![]() Mother and daughter were on opposite ends of a painful chapter in Indianapolis history that started out with noble ambitions. The younger Kirkland, who graduated last month from Perry Township’s Southport High School, made the same daily journey her mother did from their Forest Manor neighborhood, though hers was a much less eventful trip than her mother’s had been, filled mostly with kids sleeping on their way to class. The buses, paid for by the state and Indianapolis Public Schools, rolled from 1981 until last month, when the court order mandating the busing expired.Īmong the kids on the last bus was Kirkland’s daughter, LaShawn. Kirkland and her friends were trailblazers-part of the first year of an experiment that saw thousands of kids bused from struggling Indianapolis neighborhoods to more affluent sections of Marion County for school. Suddenly they were across the county, in a place where they weren’t welcome. She and her friends lived in a neighborhood where nearly everyone looked like them. “We didn’t know what to do with the racism,” said Kirkland, who is now 49. It was the disorienting feeling of being hated for being black. More than 30 years later, it wasn’t how the confrontation ended that has stuck with her-she thinks police escorted her and her friends into the school. She remembers the way the bus started to rock as the white students slammed against the bus, and then: She remembers a dozen of her white classmates approaching the bus, their hands slapping against the yellow metal side panels. She remembers the bus filled with kids - all of them black - pulling into Perry Meridian High School one morning in 1981. LaTonya Kirkland was a 14-year-old high school freshman the year a judge ordered her and her friends from Indianapolis’ East side to make a 20-minute bus ride to school.
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