Do you remember the Boston busing crisis?
Or do you just think you do?
[The following is a repeat of a previous post, somewhat edited.]
I thought I remembered it pretty well. But when I started to research the subject, the first articles I read puzzled me and made me doubt my memories. The articles were short, and concerned the black children bused in from Roxbury High to Southie and how terribly they were treated.
And that was absolutely true, of course; I recalled reading about that originally. But I also thought I remembered that the busing was reciprocal, and that it was this reverse busing in particular that raised the ire of the South Boston community, because their kids were bused out of their own neighborhoods to schools in the black ghetto. The low-income white kids of South Boston were the sacrificial lambs to the idea of desegregation; children of the white rich didn’t have to go anywhere.
I started to think that maybe my memory was faulty, but Wiki, of all things, came to my rescue by describing what others had not. Here’s the relevant passage, and the situation was even worse than I had remembered. To me, the only word to describe the particulars of this plan is “crazy” [emphasis mine]:
In one part of the plan, Garrity [the judge who had ordered it] decided that the entire junior class from the mostly poor white South Boston High School would be bused to Roxbury High School, a black high school in a ghetto. Half the sophomores from each school would attend the other, and seniors could decide what school to attend. David Frum asserts that South Boston and Roxbury were “generally regarded as the two worst schools in Boston, and it was never clear what educational purpose was to be served by jumbling them.”…The first day of the plan, only 100 of 1,300 students came to school at South Boston. Only 13 of the 550 South Boston juniors ordered to attend Roxbury showed up.
Think about it: how many parents of students at Wellesley High, for example, would have gladly sent their children to Roxbury High? Or even to South Boston High, for that matter? And how many black parents who lived in the suburbs would have willingly sent their kids to Roxbury High, either? Hypocrisy, they name is those who implemented this program:
Opponents personally attacked Garrity, claiming that because he lived in a white suburb, his own children were not affected by his ruling. The author of the busing plan, Robert Dentler, lived in the suburb of Lexington, which was unaffected by the ruling. It has been noted that the children of Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis attended school in Brookline, which was also unaffected, not being part of Boston. Garrity’s hometown of Wellesley welcomed a small number of black students under the METCO program that sought to assist in desegregating the Boston schools by offering places in suburban school districts to black students. However, most METCO students were from middle-class black families, and METCO was not available to poor white students from Boston. Another important difference in the suburbs was that white students there were not bused away from their neighborhoods, and towns were not under court order to enroll in the state-run program but did so voluntarily.
The Boston busing years were not only fraught with crises and violence and hysteria—as a little sidelight, they also ended up pretty much destroying the Boston public school system:
By the time the experiment with busing ended in 1988, the Boston school district had shrunk from 100,000 students to 57,000, only 15% of whom were white. Today the Boston Public Schools are 76% black and Hispanic, and 14% White. According to the 2000 census, Boston’s white (non-Hispanic) population is 54.48%, whereas Boston’s black and Hispanic populations together total 39.77%… In South Boston, a neighborhood found by U.S. News and World Report (October 1994) to have had the highest concentration of white poverty in the country, dropout rates soared, its poorer census tracts’ dropout rates superseding rates based on race and ethnicity citywide. South Boston, along with other poor and working class white census tracts of Charlestown and parts of Dorchester, saw an increase in control by organized crime and young deaths due to murder, overdose, and criminal involvement.
Nice going, everybody.
Especially Judge Garrity, who ordered the whole thing in what sounds like an irresponsible manner:
…[T]he plan’s ugliest element was the cross-town busing of children attending South Boston and Roxbury high schools, exchanging students from Boston’s most insular Irish Catholic neighborhood with students from the heart of the black ghetto.
The Master Plan, however, was only one of several options available to Garrity. For example, Boston school superintendent Frederick Gillis proposed an “open enrollment plan” that would have allowed families to send their children to any school in the city. This option would have been much more palatable to the public and far less costly than forced busing. But Garrity showed little interest. He gave the city only 11 weeks to prepare for the biggest social experiment in its history. Worse, six days after the court order, he unabashedly admitted he had not even read the Master Plan prior to ordering its implementation.
What’s that “the law is a ass” quote again?
