COLUMN ONE : A Surprise Roadblock for Busing : A new wave of younger black mayors seeks to curb school desegregation plans. Decried by some parents and civil rights leaders, they say it’s time to focus on rebuilding the urban core.

Mayor Freeman Bosley Jr. does not consider himself an enemy of civil rights--even if other black leaders in his city do.

His pedigree is impeccable: He grew up in a family absorbed by civil rights battles, headed by a politician father who led boycotts against white-owned businesses. At college, Bosley Jr. flirted with militancy and headed the campus Black Student Alliance chapter. Six months ago, he was elected St. Louis’ first African-American mayor, a symbolic prize that long eluded black aspirants in a city calcified by racial divisions.

Yet the 38-year-old coalition-builder in power suspenders has stunned local civil rights leaders and many black parents by calling for an end to St. Louis’ voluntary school desegregation program--a system that buses 14,000 minority students to suburban schools.

Bosley is among a growing number of black mayors and political leaders who are taking steps to scuttle court-enforced busing and desegregation plans. The 40-year battle to integrate America’s schools, they contend, has ground down into a Pyrrhic victory that offers only faint progress for minority students and drains resources from inner-city communities and public schools.

“Some people are content to stand in concrete,” Bosley says. “But there are a lot of black parents who think it’s time for a change.”

Black disillusionment with integration is not new; but the rise of young leaders willing to publicly abandon a core goal of the civil rights era is transforming a distant, academic debate into a fractious public policy issue. In cities like St. Louis, Cleveland and Denver, that transformation has, at times, threatened to divide leaders along generational lines and is setting black families against each other.

With the retirement of Los Angeles’ Tom Bradley and Detroit’s Coleman A. Young--the last of the first wave of black mayors whose success was steeped in civil rights themes--younger elected officials like Bosley are staking out their own path. Liberal on most matters, they are most concerned with their cities’ unique problems.

“It’s a fundamental shift in how you tackle urban problems,” says Dennis Judd, a political scientist at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. “These mayors are saying that integration is not necessarily the answer, that for cities to work, you have to rebuild basic social institutions.”

“It’s become an issue of practicality,” says Ronald Walters, a political science professor at Howard University. “Integration is still a goal, but since cities are unable to move all their students, they’re beginning to look at ways to educate African-American students where they live.”

Mayors who take that path have met with mixed results. In Cleveland, a federal judge has agreed to consider a plan, supported by Mayor Michael White, to phase out busing and replace it with a comprehensive overhaul of city schools. And in Seattle, Mayor Norm Rice has been the point man in an effort to relax a court-ordered busing program and replace it with more school choice and expanded use of magnet schools.

But both mayors have carefully avoided working toward an immediate ban on busing. The perils of moving too fast became evident recently when Denver Mayor Wellington Webb was rebuffed by a federal judge when he and other black and Latino leaders sought to intervene in his city’s busing order and bring it to settlement.

Yet many believe black mayors stand the best chance among any public officials of finding alternatives to decades-old busing plans.

“Only an African-American mayor can go up against busing and come away with respect,” says Donna Good, an aide to Webb. “It’s like (former Republican President Richard) Nixon going to China.”

In St. Louis, civil rights movement veterans like Ina Boon, the matriarch of the local branch of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, vow to safeguard the right of black students to attend predominantly white schools.

“We will not accept separate but equal,” she says. “If it takes a plane, a train or whatever, our children are going to have the right to learn with white kids.”

Reluctant to vilify Bosley in public, Boon does not rule out the possibility of a court fight between the mayor and the NAACP.

Inner-city parents, likewise, are taking sides. Sandra Hollis, mother of Joey and Jermaine, elementary school-age boys who are bused an hour each day to the south suburbs, wants “neighborhood schools that work.” Hollis, a St. Louis Police Department computer worker, has joined a parents group planning to petition U.S. District Judge George F. Gunn Jr. to end busing.

Many other black parents defend busing, in the words of Ruby Connors, as “the only way my children will make it in this world.” Three of Connors’ sons passed through the busing program and attend Purdue University. Connors, 48, whose two younger sons, Isaac and Eric, are bused to a suburban high school, wishes she could take back the vote she cast for Bosley last April.

“If I knew this was coming, I wouldn’t have voted at all,” she said.

