Forced Busing

My family moved away from Wichita when I was entering into the eighth grade. We only moved 20 miles to our east to a small town called Rose Hill, Kansas, but it seemed like a lifetime away. This small little farming town had not been forced to desegregate its students. Everyone here was white, upper class and spoiled. Nobody had any idea about other cultures or races. Wichita was considered forbidden territory by all the so called superior parents. It took me a few years to feel even a bit accepted here. Even though I resembled there class I was still an outsider.

The differences between these two schools where outlandish. With no cultural differences being accepted, Rose Hill had no idea what it was like in a culturally diverse society. Parents and community leaders in this area deemed certain mainstream music and ideas as intolerable. Being different here catapulted a person into social unacceptability. Even the local community police held biases towards anyone who was not born and raised in their community. Rose Hill, Ks is where all the parents ran when evading the issues of forced busing in Wichita. These communities, where everyone ran from, became known as Rust Belt cities (Wikepedia para. 5). Many believed that the 50 percent decline in population during the last fifty years can be attributed to the issue of integration (Wikepedia para. 5).

As noted in our text this semester, “Prejudice is a negative attitude that rejects an entire group; discrimination is behavior that deprives a group of certain rights or opportunities (Schaefer 2006) Each of these concepts where abundant in the lives and feelings of this particular community of Rose Hill, America. Whether it was a young student, or our fine crop of community leaders, everyone was ready to lend that discriminating eye.

During researching for my community autobiography I sent out a questionnaire to past acquaintances from Rose Hill High School. I wanted to find out some other community members views on their lives in this suburbia of schools and what kind of effect not being integrated made on their childhood. Amy S. a close friend in high school reminded me about how different both of us girls felt, we had experienced life outside R H High. Each of us girls attended desegregated schools until moving in high school to Rose Hill. Amy shared experiences of feeling sympathy for other students, knowing that these students couldn’t understand how it felt to be anybody but rich and white.