More:
From its commanders to its foot soldiers, the anti-busing movement was dominated by women. They were mostly stay-at-home moms who wanted to regain control over their children’s lives. These women had long taken for granted that their children could attend the schools in their community, that they had choices concerning their children’s education…
Although the women’s movement was on the rise, the feminist establishment had no interest in the working-class woman’s struggle against forced busing. They were indifferent to the wailing mothers who where throwing themselves down in front of delivery trucks owned by the Boston Globe (the pro-busing newspaper) or fleeing from the dogs that police used to enforce curfews…
“Sometimes when I look out this window,” White reportedly said to an aide during one hellish day at the office, “I see Belfast out there.” Police had to escort and unload buses at several Boston high schools every morning and afternoon while snipers stood guard on the surrounding rooftops. Metal detectors were installed and troopers patrolled the cafeterias, hallways, and stairwells, and still racial brawls broke out daily. Garrity also ordered equal numbers of black and white police officers to guard the schools, provoking racial hostility even within the police force. “It’ll be lucky if the Boston police don’t kill each other before the day is out,” said one state trooper at the time. For three years, as many as 300 state police officers a day patrolled South Boston High. One teacher compared the school to a prison: “We can’t leave school, we can’t come early or on the weekends to do preparatory work. We are like prisoners. Everyday when I get up, it’s like getting up to go to prison.”
In some 400 orders, Garrity meddled in every aspect of the Boston Public Schools. He placed South Boston High into federal receivership and fired its popular principal. He decreed rigid racial quotas in faculty and administrative hiring. When one elementary school was converted to a middle school, Garrity issued an order requiring the urinals to be raised…
The upshot was a public school system nearly impossible to integrate because it became all black, pretty much (the article from which the following excerpts were taken was written in 1998 and is a policy review by Stanford’s Hoover Institution):
During Garrity’s tenure as de facto school superintendent, public-school enrollment dropped from 93,000 to 57,000 and the proportion of white students shrank from 65 percent of total enrollment to 28 percent. Seventy-eight school buildings closed their doors, including Roxbury High. Now whites make up 17 percent of public-school students; most of them attend one of the three selective “exam schools” like the Boston Latin School. Boston has been forced to lower its official threshold for the acceptable racial balance of each school from a minimum of 50 percent white in 1965 to a minimum of 9 percent white today…
Busing was imposed on citizens in the name of racial equality, but few public policies have harmed Boston’s black community more. Roxbury resident Loretta Roach is the chairwoman of the Citywide Educational Coalition, a group that supports public education. Roach bemoans the extent to which busing impedes black parental involvement in the “often faraway schools their children are bused to every morning.” Community support for public schools has also “evaporated since schools are no longer part of their communities. Busing destroyed the neighborhood passion for those schools that previously existed.” Gwendolyn Collins-Stevens, a Roxbury mother of six, agrees. “Busing took away the community feeling we had for our neighborhood schools,” she says, “the feeling of ‘It’s our school and we love it.'”
“When schools were segregated, they were rich in other ways,” says Angela Paige Cook, founder of Paige Academy, a private school in Roxbury. Cook recalls the old network of neighborhood schools as the spring that made the black community tick. “Before busing, parents, teachers, and students often lived in the same community, attended the same churches, and shopped in the same stores. There were more positive role models for the kids in those days. When you destroy a community infrastructure, you no longer have those role models.”…
In 1982, more than 200 frustrated black parents formed the Black Parent Committee to petition Garrity to substitute a school-choice plan for busing. As newspapers reported at the time, these concerned parents complained about the injustice of “asking children to get up at 6 a.m. to ride a bus to a hostile environment where they are not going to get a good education.” Plaintiff Richard Yarde insisted that most blacks “never thought busing was the way to resolve inequality in the schools.” Like their white counterparts across town, black parents resented government usurpation of their “natural authority.” A 1982 Boston Globe poll found that 79 percent of black parents with children in the public schools favored an open-enrollment plan over forced busing. In fact, 42 percent of those polled said they did not even favor busing in 1974.
The Boston chapter of the NAACP, however, moved quickly to scuttle the Black Parent Committee’s attempt to dismantle forced busing.
School choice was finally implemented in Boston, however, in 1989. Here’s an interview with Hardin Coleman, dean of the School of Education at Boston University, who headed an advisory committee to the Boston mayor, tasked with the job of recommending ways to improve the school choice system. Coleman is a black man, and here are his views of where the situation was as of 2012. He sounds like a very reasonable guy to me:
Q: How big a role does choice play in the quality of schools?
