"They can run, but they can't hide!" No, I am not referring to the determination expressed by former President Reagan to search out and punish Libyan terrorists wherever they might be. Rather, these were the words of a victorious attorney after the California Supreme Court's 1976 Crawford v. Board of Education "desegregation" decision 17 Cal.3d 280 (Crawford I). Crawford I held that public school students could be involuntarily bused away from their neighborhood schools to "desegregate" racially imbalanced schools, even if that imbalance was caused by residential patterns and not school authorities.

I observed this statement in response to a claim that many students would leave the public school system, commonly called "white flight," if the trial judge ordered them bused, as the Crawford ruling was being debated on television in Los Angeles in the summer of 1977. That statement was based upon the contention of busing proponents that the Crawford decision gave the Crawford trial judge power to order busing of students throughout the entire metropolitan area beyond the lines of the Los Angeles School District, and thereby to "recapture" many students who might flee beyond those lines to avoid a busing order.

With concern, I had discerned the expansion of judicial affirmative action in public schools. Busing orders had brought reports such as the following from Samuel Blumenfeld in How to Start Your Own Private School, on page 73:

Early in 1970, Raymond York, a fourteen-year-old student at Oklahoma City's Taft Junior High School was arrested by a federal marshal, and his parents hauled into court where a federal judge pronounced a jail sentence and a fine on them. Their crime? They had refused to play the role of pawns on the judicial chessboard where students are moved about from district to district like so many black and white pieces....