Delmont - How Busing Became "Massive"
Nixon’s administration only announced two days earlier that the speech would be a televised address and did not release the customary advanced copy of the speech to the media. All of the networks carried the address, but with limited time for commentators to analyze the text of the speech, Nixon was able to present his views on busing with almost no critical commentary. Senator and Democratic Presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey called the speech a “TV commercial” for antibusing views, and Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP, criticized Nixon for using his televised address to speak “as a committed advocate of one side of a major national controversy” and wrote to ABC, CBS, and NBC to request equal time to reply. As Nixon’s critics understood, the President was in a unique position to shape the debate over busing and through television he used this power to normalize resistance to federal court school desegregation orders.
Nixon speech reached a national audience that was already familiar with the battles over busing for school desegregation taking place across the country. Protests against city-level voluntary busing programs in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia garnered media attention in the mid-1960s, as did the first state anti-busing law passed in New York in 1969. By 1972, federal courts ordered cities like Charlotte, Denver, Nashville, and Pasadena to implement plans to integrate their schools, most commonly by transporting students by school buses. Opposing politicians and parents focused their protests on “busing” rather than school integration and television news broadcasts brought these local school battles to a national audience.
In this speech and through the 1972 campaign, President Nixon referred to school desegregation orders as “massive busing” and television news commentators repeated this phrase regularly in their busing coverage. Reporters used “massive busing” as a politically neutral handle, but busing opponents understood it as an epithet to denounce what Nixon described as “courts [that] have gone too far” and have produced “anger, fear, and turmoil in local communities.” With “massive busing” opponents of school desegregation framed white families and neighborhoods as the victims of overreaching social planners, and the news media’s casual use of “massive busing” helped to establish this frame as the commonsense understanding of the busing debate. More importantly, however, anti-busing politicians and parents made busing “massive” through their savvy use of television news. Busing did not emerge as a hot button national political issue because the majority of American families experienced it, but rather, television news helped conservatives make busing into a recognizable issue that was easily vilified. From this perspective, it is impossible to understand busing as an urban/suburban political issue without understanding how television news framed the subject.
This essay shows how television news coverage of anti-busing protests by Florida Governor Claude Kirk and Pontiac housewife activist Irene McCabe made busing “massive” by establishing busing as a national issue. Rather than simply arguing that television news had a conservative bias, this essay explores how busing opponents proved more skilled at navigating television news than busing supporters. Busing opponents turned the conventions of television news—its emphasis on newsworthy events and crisis; its selective use of historical context; and its nominal political neutrality—to their advantage, staging television friendly protests that positioned mothers and children as victims of activist judges and federal bureaucrats, and framed their support for segregated neighborhoods and schools in the color-blind rhetoric of homeowners’ rights. For politicians who aspired to the national stage, like Florida Governor Claude Kirk, busing offered a recognizable issue on which to take a stand. When Kirk protested court-ordered busing by suspending a local school board in Manatee County (Bradenton, Florida) and appointing himself school superintendent, he was not only appealing to Florida voters but also to television viewers in cities like Nashville, St. Louis, and Seattle, many of whom wrote to convey their support. When Vice President Spiro Agnew complained that television network news “can elevate men from obscurity to national prominence within a week” he was referring to Black Power author and activist Stokely Carmichael, but television news also propelled grassroots anti-busing activists like Irene McCabe to national prominence. McCabe, who staged a widely covered six week march from Pontiac to Washington D.C. to protest busing, made frequent television appearances because networks deemed her newsworthy, not necessarily because newscasters agreed with her politics. Repeated television coverage turned relatively minor busing battles in Bradenton and Pontiac into national news and established Kirk and McCabe as icons of busing opposition in the early-1970s.