A: What studies are finding is that it doesn’t matter what kind of school it is – for example, if it’s a magnet school or whether parents have choice. It comes down to the quality of the teachers. The more high-quality teachers you have in a school, the better it will perform, regardless of the type of students. Poverty in general predicts educational outcome phenomenally, but if you look at a school with a high poverty rate that is performing well, the difference is in the quality of the teachers.By 2014, the district will be spending $100 million on transportation before it buys a book or hires a teacher. You have to wonder what the district as a whole gains with that. If you put that money into improving the schools by recruiting and retaining good teachers, then students could go to a good school near their home. That would in turn reduce transportation costs. Which is the best investment? Having a quality school or choice and transportation. I might be tipping my hand a little on what I believe.
Q: Is race an issue in this conversation?
A: Yes and no. My father [William T. Coleman (Hon.’10)] [who was a lawyer involved in Brown v. Board of Education] believes the only way to improve educational outcomes is to have desegregated schools. I disagree with him, and we have argued about this for years. I think the most important factor is competent teachers in the classroom. The data support me. But that question is inconsequential here because Boston busing is no longer integrating students. The population is only 15 percent Anglo. You are moving culturally diverse kids around to schools with other culturally diverse kids. So there’s no busing pattern that would create integration unless you opened it up to the suburbs, such as Brookline, Newton, Winchester. Then you’d get racial and economic balance. But you can’t do that. So busing in Boston serves no purpose when it comes to integration.But in the big picture, the darker you are, the poorer you are, and if you are male, you are more likely to fail in American schools than if you are white, wealthy, and female. And that data is national. The question becomes, what do we do to reduce the risk factors for our poor black males. Improving schools would be one answer.
In Coleman’s answer and in his own life and arguments with his father, and in the dilemma of Boston’s schools, you can see the trajectory of views on the problem over time. At first it was thought that integration would do the trick. Then it wasn’t just de jure integration that was the goal, it had to be de facto. But the method used by the court system in its attempt to accomplish this goal in Boston served the needs of almost no one, and dealt a huge blow to both of the communities involved and to the public school system in the city as a whole. Boston is still engaged in picking up the pieces.
I cannot give a hooha about poor black males, because I did not make them poor, black, or male. It is the so-called culture into which they are born that is the problem, a culture defended by all black organizations.
“if you are male, you are more likely to fail in American schools than if you are white, wealthy, and female.”
Well, yes. The wealthy look after their own; they are much more frequently married. And educated. They do not magically emerge from pigsties.
Whiteness is no barrier to the black culture, though, which is moving in on whiteness, as we have all seen.
And female, the majority of our population, is notably more tractable in the school setting. Boys get Ritalin because female teachers prize tractability. What we get is a female nation, a wussy nation with no amazons except Amazon.
“My father [William T. Coleman (Hon.’10)] [who was a lawyer involved in Brown v. Board of Education] believes the only way to improve educational outcomes is to have desegregated schools.”
That was the NAACP position but it doesn’t seem to have worked out very well in the long run. It resulted in lots of whites abandoning the cities and moving to the suburbs leaving mainly black city schools.
The situation in Boston was mirrored in Louisville, KY.
There were riots then and the schools got noticeably worse rather than better.
Cultural factors that lead to poverty aside, there is no limit to the number of lives that liberal leftists will sacrifice upon the altar of their ideology.
I’d be surprised if Judge Garrity ever lost even a minutes sleep over the havoc he wrought, rationalizing it as a ‘regretable necessity’ that was after all for their own good. Then justifying it with some version of the claim that social justice demanded it be done.
Hopefully, there’s a special place in hell reserved for the Judge Garritys of the world, who callously insist that good intentions justify coercion.
Reminds me of this C.S. Lewis quote . . .
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
Young Black boys refuse to take example from anybody other than Black men.
This tendency is so overpowering that the US Army and USMC ensure that Drill Instructors are seriously over-weighted with massively powerful Black men.
This policy is born of experience.
White recruits can accept orders from Black Drill Instructors.
Black recruits largely can’t accept orders from White Drill Instructors.
This is largely due to their youthful media exposure.
Black boys are indoctrinated by the MSM into acting out against the oppressive White culture.
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Lastly, most Black boys would be MUCH better served by the German scheme wherein boys are cross-trained into the trades// metal working while attending high school.
Such an education // skill set would launch them into adulthood, would absolutely provide them with enhanced self-value.
The most important variable as to how well kids learn in school is the family of the kid (income, education, number of parents). Second most important is the families of the other kids in the room. Third is the quality of the teacher.
