If you talk to any Denverite, who was school-aged from the 1970s through the 1990s, they will tell you about busing. While many loved the opportunity to build friendships as young people with fellow students from different backgrounds, the story of how it came to be, is much less positive.
As a Denver parent in the 1960s, Rachel B. Noel was informed that her daughter would begin at the newly constructed Barrett Elementary for fifth grade. Despite the Park Hill neighborhood's diverse residents, Barrett was almost entirely made up of African American students, and under-resourced. Content that Noel’s daughter had learned in fourth grade at Park Hill Elementary, was being taught at Barrett in fifth grade.
This first hand experience as to how the Denver School Board was manipulating school district boundaries to keep schools like Park Hill Elementary predominantly white, and schools like Barrett and Stedman predominantly black, was the inspiration Rachel B. Noel needed to run for school board herself. In 1965 she became the first African American woman to hold an elected office in Colorado. And, she immediately began to address the inequities she had seen. She authored what is referred to as the Noel Resolution, which attempted to make schools more integrated and introduced some busing measures. It was met with backlash, the next school board elections saw the election of new members who reversed the resolution.
Two weeks after the Noel Resolution was repealed, in 1969 Wilfred Keyes, along with eight other families brought a suit against the Denver School District in a case that was ultimately decided by the US Supreme Court. In it the defense was able to prove years of intentional racial segregation in violation of the 14th amendment. This case was groundbreaking on several fronts; it was one of the first to extend the civil rights movement to the West, acknowledged hispanic students face similar inequities as African American students, the US Supreme Court ruled that it was indeed de facto segregation, and that if racial discrimination was present in one school, all of the schools in the district were involved in a policy of intentional segregation, the first such ruling outside of the southern United States. One of the results was twenty years of busing to integrate schools, required by the federal government. The measure was repealed in 1995, and busing officially stopped in Denver.
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Author Bio
Alison Salutz is the Director of Community Programs for Historic Denver. Her favorite part of the role is managing their walking tours, which allows her to research, visit and explore all aspects of Denver history, and incorporate findings into her work with the public. She previously served as the Visitor Experience Coordinator at the History Colorado Center, and the Director of Education and Programs at the Molly Brown House Museum, where she helped develop a self-guided city tour called Denver Story Trek. Although not originally from Denver, she received her 20 year chip, which she’s quite proud of.