Having been an active participant in the court-ordered busing to integrate Milwaukee’s public schools, I would be the first to admit that it didn’t turn out to magically create quality public schools for every child. Neither will ending busing.

The irony is that a new effort to drastically reduce busing in the Milwaukee Public Schools is coming from leaders within the African-American community. In the ’70s, when federal courts finally tried to eliminate the “separate and unequal” schools for blacks and whites—which had been outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954— it was whites who fought it.

White parents in Boston, Louisville, Ky., and other cities, their faces twisted in racial hatred, rioted against busing. It was the history of white, racial violence against school integration that was responsible for the worst racial inequities in what Milwaukee called its “voluntary” desegregation plan.

What Milwaukee’s white leaders meant by “voluntary” was that busing would be voluntary for white families. Thousands of black children were involuntarily bused to distant white schools. Neighborhood schools they left behind were given additional resources to transform them into “specialty” schools to attract white students voluntarily.

The city’s continuing unequal treatment of students, even in the name of integration, is well known. It is an understandable source of resentment among blacks today. But as part of that first group of white parents who willingly volunteered to have our children bused to formerly all-black neighborhood schools, I want more people to remember how integration improved Milwaukee schools. The truth is when white parents arrived at formerly all-black schools, they were shocked at just how separate and unequal those schools had been.

Often, there was little or no library. Some schools had no science labs. Poor teachers with archaic teaching methods had been dumped there. At one school, the children had no playground because the teachers were using it as a parking lot. White parents screamed bloody murder.

The administration, which previously had ignored complaints from black parents, suddenly became responsive to the concerns of parents. Some of the best schools in the system today—Golda Meir Elementary School, MacDowell Montessori, Rufus King High School, Milwaukee High School of the Arts and others—were created as a result of busing, for all its racial inequities.

It wasn’t the elimination of racism, but the continuation of it, that motivated the school administration to suddenly begin upgrading black neighborhood schools once white students started attending them. The education bureaucracy may have creakily changed over the years, but it hasn’t eliminated all the vestiges of racism that will prevent a major shift in resources to all-black schools in black neighborhoods.