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SPEAKER 1: Four decades ago, cities across the country were being forced by the courts to desegregate their schools through busing. At the same time, a group of parents in South Minneapolis, some Black, some White, persuaded the school board to voluntarily bus students between two schools to make both schools more diverse. This weekend, they are gathering to celebrate the 40th anniversary of their effort. Minnesota Public Radio news reporter Brent Williams, who as a student was one of those involved in the busing plan, and he files this report.

BRENT WILLIAMS: The sound of heartfelt reminiscing and jovial chatter fills Marge Goldberg's living room and spills over into her kitchen. Today, Goldberg is hosting a gathering of people who first met each other more than 40 years ago.

SPEAKER 2: Jerry babysat Jimmy.

SPEAKER 3: Does anyone know where he is?

SPEAKER 1: The dozen or so people here all had children in Hale or Field elementary schools in the 1970s. At the time, Goldberg's now-late husband was the president of the Field parent teacher association. field is located in a racially diverse neighborhood in Southcentral Minneapolis. Goldberg says at the time, the school student population was more than 50% African-American. And she says Hale school, located nearly two miles south of Field, was nearly all White.

MARGE GOLDBERG: There was a voluntary desegregation plan that nobody used. Very few people left their school and did went elsewhere. And so I think we were thinking as a PTA, what is going on here?

BRENT WILLIAMS: Goldberg, who is White, says the effort started in 1969, when members of the Field PTA made a request to the school board to pair Hale and Field schools. The pairing meant students who lived near the more diverse Field and were in grades K through 3 would be bussed to the mostly White Hale. And fourth, fifth, and sixth-grade students living near Hale would ride the bus to Field school. Jill Vecoli, who is White, says the plan was not popular with many other White parents of Hale school students.

JILL VECOLI: We used to have some really knockdown drag-out fights at PTA. My husband was president of the PTA at Hale.

BRENT WILLIAMS: Vecoli's now-late husband Rudy was a bearded University of Minnesota professor who frequently traveled overseas. And she says some of the Hale parents suspected that her husband's support for the busing plan was part of a larger, more sinister scheme.

JILL VECOLI: There was one point that I walked right past a lady, and she said, oh, there's that Rudy Vecoli guy. He just came back from Russia, and he got his orders. So they thought this was a communist plot.

BRENT WILLIAMS: Vecoli says the opposition voiced by White parents from Hale was not expressed in overtly racist terms. She says some White parents complained that if their kids were bused all the way to Field, they wouldn't be able to come home for a hot lunch. Black parents were more open to the idea. Alberta Johnson has five children, and two of them took part in the Hale-Field pairing. Johnson and several other Black parents in the room say their kids were already used to being around large numbers of White children, so integration was not a new or scary thing.

ALBERTA JOHNSON: My biggest thing was that I wanted the children to have an equal shot, have books, all those things that you need to be successful people.

BRENT WILLIAMS: But Johnson says she and some other parents did have concerns about putting young kindergarten-aged children on a school bus, especially on the first day of the pairing, which was September 2, 1971, the same year the US Supreme Court ruled that forced busing of students could be ordered to achieve racial integration.

ALBERTA JOHNSON: Jay's wife, Madge, and all of us put our little ones on the school bus. As soon as the bus took off, Madge came with the station wagon. We all jumped in. We thought we were going to have to fight our way through the quietest first day of school you have ever seen in your life.

BRENT WILLIAMS: On the same day Johnson put her son on a bus to Hale, Daniel Goldberg took the bus to Field school. Daniel is Marge Goldberg's son. At the time, the Goldberg's lived in a predominantly White neighborhood near Minnehaha Creek.

Daniel says his first day at Field was also non-eventful. He says he was more apprehensive about getting lost in his new school than he was about how he would get along in a school with more Black classmates than others he'd attended. White parents who opposed the pairing often raised fears of interracial violence. However, Daniel says the only fight he remembers getting into was with another White kid, who hit him in the mouth and cut his lip.

