‘An integrated school environment’: Aged six, Kamala Harris was part of California push to end segregation – Washington Examiner

A searing confrontation between Kamala Harris and Joe Biden over his opposition to school busing in the 1970s has brought her childhood experience of busing to the center of the the 2020 Democratic primary battle.

The California senator, 54, tore into the former vice president over his 1970s fight against busing in his home state of Delaware.

Harris, born in October 1964, said busing — in which children were transported by bus so that schools would be racially integrated — gave her the opportunity to grow up equally in Berkeley, north of Oakland in the East Bay of San Francisco during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

She entered kindergarten in 1969. Berkeley’s public schools, which Harris attended, began implementing their integration plans in 1968.

While Berkeley had only one public high school at the time — meaning it was relatively racially integrated — the city’s middle schools and elementary schools were largely split along racial lines. Some schools, according to a 1963 census, were as much as over 97% white and 1.7% black.

The 1968 educational plan’s goal was to create “an integrated school environment that lessens prejudice and discrimination. Each class heterogeneous, reflecting the community’s racial, socio-economic and intellectual diversity.”

Harris wrote in her 2019 memoir: “I only learned later that we were part of a national experiment in desegregation with working-class black children from the flatlands being bused in one direction and wealthier white children from the Berkeley hills bused in the other.”

By 1977, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights praised Berkeley’s desegregation efforts, writing that the program was “implemented with relative ease.”

“Buses were on schedule, students met in homogeneous classes (at the elementary school levels,) parents socialized across racial lines and teachers did not resign en masse,” the commission wrote. “The number of racial incidents was minimal and very few could be traced to desegregation,” the report continued.

The California senator’s experience with Berkeley’s busing program contrasts with Biden making repeated efforts to stop similar programs in his home state of Delaware.

“I think the concept of busing … that we are going to integrate people so that they all have the same access and they learn to grow up with one another and all the rest, is a rejection of the whole movement of black pride,” Biden said in a 1972 interview.

Related coverage:

• Joe Biden embraced segregation in 1975, claiming it was a matter of ‘black pride’
• Joe Biden falsely claims: ‘I did not oppose busing in America’