St. Louis’ busing plan has been in effect since 1982, when a federal judge upheld a desegregation lawsuit filed 12 years earlier by a group of black parents. Under its three-pronged plan, 3,000 students are bused within city limits, 9,000 attend magnet schools and 14,000 children board yellow school buses each day bound for suburban schools. Suburban schools have agreed to take in the inner-city students to avoid a court-enforced mandate.

Susan Uchitelle, executive director of the Voluntary Interdistrict Coordinating Council, which administers the busing program, says the St. Louis plan is the largest voluntary desegregation operation in the country and “the most successful. Certainly, we have some parents who force their children to go. But in most cases, the students get a lot out of the program--their education improves and they make friends with the white kids.”

Riding 45 minutes to and from his mother’s apartment in South City to Lindbergh High School in south St. Louis County, 11th-grader Isaac Connors, 17, manages to stay on the honor roll and play varsity football.

“I think it works for me because I started right out of elementary school,” he says. “Kids who start busing out of middle school or high school have a hard time adjusting.”

Sandra Hollis’ 13-year-old son, Joey, is also a Lindbergh district student. He has been riding the bus for two years, but unlike Isaac Connors, aches to return to city schools. His bus is targeted almost every day by stone-wielding city kids. His grades have fluctuated, he has few white friends and he has been banned from the bus several times for throwing spitballs and other infractions.

“The only time I hear from his teachers, it’s another discipline problem,” Sandra Hollis says. “I work, so I can’t go out there for meetings. They don’t make the effort to keep me informed.” Even if the busing program continues, she has decided to return Joey to city schools next year.

Architects of integration and busing programs insist that with 500 American cities and communities under federal orders to desegregate their schools, the impact of a few influential black opponents is not likely to be great.

Gary Orfield, a desegregation expert and Harvard University political scientist, notes that attempts to end busing by black school board members in Louisville, Ky., and Charlotte, N.C., and by black parents in Atlanta had little impact on judicial orders.

“Black politicians are not the black community,” Orfield says. “Support for desegregation is still strong enough to convince most cities to support busing.”

Still, even federal judges shepherding complex desegregation plans acknowledge they are not deaf to some black mayors’ arguments that the need for quality education should precede the drive for integration. A 1992 Supreme Court ruling that racial imbalance alone is not a basis for enforcing mandatory busing has moved some judges to consider closing out their desegregation orders as long as they see improvement in urban schools.

In his St. Louis chambers, across the street from the dimly lit City Hall office where Bosley works, Judge Gunn says he is giving the mayor’s anti-busing views a hearing. But Bosley’s opinion, Gunn adds, is only one among the multitudes he has to consider as he determines the future of his 11-year-old court order.

“I have to look out my window and listen to all the voices on this issue,” says Gunn, choosing his words carefully. “The mayor, coming out the way he has, is a very strong voice.”

Bosley has taken care not to move too fast. He has avoided the next logical step, asking Gunn to allow the city to intervene in the court case. A similar move by Denver Mayor Webb backfired several weeks ago. Federal Judge Richard Matsch ruled that Webb had “no significant interest” in the case and turned down his request to settle a busing order.

Bosley prefers to let allies on the school board take the lead. School board President Eddie Davis and three other black board members recently voted with a white majority to present a new plan to Gunn to end the desegregation case.

And two months before speaking out on the busing issue, Bosley quietly sent Gunn a letter “expressing my concerns about the case.” Gunn, who replied to the mayor in a letter he declined to detail, said the mayor informed him that he hoped the busing order could be settled.

Even if Gunn agrees to close out the case, St. Louis’ school system, which is 76% black, would not instantly improve, Bosley acknowledges. City officials would have to persuade Missouri’s Legislature to award St. Louis not only the lion’s share of desegregation funding, but millions more to build schools, renovate older buildings, hire teachers, buy state-of-the-art equipment and fund new programs.

That is an unlikely prospect in a Legislature dominated by rural leaders who chafe at the amount of money already spent on city schools and resent federal court orders that compelled them to spend more than $1 billion on desegregation.

“I’d have a lot of persuading to do,” Bosley says. “But if my mind can change, so can others.”