Money has little effect on outcomes. Baltimore spends $16,000 a year per kid compared to Utah at about $7,000. Baltimore had six schools that did not have a single student who scored proficient in math and reading.
Utah has mostly conservative two parent households. Baltimore would have about 70% single parent households.
For some reason when I went to grade school in Lubbock TX back in the late 80s/90s they still had busing. I got exemptions, but of all the stupid things…
I endorse blert’s succinct evaluation. I was drafted in February 1966 in Los Angeles, along with a big cohort of blacks, who the summer before had participated or closely watched the Watts Riots. About half of our drill instructors were black. Both blacks and whites submitted to the thorough domination of our drill instructors well enough. My Army experience was in the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions, which meant that all of us had self selected to parachute jump would likely see ground combat in Vietnam. I suspected that our career black NCOs were ambitious and saw Army Airborne as a way to get ahead. I thought we had good racial harmony during my two years. After I got out, I paid attention to stories of racial polarization in military units in Vietnam. I thought then that what was happening was that the civil rights and anti-war movements were encouraging blacks to be disgruntled and combative.
[class] diversity’s long and progressive history.
Pro-Choice is a many selective, opportunistic, and unprincipled quasi-religious/moral/legal philosophy.
Geoffrey Britain says “I’d be surprised if Judge Garrity ever lost even a minutes sleep ”
Indeed. In fact he probably felt a warm glow of self-righteousness which only increased when he was denounced by the people whose lives he damaged.
Why do you associate Garrity with good intentions?
We may discover once those holding the cover die off that the Northern Democrats having seen Blacks gaining rights as inevitable shifted to the welfare state to stop any wholesale advancement of liberty. Bonus for breaking the “Curley” constituency in Boston at the same time.
“The Boston chapter of the NAACP, however, moved quickly to scuttle the Black Parent Committee’s attempt to dismantle forced busing.”
One of the most inaptly named organizations in America today is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
They have scuttled other movements that would have achieved meaningful integration; e.g., intimidating agencies into banning bi-racial adoptions because they deprived black children of “authenticity” – it was better from them to be homeless; plus supporting Planned Parenthood – abortions are disproportionately of black children; supporting Affirmative Action aka Quotas that inarguably dis-advantage less-prepared black students dumped into colleges where they can’t make the grade.
However, a well-thought-out integration plan can be implemented, as was done in my (fairly small) West Texas hometown.
The school board did some minor adjusting on elementary schools (which was not disruptive because a good half of the white students were being bused from their farms into town anyway); closed the black high school, and expanded the only remaining HS to handle all the students; and split the junior highs into one 7th grade and one 8th grade campus, which again handled all the students.
Side benefit: 7th grade was originally housed in the building in which my mother went to HS, and where I went to JHS, and it was old in her day. Once the lawyers and doctors had to send their kids to that school, a bond issue to erect a new building was hastily passed.
M Williams Says:
June 10th, 2017 at 4:40 pm
Reminds me of this C.S. Lewis quote . . .
* *
It was a toss-up for me between being AesopFan and LewisFan.
“Do you remember the Boston busing crisis?”
Louise Day Hicks, late 1960s.
So-called “xenophobia” is perfectly normal. Everybody advised by the history of mankind evolutionary development rightly find the company of like-looking, like-speaking and like-minded people the most comfortable and safe environment. The pathology is the lack of this basic feeling. We can, of course, culturally overcome in our behavior this instinctive urge, but we can not get rid of it.
Any surprise in the long term outcome?
Evidently, with the drop in district population, people who saw no benefit to the busing moved out – per the description, they probably weren’t going to private schools instead.
.
That’s the problem with the “there oughta be a law” crowd, in the zealous pursuit of their cause …
They think no further than the first order effects.
The real world is much more complex.
While attending, the Lovely Mrs. Firefly’s High School was the victim of a similar, altruistic court order. Most all the incoming black students almost instantly self-segregated. She says there were halls white students could not traverse, and they soon held a blacks only Prom; the Afro-ball.
Due to the advent of social media, she’s recently reconnected with many in her High School class, even if only reading Facebook posts. Some of those black students used the opportunity to become educated and have careers and lives that they almost definitely would not have had if they stayed in their prior, failing High School. But many are still obsessed with racial identity and internalizing feelings of victimhood.
Rufus Firefly: “Most all the incoming black students almost instantly self-segregated.”
That tends to be the pattern. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. Human nature, as Sergey points out, is bent toward self segregation. My grandmother had a saying for it:
“Birds of a feather will flock together,
and so will pigs and swine.
