fine, says Joseph Kraft (who, incidentally, favors desegregation-by-busing). He compares the Commission’s cities with other cities which, with no explanation given, were left out of the survey. He finds that most of those studied had upward-moving “economies; none had a black population of more than 24 per cent. Had the Civil Rights Commission chosen to study Detroit, says Kraft, it would have found that the present court order “does not even touch the central part of the city where over 90 per cent of the blacks live”; in Baltimore, half the blacks go to schools that are 90 per cent or more black; in Philadelphia, there has never even been an attempt to mix the schools by court order. “By omission, accordingly, the commission report makes its true point. School desegregation, as we all know in our bones, is a basket case.”