Law Office Management
Apr. 2, 2011
My View from the Bus
As a public school student in Los Angeles in 1978, I witnessed firsthand one of the most ambitious efforts to implement Brown v. Board of Education.
Like every law student, I studied Brown v. Board of Education in my first-year con-law class. I remember the professor telling us that even though the decision was written in 1954 with the intent of ending segregation in public schools, the courts and our larger society still grapple with how to implement Brown: Inner-city schools remain mostly black and brown, while suburban schools are mainly white in much of the country. As a fourth-grader in the Los Angeles Unified School District in 1978, I witnessed firsthand one of the most ambitious efforts to follow through with the dictates of Brown. That year the LAUSD instituted a mandatory busing program that not only sent inner-city kids to schools in predominantly white neighborhoods but also sent white kids to predominantly black schools in the inner city. Parents filed lawsuits to block the reassignments, and meanwhile kids in my lily-white West Los Angeles neighborhood fled to the private schools that suddenly sprouted like mushrooms all over L.A. In the weeks leading up to the first day of school that September, my own home became a microcosm of the tension and divisiveness running rampant across the city. My parents argued constantly over whether to keep me in public school or enroll me in one of the fledgling private institutions. Eventually my mother prevailed, and I found myself on a bus speeding toward the gritty heart of L.A. That first trip started out with the usual chatter and high jinks of elementary school students. But as the bus neared our destination, a nervous quiet came over us. Aside from the hordes of news crews and police outside the entrance of Baldwin Hills Elementary, my new school, that first day was relatively uneventful. And my two years at an inner-city school did not, contrary to popular fears, compromise my education. In fact, the younger, more energetic teachers were refreshing compared with the older, seemingly burned-out teachers at my neighborhood school. Skin color aside, the black students were no different from the West L.A. kids; we all looked forward to recess and pizza day in the cafeteria and found arithmetic and history pretty dull. Unfortunately, the school district caved to (white) public pressure and stopped mandatory busing in 1981. However, black students continued voluntarily to be bused to my elementary, junior high, and high schools. Thus I had the benefit of continuing to attend fully integrated schools--albeit in my upper-middle-class neighborhood. The common perception is that the LAUSD's two-year mandatory busing program was a flop. It did prompt some white students to flee to private schools, never to return--though part of the blame goes to 1978's Proposition 13, which deprived public schools of tax dollars. Thanks to Facebook, I am still in contact with dozens of my grade school classmates from both the inner city and my neighborhood. The clear consensus among us is that the busing program was an extremely positive and valuable life experience. Those daily bus rides--through more modest urban neighborhoods than I probably would ever have seen as a child if not for busing--have shaped who I am today, both as a person and as an attorney. In the 1990s when I was living in San Francisco and waiting for the results of my bar exam, my sister, a prosecutor for Los Angeles County, suggested that I volunteer at the local DA's office to get some courtroom experience. On my way there, I passed the public defender building. It quickly dawned on me that I didn't have it in me to prosecute mostly poor people and send them to jail. I wanted to defend those people and tell their stories. So I walked into the public defender's office and became a volunteer for the next several months. I have continued doing criminal defense work and find it, much like my busing foray as a youth, immensely rewarding. Jonathan C. Turner is a criminal defense attorney with Blackmon & Associates in Sacramento.
Kari Machado
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