Court-ordered busing began in the Memphis City Schools system in 1973, 19 years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that racially segregated public schools should be integrated with “all deliberate speed.”

A generation of students — 140,000 in MCS, all born since the 1954 decision — were making their way through a school system that continued to assign students to schools based on the color of their skin, as a matter of policy, until 1966.

There were other tries at integration before busing.

Half a century later, the memory of Elton Hayes still echoes today

In 1960, the Northcross vs. Board of Education lawsuit was filed in Memphis federal court by the Memphis Branch NAACP to locally enforce the Supreme Court’s Brown decision. In 1961, a group of 13 Black children integrated four all-white Memphis schools. 

But with little to no effect on racial balance, the federal courts mandated busing could be used as a method to achieve integration.

The oral history that follows is taken from interviews by The Daily Memphian to mark the 50th anniversary of Plan Z busing and the 1971 ruling of Memphis Federal Judge Robert McRae that set the stage for the practice to begin. 

This is the oral history’s first installment; read more about the project here.

Marcus Pohlmann

Pohlman is a Rhodes College professor emeritus of political science and author of “Opportunity Lost: Race and Poverty in the Memphis City Schools.” The book is required reading for teachers in the Memphis-Shelby County Schools system, for which Pohlman has worked as a consultant.

“When the state finally sort of reacted to Brown vs. Board of Education and said, ‘You’ve got to do something.’ — ‘You’ve got to move towards a unified system.’ — They tried to do it by voluntary transfer. That was going to be a very slow go.

And what they found out early on is some of the white schools simply wouldn’t take, for one reason or another, some of the Black students who wanted to come there.

If students wanted to voluntarily move, the schools needed to accept them and that wasn’t always the case. So, it got a little more complicated rather quickly.

Ideally, it would all be done voluntarily. I think it became clear within years that wasn’t going to be enough.”

O.Z. Stephens

MCS director of planning and research and the school system official O.Z. Stephens drew up Plan A and Plan Z — the two busing plans enacted by federal court order in 1973.

“We, in the early 1970s, had not done very much towards mixing the races in the city of Memphis nor had any other Southern school system. But when the Charlotte-Mecklenburg case came down and the Supreme Court ruled that transportation could be used as a means to desegregate the school systems — that’s when the plaintiffs in our case went back to court.

Judge McRae got us all together and said we had to come up with a plan that met the tenets of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg case and that is transportation. And you couldn’t use white flight as a reason to not do that — to not desegregate.”

To emphasize the “established way of life” in Memphis, McRae noted in a footnote a 1947 decision by the city’s Board of Censors to ban a Hal Roach Studios movie because a Black character in the film was shown attending a school with white students. 

“The South does not permit Negroes in white schools nor recognize social equality between the races even in children,” the 1947 board decision read as quoted in the footnote.

Marcus Pohlmann

“That’s the classic old legal distinction between de jure and de facto segregation, right — Are people living in predominantly homogeneous committees because they choose to, or because they have to? And particularly because they have to by law, which would be discrimination or segregation.

So the judge had to decide fairly quickly: Was the resulting segregation after the busing attempts and so on were tried the result of residency?

One-year marriage of Memphis City Schools and Shelby County Schools ended in a happy divorce — for one side

And that gets to one of the deeper questions and that is, was the residency all voluntary?

When I came to Memphis in the mid-1980s, we had students that, as part of various projects, worked on paired real estate testing, where they would go with a young Black couple and a young white couple would go and be quoted very different prices or steered in very different ways.

That was in the ‘80s that people were caught and I won’t name one of the local major real estate companies that was caught steering, as it was called.

And so, you know, the question that you raise goes deeper and that is why there is residential segregation in the first place. The courts had to deal with the school result of that and they had to wrestle with that question.”

McRae’s 1971 ruling that set the stage for the busing plans was rich with examples.

The set of Ridgeway schools was built when that part of East Memphis was annexed by the city in 1969, three years after MCS ended the policy of assigning students to schools based on their race.

In 1971 they were the easternmost schools in the city. The Ridgeways opened in the 1970-71 school year but weren’t ready in time for the start of that school year. McRae noted that MCS used chartered buses to transport the white students six miles to Grahamwood Elementary School as a temporary measure.

McRae cited disparities in the way attendance zones were drawn as well as capacity issues for traditionally Black schools as efforts to prolong segregation.

Manassas Junior and Senior High School, built in 1927, had 2,141 students with an optimum capacity of 1,700 and a maximum capacity of 2,100. It was built on 6.3 acres with nine additions from 1939 to 1964.

As the integration of four other schools was underway in 1961, students at Dunbar Elementary School in Orange Mound came from an attendance zone that was five miles wide and made up primarily of Black neighborhoods.

In 1970, the year before the Charlotte-Mecklenburg case, McRae ordered MCS to begin the racial integration of school faculties with a goal of complete integration within two years. Each school was to have a faculty that reflected the racial balance of Black and white students in the school system within 10%.