Understanding how conservative parents and politicians successfully used of television to lobby against the major civil rights issue of the 1970s builds on scholars like Aniko Bodroghkozy, Steven Classen, Herman Gray, and Sasha Torres who have shown the importance of television to the history and memory of the civil rights movement, as well as scholars of grassroots conservative politics like Donald Critchlow, Lisa McGirr, Michelle Nickerson, and Catherine Rymph. In this way, this essay contributes to scholarship on conservative media practices, which as television studies scholar Amanda Lotz recently noted in Cinema Journal, “remains limited.” The busing debate foregrounded competing ways of conceptualizing space (e.g., metropolitan school districts vs. neighborhood schools) and understanding how television framed these issues builds on the work of scholars like Anna McCarthy and Lynn Spigel who have explored the spatial relationships engendered by television, as well as historians such as Jack Dougherty, Ansley Erickson, Matthew Lassiter, and Jeanne Theoharis who examine the interconnections among schools, cites and suburbs, and local and national politics. My analysis of how Kirk and McCabe, working at the state and local levels, leveraged the specific characteristics of television news to reach national television audiences builds on work on television news and social movements by Bonnie Dow, Todd Giltin, Gaye Tuchman, as well as local histories of school desegregation and busing by historians like William Chafe, Davison Douglas, Ronald Formisano, Brett Gadsden, Tracy K’Meyer, Gregory Jacobs, and Robert Pratt. These angles of analysis are important, because despite important case studies on busing in metropolitan areas, social and political historians have not attended to the media strategies of anti-busing protestors or how television news framed local busing fights as part of a larger national story. Similarly, none of public policy scholar Gary Orfield’s extensive publications on busing and school desegregation make more than a passing mention of television, nor do the works of analysts, like Christine Rossell or David Armor, who argued against busing.
Focusing on television coverage of busing also offers a new angle from which to examine what historian Matthew Lassiter calls the “regional convergence” of southern and national politics. As Lassiter describes, the Nixon administration contributed to, and benefited from, a “regional convergence” of southern and national politics in which the rights and consumer preferences of white middle-class (largely suburban) homeowners were paramount. This political platform disavowed explicit appeals to anti-black racism in favor of color-blind rhetoric to justify segregated neighborhoods and schools. Nixon called these voters the “Silent Majority” (and elsewhere the “Forgotten Americans” and the “New American Majority”). Television coverage of busing played an important role in this regional convergence because newscasts made it clear that resistance to school integration was not unique to the South. Anti-busing protests in Louisville and Memphis looked a lot like protests in Cleveland and Seattle and television helped to make this regional convergence visible. Television networks, encouraged both by commercial interests and charges of liberal bias from the Nixon administration and other conservative critics, were invested in articulating their national reach to viewers and advertisers. Where the Nixon administration saw white suburban families as the “Silent Majority,” television news networks saw these same households as their largest and most profitable demographic. Nixon’s statements on busing, like the March 1972 speech, made this regional convergence explicit, emphasizing that cities and school districts in the “North, East, West, and South…have been torn apart in debate over this issue.” If television viewers watching Nixon’s speech needed evidence of the national reach of the busing issue, they only needed to watch the nightly news for an update on Irene McCabe’s 620-mile trek from Pontiac to Washington D.C. in support of a constitutional amendment sponsored by Norman Lent, a U.S. congressman from New York. Thanks to busing opponents like Kirk and McCabe, “massive busing” resonated as a shorthand critique of school desegregation because television viewers were already well versed in anti-busing protests before they ever considered busing in their own communities.
This essay shows how television news coverage of anti-busing protests by Florida Governor Claude Kirk and Pontiac housewife activist Irene McCabe made busing “massive” by establishing busing as a national issue. Rather than simply arguing that television news had a conservative bias, this essay explores how busing opponents proved more skilled at navigating television news than busing supporters. Busing opponents turned the conventions of television news—its emphasis on newsworthy events and crisis; its selective use of historical context; and its nominal political neutrality—to their advantage, staging television friendly protests that positioned mothers and children as victims of activist judges and federal bureaucrats, and framed their support for segregated neighborhoods and schools in the color-blind rhetoric of homeowners’ rights. For politicians who aspired to the national stage, like Florida Governor Claude Kirk, busing offered a recognizable issue on which to take a stand. When Kirk protested court-ordered busing by suspending a local school board in Manatee County (Bradenton, Florida) and appointing himself school superintendent, he was not only appealing to Florida voters but also to television viewers in cities like Nashville, St. Louis, and Seattle, many of whom wrote to convey their support. When Vice President Spiro Agnew complained that television network news “can elevate men from obscurity to national prominence within a week” he was referring to Black Power author and activist Stokely Carmichael, but television news also propelled grassroots anti-busing activists like Irene McCabe to national prominence. McCabe, who staged a widely covered six week march from Pontiac to Washington D.C. to protest busing, made frequent television appearances because networks deemed her newsworthy, not necessarily because newscasters agreed with her politics. Repeated television coverage turned relatively minor busing battles in Bradenton and Pontiac into national news and established Kirk and McCabe as icons of busing opposition in the early-1970s.
