Growing up through twelve years of public school in Texas as a Caucasian, I was never privileged—allowed—to attend school with one African-American child. Those were the days of segregation, and not once until I got to college did I have any black classmates.

 
btw, when I got to college, the number of black students in my class was still not what you would call high. The institution of higher learning was Rice University, with many excellent professors and a handful of the other kind, in a rather enclosed setting—the campus was one of the few sites in Houston at that time that had actual hardwood trees, spreading oaks said to have been planted by a Mexican-American gardener on his own initiative, years earlier, to change the face of Houston in one sector. Rice had a very small student body, with a 10-to-1 faculty-student ratio or less and a 4-to-1 male-female undergraduate ratio. About one-third engineering students, it was also not particularly heterogeneous then, in spite of conscientious efforts. After all, Rice Institute, as the university had originally been named, had been founded by charter by William Marsh Rice to be “free to all white boys.” The ‘boys’ part fell within four years—a few women were admitted back near the beginning—but the race part took a little longer (decades). Several student athletes were African-American, but Linda Faye Williams was my only black classmate not an athlete, the only young woman.

 
Linda, who went on to grad school at Chicago and became a lively and inspiring political scientist—words that do not often go together—died last year, heartbreakingly early. Rice’s Fondren Library now has a room named in her honor. Back when we were composing our annual yearbook, a ‘yearbox’ that year, submitting photographs with our own captions to define ourselves, Linda submitted a photo of a bus token.

 
But—as Tom Lehrer would say—I digress.

 
Back to busing. School in Houston, 4th through 12th grades, offered a series of excellent teachers but as said not too much mix socially. Because of my parents’ numerous job moves, I went to five elementary schools in six years with little academic damage (though it was not until I had the across-the-board vision test in 7^th grade that anyone including me knew I was nearsighted). Halfway through 6^th grade we moved again—my parents bought their house—and I made close friends in my small class.

 
Then came an enormous junior high/middle school and a school bus for the first time in my life. The Houston Independent School District went through three stages of segregation while I was there: first outright total segregation; then the effort to pretend in courts that “separate but equal” really was equal; then a foot-dragging pretense of integrating “with all deliberate speed,” which finally collapsed after the courts ruled that there was all too much deliberation and too little speed, but not until after I had graduated from high school.

 
So about the time thousands of us went from elementary to middle school, HISD built a bunch of new black schools in an effort to shore up the ‘equal’ pretense. The result for me individually was a longer bus trip—I as a white kid of course did not have the option of attending one of three new black junior highs built nearer my parents’ home than the white school I was districted in. Instead, I was bused forcibly, across that expensive buffer zone, to the crumbling and overcrowded, noisy junior high named after one of our local rightwing-nut-but-wealthy families, where I was largely miserable at school—fortunately, I had friends in my own neighborhood--for three dim years, except in accelerated classes and in music, till high school.

 
For the same length of time, I also suffered the bus—overcrowded, noisy, dirty and aging. These were the innocent pre-safety-seat days, when young people’s safety was just not much of a factor in anyone’s calculations. So I got on the bus every day, rode standing jammed in with student bodies about 99 percent of whom outweighed me, in un-air-conditioned Houston heat most of those days, got off the bus with clothes and hair a mess (I thought), and learned all the dirty words that I know probably the first week. I remember my father asking me, rather naively I thought, They don’t use rough language on that bus, do they?

 
Incidentally, conflict and violence were not exactly unknown. One of the big gaps in all the inflamed ‘reporting’ about busing—which at its peak included about 3 percent of U.S. students—is that adolescent conflict in schools tends to be associated exclusively with race. Race was absolutely not a factor on any bus I ever rode; 100 percent of my fellow riders were white. Conflict and discomfort still prevailed. I remember hitting a guy on the head with my hairbrush, for reasons I cannot at all recollect—wish I had not.

 
So it could be acknowledged, even by people who rightly wanted to end segregation as my own parents did, that—as stated—being forcibly bused in bad conditions was a miserable experience.

 
On the other side, an accurate view of ‘busing,’ often referred to but always partially, must at least mention those separate-but-equal days. Every reference to ‘busing’ in the news media associates busing with desegregation. This is truthiness.

 
Mandatory busing didn’t come in with integration, didn’t start with desegregation. An accurate version of those years would include the unmentioned fact that thousands of us white kids were already being bused, without choice and mostly without input, in support of segregation.