Ducks and geese will have their choice,
and so will I have mine.”
Forced integration as attempted by bussing was a failure that should have told us something.
Go to any college/university student union and you will see self segregation in action. Thus, we have BLM, the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus, National Action Network (Al Sharpton), Rainbow Push Coalition (Jesse Jackson), Miss Black USA, and many more.
Instead of being Americans who happen to be black, too many blacks want to separate themselves out as being separate and apart from the majority culture. A majority culture that is an amalgam of mostly European culture with bits and pieces of Latin, Native American, Oriental, Jewish, and African cultures incorporated. What they seek to accomplish through self segregation isn’t clear. A separate nation? An all black state? Or? Maybe many blacks are just unable to integrate into the dominant culture. But because so many black people have achieved success here in the U.S., that seems to put the lie to that idea.
That blacks were held as slaves and mistreated under Jim Crow is undeniable. However, most all of us can trace our histories back to a period in history when our ancestors were ill treated by the powers that existed at the time. My family history in Scotland was one of ill treatment that drove my ancestors to Ireland where things weren’t notably better. And that’s why they left Ireland for the U.S. What matters is not holding onto old grievances but looking forward and making a better life. The vast majority of people who are raised to understand the rules for success, which have been enumerated here many times by Geoffrey Britain, are able to achieve at least a moderate middle class life regardless of race. Such principles, once commonly dispensed by schools and parents, seem to have been lost in the present day. Tragic for all young people, but especially blacks.
I don’t think xenophobia is the sole state of mankind. Some societies are more distrusting of outsiders – in every country, those are the rural and hill people. Sparta, aggressively hostile to outsiders, and fiercely tribal, was located inland, between two mountain ranges and along a river – relatively defensible, particularly with a heavily militarized society.
Athens, more hospitable to foreigners, was located on the sea, and with only parts of it elevated. They maintained their distance from aliens by using cultural solidarity as a distancing tool. Their economy depended on outsiders, so they were forced to associate with them, but they did NOT intermingle by choice.
Some in America welcome outside cultures – my mother was one, whose friends were as likely as not to be non-natives, and who married someone from a very different culture – suburban Cleveland Catholic married to WV Fundamentalist poor HS dropout.
So, the world is divided into two kinds of people: those who can learn to like other people who differ from them in some ways, and those who can’t.
Please note that only some of those “ways” involve physiological appearance, while others which are just as influential, or more so, include ideology, religion, and moral values (to cover those who may not practice what they preach).
The most important two school parameters–more important than class size or teacher quality or anything else–are the students’ safety from one another and their studies’ tranquility from one-another’s disruptions. These were doubtless tenuous before integration in those two poor schools. But were fatally undermined by Judge Garrity.
What a ruthless, cruel man. His name will live in infamy.
There is one striking pattern than never comes up in discussion:
It’s always Whites shunning// running away// moving away from Blacks.
Years ago, I had Black co-resident room-mates.
These gals ALL insisted that they shunned Black culture. They meant it.
Young Black men, in particular, have extremely poor impulse control, provoked or otherwise.
This keeps coming up in crime statistics — most notably among societies that NEVER had chattel slavery. Britain has the same stats, race on race, that America has, that Canada has.
In the case of Canada and Britain, their Black population is quite recent. It’s entirely self-motivated.
Yet, look at how over-represented Blacks were during the recent London riots.
Even more Socialist than the USA, such Black men were able to obtain welfare — even as able bodied young men — virtually straight off the boat// jetplane.
They’re able to simply move in and obtain welfare… because they are of the Commonwealth.
Crazy, I know.
What’s remarkable, is that their crime stats ENTIRELY parallel their Black American ‘brothers.’
It’s astounding. It, the correlation, must be genetic.
You also see the same propensity for violence in South Africa… even as the Blacks there are politically dominant.
The Whites have largely fled… in a repetition of Rhodesia.
The fact is that Black culture is Maternalistic; White culture is of the Patriarchy. This was remarked upon in the earliest contact diaries from the dark continent.
Europeans could NOT get over how such a polygamous society could be so female dominant — in ECONOMIC terms. Restated, the mothers not only raised the kids, they did virtually all of the productive work… to include farming. The men just simply did not farm. This astounded every European.
This scheme does resemble that of the lion pride. The lionesses provide ALL of the food, raise the cubs, etc.
The males TOTALLY concentrate on attack and defense of the pride. Which is no small task, BTW. Lions are in perpetual war with hyenas.
