When I was growing up in North Mississippi in the 1960s, my ideal celebration of Independence Day revolved around two things: sharing ice cream and cake with my sister Doris, who was born on July 4, and taking a holiday afternoon trip to Sardis Lake.

It was a thrill just seeing the expansive dam, the people fishing at the spillway and the water skiers being pulled by fancy speedboats.

But the other unmistakable feature about the lake was that it was racially segregated.

Everyone knew the rules. No African-Americans were welcomed at any of the beach areas and campgrounds frequented by white visitors. That included the John W. Kyle State Park located at the lake.

African-Americans instead were relegated to the Cypress Point public use area on the far west side of the lower lake. In essence, the lake’s back side was also the black side.

The segregation slowly diminished as African-Americans decided enough was enough. As I recall, there was no formal decree. Black patrons just began showing up at the lake’s other recreation areas that had been reserved for whites.

Eventually the icy stares and racist comments evolved into acceptance. And official segregation at Sardis Lake became a thing of the past.

As we celebrate our country’s 243rd birthday, I bring this up only as context for the renewed debate over the use of forced busing in the 1970s to desegregate public schools. The issue got the most attention during the second night of the Democratic presidential debates last week.

California Sen. Kamala Harris put former Vice President Joe Biden on the defensive for his fierce opposition to busing in the 1970s when he was a young senator from Delaware. Specifically, Harris chided Biden for working in concert with James O. Eastland, the Mississippi senator and outspoken segregationist, to undermine busing efforts across the country.

“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public school, and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me,” Harris said in what became the defining moment of the debate.

Biden insists he did not oppose voluntary busing, only that which was imposed by the federal government. And lots of people, black and white, have come to his defense.

For me, busing was never an issue growing up. My family lived on a farm outside Como, and I was bused to school all 12 years, including my senior year in 1970-71. That also was the first year of full school integration in Mississippi, more than 16 years after the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education that outlawed so-called separate but equal public schools.

In Memphis, however, busing was this city’s most divisive issue during the 1970s. Like most Southern cities, Memphis simply ignored the Brown decision. Members of the all-white school board convinced themselves that neither black nor white Memphians wanted school integration, so why bother?

“We believe our Negroes will continue using their own school facilities since most of them are located in the center of Negro populated areas,” school board president Milton Bowers said shortly after the Brown decision was announced.

The problem was black and white schools in Memphis were separate, but they were far from equal. So in March 1960, a group of black lawyers, led by future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, filed suit in U.S. District Court in Memphis demanding full integration of city schools.

Presiding Judge Marion Boyd initially sided with the school board, which claimed it was doing all it could to achieve integration as quickly as possible. But the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals took a different view. It declared that the board was in fact illegally running a segregated school system and ordered Boyd to oversee swifter changes.

Boyd continued to slow-walk the case until he left the district court bench in 1966. It was then assigned to his successor, Judge Robert M. McRae Jr.

The lawsuit lingered several more years until the Court of Appeals and McRae finally lost patience. After a contentious hearing in December 1971, McRae ruled that busing would be imposed to bring about full integration of schools.

The decision sent shockwaves across Memphis. White residents were incensed, a group called Citizens Against Busing buried an old school bus in Frayser in symbolic defiance of the ruling, and McRae was the target of constant death threats.

The first wave of busing started in January 1973. It involved some 7,000 students – almost all of them black – who were bused to previously all-white schools. But the backlash grew stronger.

White Memphians by the thousands abandoned the city and moved to the suburbs in Shelby County or across the Mississippi state line to DeSoto County. The result was a dramatic demographic shift in school and city population from majority white to predominantly black.

The city’s tax base was adversely affected and broad-based support for Memphis City Schools diminished. Those and other negative outcomes are among the reasons that Biden objected to busing in the 1970s.

“I oppose busing,” Biden said in a 1975 interview, according to The New York Times. “It’s an asinine concept, the utility of which has never been proven to me.”

Biden said in the interview that court-ordered school integration plans were “really just quota systems to assure a certain number of blacks, Chicanos, or whatever in each school. That, to me, is the most racist concept you can come up with.”

He added, “The problem, you see, is that the courts have gone overboard in their interpretation of what is required to remedy unlawful segregation. It is one thing to say that you cannot keep a black man from using this bathroom, and something quite different to say that one out of every five people who use this bathroom must be black.”

Lots of people, then and now, agree with him, which is why the confrontation between Harris and Biden resonated around the country. Of course, hindsight is easy. Busing, by and large, was a failure.

But in Memphis, as in many other communities, white resistance to school desegregation was so intense that judges, such as McRae, felt they had no other option except busing to try to end a clearly racist system.

Because unlike what they did at the segregated areas of Sardis Lake during my childhood, African-Americans were not about to just show up and waltz into all-white public schools and trust that they would be accepted. It required the power of the federal courts – and in some instances the muscle of the federal government – to force change.

After all, the demand for change is why we celebrate Independence Day.