Understanding how conservative parents and politicians successfully used of television to lobby against the major civil rights issue of the 1970s builds on scholars like Aniko Bodroghkozy, Steven Classen, Herman Gray, and Sasha Torres who have shown the importance of television to the history and memory of the civil rights movement, as well as scholars of grassroots conservative politics like Donald Critchlow, Lisa McGirr, Michelle Nickerson, and Catherine Rymph. In this way, this essay contributes to scholarship on conservative media practices, which as television studies scholar Amanda Lotz recently noted in Cinema Journal, “remains limited.” The busing debate foregrounded competing ways of conceptualizing space (e.g., metropolitan school districts vs. neighborhood schools) and understanding how television framed these issues builds on the work of scholars like Anna McCarthy and Lynn Spigel who have explored the spatial relationships engendered by television, as well as historians such as Jack Dougherty, Ansley Erickson, Matthew Lassiter, and Jeanne Theoharis who examine the interconnections among schools, cites and suburbs, and local and national politics. My analysis of how Kirk and McCabe, working at the state and local levels, leveraged the specific characteristics of television news to reach national television audiences builds on work on television news and social movements by Bonnie Dow, Todd Giltin, Gaye Tuchman, as well as local histories of school desegregation and busing by historians like William Chafe, Davison Douglas, Ronald Formisano, Brett Gadsden, Tracy K’Meyer, Gregory Jacobs, and Robert Pratt. These angles of analysis are important, because despite important case studies on busing in metropolitan areas, social and political historians have not attended to the media strategies of anti-busing protestors or how television news framed local busing fights as part of a larger national story. Similarly, none of public policy scholar Gary Orfield’s extensive publications on busing and school desegregation make more than a passing mention of television, nor do the works of analysts, like Christine Rossell or David Armor, who argued against busing.
Focusing on television coverage of busing also offers a new angle from which to examine what historian Matthew Lassiter calls the “regional convergence” of southern and national politics. As Lassiter describes, the Nixon administration contributed to, and benefited from, a “regional convergence” of southern and national politics in which the rights and consumer preferences of white middle-class (largely suburban) homeowners were paramount. This political platform disavowed explicit appeals to anti-black racism in favor of color-blind rhetoric to justify segregated neighborhoods and schools. Nixon called these voters the “Silent Majority” (and elsewhere the “Forgotten Americans” and the “New American Majority”). Television coverage of busing played an important role in this regional convergence because newscasts made it clear that resistance to school integration was not unique to the South. Anti-busing protests in Louisville and Memphis looked a lot like protests in Cleveland and Seattle and television helped to make this regional convergence visible. Television networks, encouraged both by commercial interests and charges of liberal bias from the Nixon administration and other conservative critics, were invested in articulating their national reach to viewers and advertisers. Where the Nixon administration saw white suburban families as the “Silent Majority,” television news networks saw these same households as their largest and most profitable demographic. Nixon’s statements on busing, like the March 1972 speech, made this regional convergence explicit, emphasizing that cities and school districts in the “North, East, West, and South…have been torn apart in debate over this issue.” If television viewers watching Nixon’s speech needed evidence of the national reach of the busing issue, they only needed to watch the nightly news for an update on Irene McCabe’s 620-mile trek from Pontiac to Washington D.C. in support of a constitutional amendment sponsored by Norman Lent, a U.S. congressman from New York. Thanks to busing opponents like Kirk and McCabe, “massive busing” resonated as a shorthand critique of school desegregation because television viewers were already well versed in anti-busing protests before they ever considered busing in their own communities.