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.
At the beginning of the 1971-1972 school year, a Superior Court order delayed mandatory busing of middle school students for one year. The School District also began to offer transportation to students who lived outside of a two-mile radius from their school, but only in certain areas, leaving more than half of eligible students to find other means of transportation to school. Around 100 students and parents from the Rainier Vista Housing project protested the lack of busing to the new Dearborn Park School. The walk, they argued, exceeded 2 miles, and also included an unsafe stretch through a wooded area. This image shows a group of Rainier Vista children protesting the lack of busing to their school.
Caption information source: "Buses roll as Seattle schools open" by Constantine Angelos, Seattle Times, September 1, 1971, p. 49. 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.
