Interesting experiment...busing NYC

Nativity Bed-Sty

As a retired white woman of a certain age who grew up in a racially segregated city, I was "bused" from my white ethnic neighborhood into an overwhelmingly black neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. Yes, the segregated city I lived in, and to a lesser extent, still live in, is the largest city in the nation: New York City. In 1957 my parents bought a four bedroom house in the Vanderveer/East Flatbush section of Brooklyn located a healthy ten block walk from the last stop of what was then known as the IRT #4 and #5 train. We had been living in the Fordham section of the Bronx in a fifth floor apartment close to where my parents had grown up. My Dad had a job in Brooklyn, and drove every day to his job along the waterfront in Red Hook. It just made sense for us to live closer to his place of employment.

We would have twice the space with plenty of room for the then seven of us: parents, four kids and my maternal Grandmother who lived with us, a backyard and a garage for my father's car! We moved in late summer, and my mother wanted us enrolled at the local Catholic school as soon as possible. But it was in the middle of the post-World War II baby boom, and seats were tight. After spending a week or two at the local public school; by sisters and I were shoe-horned into spots at a Catholic school. Only one of us would be gong to the local parish school; two of us, including my 8 year old self, would be taking a bus every morning to an underpopulated school in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, just under an hour's ride away. 

Bed-Sty, as it is lovingly known, was a neighborhood of brownstone row houses and parks that had flipped over during the post war years from a white population to a prominently black one, many of the newer inhabitants were from the South, the Caribbean or even Africa. The school that I attended, Nativity, had been built by Irish and Italian immigrants in the classic style of San Apollinare in Classe in Ravenna, Italy, a Romanesque building with a high vaulted ceiling and a replica of Michelangelo's Pieta in the back. There were two school buildings a rectory and a convent that created an inner courtyard where students assembled in the mornings and played in during lunch recess.

Nativity's school was underutilized since the shift in population resulted in a decreasing number of Roman Catholics in the neighborhood. The Diocese of Brooklyn looked at this as an opportunity of sorts, and began sending the overflow from other more whiter local parish schools into what some would consider to be "The Hood". So, like Senator Kamala Harris, I was part of a busing experiment. Unlike many white ethnic parents who balked at sending their children into minority neighborhoods and minority schools, my parents sent two of their soon to be five children into what those parents would consider to be an undesirable situation. And guess what? We thrived.

My sister who attended the local parish school sat in a classroom of fifty students; I was in a class of thirty. Her classmates all looked alike, white ethnic New Yorkers: Italian, Irish, German-American. My classmates were from all over: Hungarian and African refugees, Puerto Ricans, Afro-Caribbean, Central Americans, Asians, as well as the kids who looked like me.  We all studied together, ate lunch together, played together, and worshipped together which set us aside from other "forced" bused kids. I spent six years in a multi-ethnic and multi-racial environment, and it formed me in unmeasurable ways, ways of tolerance, inclusivity and an openness to learn and expierence new things. I developed a love of Cuban black bean soup, fried plantains and banana pudding that, thank heavens, I can usually get somewhere in this city when the craving strikes. 

That youthful formation has also resulted in a very unique lens through which I view society. In those early years all of my classmates were smart, bright, eager to learn and valued by our teachers, the good Sisters of St. Joseph. They showed no favoritism; they valued each of us for our personhood, not for how society may have viewed us. This rubbed off on each of us. We treated each other as equals, no one was better than anyone else. We were all held to the same set of expectations, and we met them. We truly liked each other and cared about each other. My expierence was an unexpected outcome in an unintended social experiment. It was an invaluable lesson in the universality of being human. We all got along; we all learned; we all valued each other as uniquely wonderful creatures, and we were friends.