Half a century ago this month, 39,000 Memphis children — about a third of the then-Memphis City Schools system — were told to board school buses and continue their education at new schools in an effort to racially integrate them.

Called Plan Z in a federal court order that spelled out how many students would be transferred, the move was an expansion of an earlier busing plan, dubbed Plan A. That first plan was to bus 13,000 students starting in January 1973.

It expanded to 39,085 students in Plan Z at the August start of the 1973-74 school year.

The school system selected students for busing based on where they lived, which at the time also meant what color their skin was due to the segregation of nearly all Memphis neighborhoods.

Most of the Black students rode buses from their neighborhoods, but many of the white students did not, fleeing the school system entirely. About 40,000 white students left Memphis City Schools over Plan Z’s first four years.

At the outset of busing, MCS was 53.6% Black and had about 40,000 more students than the current Memphis-Shelby County Schools system, even though MSCS currently covers more geography, including all of the city and the county’s unincorporated areas.

The 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, and subsequent attempts at integration, had little to no effect on racial balance in the schools. So, the federal courts mandated busing could be used as a method to achieve integration.

Plan Z didn’t fully integrate the school system and created unintended consequences, but its results were nevertheless instrumental in shaping today’s modern Memphis.

For the next month, The Daily Memphian will mark the 50th anniversary of Plan Z with a multi-part oral history of busing from the perspective of students and teachers in the schools as well as the architect of the two plans.

There will also be some perspectives from those who have studied the historical impact of busing.

The spark for the series began with a February 2022 episode of the WKNO-TV show “Behind The Headlines.”

Guests Archie Willis III and Roshun Austin were booked to talk about their redevelopment plan for the old Northside High School and the surrounding Klondike residential area. But the conversation wandered into memories from the school’s heyday, which was also when busing began.

The resulting discussion is a primer on the basic concept of busing and a glimpse into a community hit hard by the reality of Plan Z. The impact of the practice is still felt today, even though many of the details have perhaps been forgotten.

In going through Northside for prep work toward its new use, Austin — founder of The Works Inc., which is overseeing the comeback of the surrounding Klondike neighborhood — was surprised to find class pictures showing Northside wasn’t always the all-Black school it was known as.

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Early class pictures from the late 1960s show a mix of white and Black students.

The story of racial integration, court orders, schools and communities is complex and personal.

Yet, the reality is that the effects weren’t felt equally. While Black children got on the buses and attended the schools they were assigned, white children left in large numbers for private and parochial schools.

That meant formerly Black schools didn’t get the influx of white students necessary to sustain them at their given size. Meanwhile, white schools gradually became predominantly Black as white students and their families left the schools and surrounding neighborhoods.

Their departure was part of a larger push of development eastward that predated busing but also was accelerated by it. 

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The first part of our oral history — Before the Buses — begins with what things were like just before the buses started rolling.

As a complement, a 1975 WREG-TV feature focused on Downtown redevelopment, a few years after the start of Plan Z, is linked below.

It offers more than a glimpse into the civic environment that surrounded busing, an interview with Memphis Branch NAACP executive secretary Maxine Smith, who was the force behind the move to busing, and a revealing portrait of prevailing racial attitudes.

Note: Roshun Austin, the CEO and president of The Works, is on the board of Memphis Fourth Estate Inc., the nonprofit that owns and oversees The Daily Memphian.