Desegregation busing
Desegregation busing in the United States (also known as simply busing) is the practice of assigning and transporting students to schools within or outside their local school districts in an effort to reduce the racial segregation in schools.[1] While the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, many American schools continued to remain largely segregated due to housing inequality.[2] In an effort to address the ongoing de facto segregation in schools, the 1971 Supreme Court decision, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, ruled that the federal courts could use busing as a desegregation tool to achieve racial balance.[3]

Even though school districts provided zero-fare bus transportation to and from students' assigned schools, those schools were in some cases many miles away from students' homes, which often presented problems to them and their families. In addition, many families disliked having to send their children miles to another school in an unfamiliar neighborhood when there was an available school a short distance away. The movement of large numbers of white families to suburbs of large cities, a phenomenon known as white flight, reduced the effectiveness of the policy.[4] Many whites who stayed moved their children into private or parochial schools; these effects combined to make many urban school districts predominantly nonwhite, reducing any effectiveness mandatory busing may have had.[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desegregation_busing