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more aggressive approach. Two basic strategies were put forward to accelerate the
integration of blacks into the educational and economic mainstream: the busing of
schoolchildren outside their neighborhoods to promote classroom integration, and
affirmative action in the workplace and university admissions. Both concepts were
implemented primarily through action taken by the federal government, and both have
proven intensely controversial.

The thinking behind busing was that the integration of public education would be
hampered in practice by the substantial degree of de facto housing segregation in most
American communities. Although some advocates proposed wide-ranging desegregation
plans that called for busing large numbers of blacks to predominantly white schools and
whites to predominantly black schools, in practice the children who participated in busing
plans were overwhelmingly black. Busing was instituted in a number of communities, often
despite resistance from whites and the ambivalent attitudes of black parents.

It soon became clear, though, that desegregation schemes would have a limited impact in
many large cities because few white children were enrolled in the public schools, and
because of worries that busing plans were encouraging “white flight” to the suburbs. Civil
rights advocates therefore proposed that busing schemes be expanded to embrace both
urban and adjacent suburban school districts to ensure a sufficiently large pool of white
students to make integration viable. In Milliken v. Bradley (1977), the Supreme Court ruled
that these cross-district busing plans could not be imposed on suburban communities,
thus thwarting the more ambitious aims of busing supporters.23 Moreover, by preventing
the government from compelling communities to accept cross-district busing, the court
took an important step toward minimizing busing as a desegregation tool. With enrollment
in big-city school districts increasingly dominated by black and Hispanic students, school
integration diminished as a goal of civil rights policy. By the 1990s, many of the
desegregation plans that incorporated busing had been abandoned.
Affirmative action, by contrast, has assumed a more or less permanent place in American
civil rights policy. Initially, during the 1960s, it was regarded as a program to encourage
private corporations and government units to voluntarily adopt measures to hire, train, and
promote black workers. A key theory behind affirmative action was that an important
source of inequality was institutional racism. This concept held that several centuries of
racial discrimination had been internalized by corporations, universities, government
agencies, and other institutions. To overcome this legacy, advocates urged policies that
would, in effect, compel the hiring of qualified blacks and the admission of blacks to
colleges, especially prestigious private universities.

The federal government thus began to pressure employers to hire and promote blacks,
and where the percentage of black employees fell short of their presence in the local
population, it took legal action to force companies or government entities to develop plans
that would increase their minority workforces. One obstacle to the implementation of
affirmative action plans was a provision in the 1964 Civil Rights Act that forbade “reverse
discrimination,” that is, the hiring of minorities over better-qualified whites. But the
Supreme Court ruled in several cases that a certain degree of affirmative action did meet
constitutional muster. Once the courts gave legitimacy to race-conscious remedies, federal
initiatives to encourage the hiring of minorities mushroomed.

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