Blacks are in perpetual tribal war with each other, as well. That was the other thing Europeans noted.
Lastly, unlike Europe, there are NO natural defensive barriers in Africa. ( Exception, the Congo. ) Instead, the dynamic is that of the Plains Indians: perpetual skirmish warfare.
This is warfare largely fought by teen aged warriors.
This millennia long dynamic hugely explains why Black boys have such poor impulse control. It’s genetically favored, a survival trait.
Such genes are washed out… only after many, many, many generations… the HARD way.
&&&
I find it most curious that once Blacks have political power// social power … they promptly DEMAND segregation… hard line segregation.
I give you the Nation of Islam, and Louis Farrakhan.
( It’s not really Islamic, BTW. It’s just BLACK. )
[ Counting NoL as Islamic is how Sunni Salafists are able to inflate the stats for the Ummah within the USA something silly.
Mohammed Ali was deemed a Muslim. Sheesh.
What a farce. He was into the NoI, not Riyadh, not Wahhabism.
You see the same silliness with Karem Abdul-Jabbar. He went for the NoI… and then YEARS later… started to be converted, again, to Sunni Islam… perhaps. For such show-horses, NONE of the true dictats of Islam are ever invoked// demanded.
We’re now seeing this farce repeated with Lindsey Lohan, the Irish Muslim.
None of these tools realize that they ARE tools.]
I remember Boston​. I was in first or second grade and the scenes on the news frightened me. My father said something I never forgot. He said Northerners cheerfully criticized the South but completely lost their minds when desegregation came to their door.
I remember when there were rumors of busing in Richmond. I was in elementary school at the time and I have a distinct memory talking with kids at the bus stop and us agreeing that we would refuse to go to school if it happened.
Later I learned my parents felt the same way and would have put us in private school so fast your head would spin if it had happened. Fortunately, it didn’t.
I was with the guy that was on the cover of Life, stabbing a black with an American Flag pole one week before it happened. I was in the Army and friends with his friend from Charlestown. It was the WORST possible solution to an unsolvable issue. And Blert, I agree with you AFTER the days when black fathers disappeared and are raised by single mothers with multiple “Baby Daddy’s”. My father taught me “Impulse Control” very effectively. As another old time black guy said in an interview regarding “Peer Pressure”…..”When I was growing up, I didn’t have peer pressure.” “I had FATHER PRESSURE.”
blert.
Drill Sergeants/Instructors is a specialty for NCOs whose MOS is whatever the field is.
You have a good record and you apply for DI school, which is tough, I’m told. There were DI NCOs in Air Defense radar school.
About half of our training in Basic was from the company DIs The rest was at various training locations such as rifle marksmanship, grenades, etc. This iis where the DIs did what the outside world thought they did, only in the Army they didn’t yell as much. How to march, salute, report for pay, recognize rank insignia, wear the uniform, do PT.
In Infantry AIT, almost all training was on instructional locations. The company cadre managed the company and got us to the locations. They watched the training to assist the instructors.
When I was a training officer in an Infantry AIT company, I noted that the senior Drill Sergeants seemed to take a day off each week. The other guys and junior sergeants could get things going–everybody knew the routine–run the PT, get the troops to chow and back, and into the uniform of the day with weapons if required and to the parking lot to get on the trucks. Not a bad gig. If anybody in the company cadre raised a sweat, it was the lieutenants and junior noncoms.
The proportion of black DIs was, it seemed to me, to be about the proportion of black senior noncoms in the combat arms, or just under half. That was about 1970.
Racial issues were ginned up by the left in order to damage good order and discipline.
There were a few bad actors in the barracks, but that usually got taken care of before it came to official notice. Did you know a guy can fall down a flight. of stairs when you’re in tents?
The same protocol was in place for the Yonkers issue where a judge started fining the city council personally for not voting to allow subsidized housing in Yonkers.
None of the judges or supporters of such a move were in Yonkers nor did they intend to be.
The fact is that Black culture is Maternalistic; White culture is of the Patriarchy. This was remarked upon in the earliest contact diaries from the dark continent.
It’s more likely it has something to do with the spiritual (not necessarily genetic) curse that was put on Ham, to deprive him of the priesthood. Afrikaners are descendants of Ham.
New Hampshire> 50th in public education spending; #1 in SAT scores; 1% black population.
Question: Maybe its about culture & parenting (factors which school tax funded efforts cannot address), not who attends where.