O.Z. Stephens

“The initial proposal for desegregation of faculties was there had to be one crossover teacher in the opposite race school. I had a sister who taught at Treadwell High School and she was one of the first crossover teachers and she went, I think to Chicago Park. … And then a Black teacher from Chicago Park would go to Treadwell. And she told me recently that there were six, I think, six teachers from Treadwell that had that crossover assignment.

““The South does not permit Negroes in white schools nor recognize social equality between the races even in children.””

1947 Board of Censors decision
Included in a footnote of Judge Robert McRae’s1971 decision

At first, they asked for volunteers and my sister volunteered and the proviso was after one year you got to go back to your original school and she wanted to go back to Treadwell and she did go back to Treadwell. But I don’t recall any big insurrection or that the teachers didn’t do what they were assigned to do. …

My sister said that she had no problems at her new assignment and had a very supportive principal and was welcomed by the staff. My brother ended up at Lester (High).”

Betty Bolton

A white teacher at Tech High School who was assigned to Melrose High School in Orange Mound starting in the 1971-72 school year.

“I know of a lot of teachers that resigned at that time that went to private schools or wherever else they went. They did not integrate. They went somewhere else. Some went to Catholic schools. I don’t know where they all went.

As far as the teachers were concerned — they integrated to Hamilton, Northside — the big schools at that time. We had quite a few white teachers at Melrose.

I didn’t see any real friction there. The principal and I got along just fine. There might have been a time or two when we didn’t agree on some things but we worked it out.

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I didn’t have any expectations because I was just — ‘I’m going to go teach kids.’ That was my philosophy. When I got to the old Melrose, that’s what I did and they accepted me pretty much. I didn’t have really any racial issues to that extent. I just did what I needed to do. They had to follow my rules or they couldn’t hang around.”

A few months after school started, Bolton saw the violent reaction to the October 1971 death of Elton Hayes who was beaten to death by a group of Memphis Police officers and Shelby County Sheriff’s deputies.

Half a century later, the memory of Elton Hayes still echoes today

Hayes had attended Melrose before dropping out of high school. He and his family lived off Park Avenue — the community’s main street and the scene of much of the violent reaction that began the day of his funeral. It was five blocks from what is now called “Old Melrose.”

“There was a riot up and down Park Avenue. Helicopters came — everything,” Bolton recalled. “The white teachers were told to go out the back. I just got in my car and went home and so did another teacher. I don’t know what happened at other schools, but I know what was going on at Melrose. It kind of could be scary.”

O.Z. Stephens

“The notion was we were going to have some no-nonsense schools. We didn’t tolerate cussing teachers. We didn’t tolerate fighting. And you were going to be out of the school system if that happened. So, the rules were laid down in a very understandable way. We just don’t tolerate that kind of behavior.

But we had some people that were good. They were good, strong people and veteran educators too. The experience really came through. They knew what they were doing and above all, I think, is we had a strong, strong superintendent.

John (Freeman) was a no-nonsense fellow and he was very fair. He was the one who was going to have to implement the initial plan and we protected him because he and a lot of us took some blows. John was the one who was going to have to make it work and he did.”

John Freeman became superintendent in 1971 after E.C. Stimbert left the position to become the Tennessee commissioner of education in the cabinet of Gov. Winfield Dunn of Memphis. Freeman immediately inherited the Northcross case, which had moved into faculty integration and was now synonymous with busing. Up to this point, MCS did not have a fleet of buses.

In Memphis federal court, McRae was trying to gauge whether preliminary steps to the full-on busing of a large number of students would work, and effectively seed the larger segregated Memphis terrain for racial integration. The school system and white political leaders did not share that view.

Federal judges get lifetime appointments from the President of the United States that are approved by the U.S. Senate. In return, those judges are isolated to some degree — mostly in terms of expressing opinions outside of open court. McRae would find he was not isolated from the furor his rulings on busing would create.

Years later, Stephens got an after-the-fact view of how McRae was calculating how far to go leading up to his request in late 1971 for Stephens to draft several options for a court-ordered, specific MCS busing plan.

O.Z. Stephens

“I got a call one day (in the late 1980s). I had retired from the Board of Education and from my job and was in the private sector. I got a call from Kay Pittman Black … a reporter with the Press Scimitar. She had inroads with the judge and was sort of a confidant. She called me and wanted to know if I could go with her to meet Judge McRae for lunch one day. He had some questions he wanted to ask me in as much as he was writing a book about the school desegregation case, which he did. So, we met in Midtown.

One thing he said that I will never forget — he was very, very angry at the Board of Education and the early litigation that was going on, particularly about desegregation of faculties. He said that was an easy one for him and said, ‘They could have done that as they were eventually ordered to do and they wouldn’t do it.’

The inference was — ‘I could have probably been a little easier on them in later litigation if I could have seen where they were willing to take even the initial step to desegregate faculties, but they wouldn’t do it. They wanted me to do it.’ ”

One plan, McRae said, would pair adjacent or nearby schools without busing and change attendance zone lines as well as close some schools — all with “minimum use of transportation.” This was Plan A, which began in 1973.

The second plan, Plan Z, went much further.