DANIEL GOLDBERG: Two of the guys that were watching this or around were the ones that ended up taking me to the nurse's room to get some attention. And those two kids were Black kids. And none of that seemed out of the ordinary to me.

GREGOR PENNY: Let me show you what I've got here that'll show you pretty much.

BRENT WILLIAMS: Gregor Penny covered the busing story extensively for the Minneapolis Tribune, 40 years ago. The now-retired reporter sits at his dining room table, looking at clippings of some of his stories. In November of 1970, Penny covered a school board meeting attended by around 800 people.

Penny wrote that opponents of the pairing booed and jeered people who spoke in favor of it. A man at the meeting shouted, are Negroes as intelligent as Whites? And the man later added, they are inferior. Then, Minneapolis Mayor Charles Stenvig was among those who opposed the pairing. But Penny says the most vocal opposition died down after the school board approved the pairing by a 6-to-1 vote.

GREGOR PENNY: The people who didn't like the idea, felt that it was an infringement on their rights. It was really a shattering of the kind of life that they wanted to lead.

BRENT WILLIAMS: One of those people, Olaf Ulvag, became the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit in Hennepin County District Court, after the school board approved the plan. The complaint stated that among other things, the pairing deprived Ulvag of an inherent property right, namely, the right to decide where his kids went to school based on his choice of where to buy his home.

NPR News contacted Ulvag, but he declined to comment about the lawsuit, which was dismissed. Penny interviewed Ulvag for a story, shortly after the suit was filed. Penny reported that Ulvag wasn't necessarily against integration. Ulvag said he opposed forced integration and threatened to move his wife and two kids out of Minneapolis. But the Ulvags still live in the same house they did more than 40 years ago. But Penny says others quietly pulled their kids out of Hale, the formerly nearly all-White school.

GREGOR PENNY: Some 30 kids were transferred or enrolled in Mount Calvary Lutheran School, which is out on 66th Street, none of whom had been parishioners there.

BRENT WILLIAMS: Penny says some students also left Field, the school that was more diverse to begin with. In an article for the Tribune, published a few weeks after the bussing began, Penny wrote that about 220 students moved from the Hale field area or transferred to private schools. However, school officials quoted in the article said the number of students who left the schools was only slightly higher than the previous year.

Immediately after the pairing, the Black populations at each school either fell or rose to nearly a third of the student body. However, over the decades, Hale and Field have both become less racially balanced. According to the latest numbers from the district, Hale is more than 3/4 White. And the African-American population at Field has dropped to 20%, and White students now make up 64% of the student body.

[RINGING SOUND]

A lot of things have changed here at Field school since I went here in the late 1970s. The school is now a middle school with a few classes of fifth and sixth graders.

STEVE NORLAND-WEAVER: Oh, what do you mean nothing? There's a good story there.

BRENT WILLIAMS: Principal Steve Norland-Weaver chats with students as they walk the halls between classes. The tide of students that wash past us appear to be a pretty even mix of White, Black, and Brown pre-teens and teenagers. Norland-Weaver says while the pairing between Hale and Field was considered cutting edge 40 years ago, it's pretty well accepted now.

STEVE NORLAND-WEAVER: Although times have changed and the neighborhood has ebbed and flowed, it's still known as Hale-Field. That concept and that paired idea has still continued to exist and grew to include eighth grade over time and is still a strong program, and in the end, highly regarded.

BRENT WILLIAMS: The Hale-Field pairing was the first of several unions designed to bring about racial balance. However, like Hale and Field, schools across the city have become increasingly racially unbalanced or segregated. That may be a sign there are still some societal divides too wide for yellow school buses to cross. Brent Williams, Minnesota Public Radio News, Minneapolis.

SPEAKER 1: Reporter Brent Williams was one of the thousands of students in the mid-1970s who participated in the Hale-Field pairing. Go to mprnews.org to read his reporter's notebook. You can even see one of his class pictures. And we have video from news reports at the time about the busing plan.