Bosley says he grew disillusioned with integration as he watched his north St. Louis community wither. In his childhood, he could walk to movie theaters, bakeries, Laundromats, pharmacies, beauty salons, barber shops and restaurants. All that is gone, he says, as whites and then middle-class blacks fled to the suburbs.

Bosley says his change of heart on busing was well-advertised during his campaign for mayor. His stance, he insists, was ignored by local media. That magnified the shock among other black leaders when he informed a St. Louis Post Dispatch editorial board meeting in September--five months after his election--that he wanted the desegregation program ended.

Local civil rights leaders say Bosley artfully concealed his views until after the election. “He got all these people to vote for him who never dreamed he would deviate from the gains we have fought so hard to protect,” Boon says.

NAACP officials also complain that Bosley and other black opponents of busing play into the hands of white segregationists.

“Some of these so-called critics will say, ‘See, what did I tell you? The blacks don’t want integration, either.’ ” says Beverly P. Cole, the NAACP’s national director of education. “It gives aid and comfort to our enemies.”

Those fears cut deep in St. Louis, a city with few integrated neighborhoods and a school board that opposed integration until recent years. Civil rights leaders were horrified when Bosley appeared before a largely white crowd in South St. Louis several days after coming out publicly against the busing program.

After discussing other urban topics, Bosley reportedly told his audience, “now for the best part,” then proceeded to reaffirm his opposition to busing. The audience “lapped it up,” one civil rights leader says.

The growing enmity between the new mayors and old-line civil rights leaders is not necessarily inevitable. Mayor White of Cleveland has managed to thrash out a consensus with NAACP officials over that city’s court-ordered desegregation program.

Cleveland has advantages that St. Louis lacks. Cleveland’s local NAACP organization, unlike St. Louis’, is dominated by younger members amenable to new approaches in education. And the Cleveland group is run not by a doctrinaire older leader, but by George L. Forbes, a former City Council president practiced in the art of compromise.

“What helped us is that the new blood (in the local NAACP branch) wanted the court case ended,” he said. “And luckily, the national office didn’t lean on us. That made it easier to sit down with (Mayor White) and come up with something we all could agree on.”

The compromise, a plan that would minimize but not eliminate busing and put more emphasis on magnet schools and other community choices, was also aided by the city’s adoption of a comprehensive plan to refashion the school system. Backed by city leaders, the plan has been approved by federal Judge Frank J. Battisti--although his desegregation order still stands.

“Our plan made it easier for the judge to agree to rethink his order,” says Chris Carmody, White’s chief education aide. “We feel it’s only a matter of time before we get a complete settlement.”

In recent weeks, Bosley has made similar conciliatory gestures, announcing that he and Davis will join in a regional summit later this month with the NAACP and other interest groups to seek common ground over desegregation issues.

But Bosley says only a complete settlement of the St. Louis court order will satisfy him. In that, he differs with his father, a honey-tongued mattress factory owner and a 16-year veteran of the St. Louis City Council.

Freeman Bosley Sr. believes “those who want to go to the suburbs should have that right--even if I think they’re wrong for wanting to.” But his son wants the entire program scrapped. St. Louis schools, Bosley Jr. says, desperately need the $52 million that Missouri awards suburban schools and bus firms each year to carry out the desegregation order.

“What has busing done for the black community?” he asks. “We still have 47 all-black schools after 11 years of integration (out of 50 city schools), we’re losing some of our best minds to the suburbs and we can’t afford to pay for basic improvements and equipment at most of our schools. It’s time to try something else.”

Neighborhoods like his can only thrive again, Bosley insists, when city schools begin to lure back families who left. “We’re never going to trust our own schools and our own neighborhoods as long as we keep sending our kids off to the suburbs every morning.”

Yet even as committed as he is to improving neighborhood education, Bosley will soon face an agonizing decision on his own family’s commitment to city schools.

His 2-year-old daughter, Sydney, will be school age within three years. The mayor wants her to start kindergarten at Harrison Elementary, the nearest public school.

But his wife, Darlynn, is not so certain. She prefers the idea of Sydney attending a city magnet school--part of the system created under the desegregation order.

And Darlynn Bosley speaks from experience, the mayor admits, wincing slightly. She works as a special education teacher for the city schools.

“Believe me, we’re facing the same dilemma that many parents are torn over,” Bosley says. “But at least we’re committed to staying in the city system. We just can’t run any more.”