In the 1960s, after decades of discrimination in housing had created an increasingly segregated school system in Seattle, civil rights activists wanted the School Board to promote integration and, with it, intercultural empathy and understanding. After various attempts to promote voluntary integration, and faced with the threat of legal action from advocates of integration, in 1972 the School District launched the first phase of what became a decades-long experiment with mandatory busing to integrate its schools. From 1978-1999 minorities ended up carrying the burden of busing, as nonwhite students from the South End were sent to the North End. The parents of white children were far more likely to manipulate the system and avoid an undesirable school assignment, or abandon the system altogether for the suburbs or for private schools. By 1999, critics deemed the busing program a failure, and that year, students were given the option to attend their neighborhood school. In 2007, the US Supreme Court ruled that Seattle Public Schools could not use race to assign students to schools, and that the busing program was unconstitutional.

In this image taken at the West Seattle High School auditorium during a Seattle School Board meeting, over 850 attendees argue the issue of mandatory busing to achieve racially balanced enrollments in schools.

Caption information source: The Seattle Times, October 15, 1970, page 4
Caption information source: "Busing in Seattle: A Well-Intentioned Failure," by Cassandra Tate, HistoryLink.org Essay 3939
Caption information also derived from captions written by Post-Intelligencer staff and attached to the back of the photograph.