Nellie Bowles

Where had they found these Trump supporters in the first place, some wondered.

Why would anyone subject themselves to a day of this, others asked.

And if the day’s experiment worked — defined loosely as everyone surviving and maybe also not yelling? — were there any lessons to be drawn for less controlled environments like the Thanksgiving table or a Tinder date?

The host was a nonprofit called Better Angels, which is putting on a half-dozen events around the country every week through the election.

Its work is part of a boomlet in efforts to break partisan passion in the U.S. as the 2020 election approaches.

There’s TruStory, a new social network that uses points-based incentives to encourage good debate. Bridge the Divide brings young people together to engage in “respectful, face-to-face” conversations. Make America Dinner Again helps people host cross-party dinner parties. Companies hire Georgetown business school professor Christine Porath to come in as a civility consultant. And there’s Civility, a physical meetup group that is now becoming a virtual platform for finding understanding between those on opposite sides of the political divide.

Or rather, of the cultural divide. Because the division is no longer just about politics. Politics is the backdrop, of course. The House is moving forward with impeachment proceedings — an effort that Republicans insist is a “Soviet style” “coup” and that President Donald Trump warned, quoting a pastor on Twitter, would “cause a Civil War like fracture.”

“I had not been, shall we say, enthusiastic about the divisiveness that would occur from an impeachment,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said about why she had been wary of the proceedings.

But even Americans outside the Beltway have been conscripted into this war, sometimes without realizing it. Many going to these civility gatherings talked about new family divisions and fights among friends. Cross-party relationships that had survived the Bush or Obama presidencies were faltering now under Trump.

Last month, Ellen DeGeneres sat next to former President George W. Bush at a football game and later called him a friend. It turned into a national storm that made it to the Democratic debate stage in October with a question from Anderson Cooper about whether any of the candidates had “surprising friends.”

Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg — under scrutiny for his company’s policy on not fact-checking political advertisements — was also criticized recently for meeting with conservative journalists and commentators. The hashtag #deletefacebook trended in response. Zuckerberg responded to the outcry.

“Meeting new people and hearing from a wide range of viewpoints is part of learning,” he wrote. “If you haven’t tried it, I suggest you do!”

At Better Angels, the polarized were at a square table supervised by two moderators, a therapist and a retired psychiatrist. They were mostly in their 50s and 60s and wore red and blue name tags to correspond with their political leanings. The moderators referred to them as the reds and the blues.

The day began with each group devising a list of the biggest stereotypes they think others have about them.

Ruth Ashkenazi, 51, of the reds, raised her hand and said: “Racist.”

Carlos Hernandez, 62, added, “White.”

Hellynn Reilly said, “White supremacist.”

The moderator tried to lump all these together. A few could surely just fit under the stereotype category of racist, no? No.

“White, privileged and also anti-immigrant,” Reilly said.

The blues came back from their session. The top stereotype they listed was godless/decadent. Each side presented their lists.

The conservatives were surprised the liberals thought at all about religion. The liberals were surprised the conservatives were so anxious about being seen as racist.

Over a lunch break of deli sandwiches and mixed bean salad, the two groups stayed largely separate.

Many of the blue side said they came just for the opportunity to meet and question someone who disagreed with them politically.

“Outside of this group, I’ve got no Republican friends,” said Monty Worth, 52, a teacher who had also been to one previous session. “My grandparents were, but they died.”

People on the red side said they came to the workshop to be in a safe space where they could be open about their politics and argue their case.

Ashkenazi lives in Cupertino, considers herself socially liberal but fiscally conservative, voted for Trump and teaches fitness classes. She learned to avoid talking about her politics when, the morning after the 2016 election, a friend stormed out of her class.

“A good friend of mine came to boot camp and starting railing against those ‘stupid racist’ Midwesterners, and I said, ‘Let’s just work out,’ and she was like, ‘How could you defend them?’” Ashkenazi said. “And that’s when I realized conversations would need to be very carefully crafted and choreographed from there on out.”

At one point, each side went to separate rooms to workshop questions for the other. Leslie Lopato, who was moderating for the blue side, directed them to come up with open, nonjudgmental questions.

Martha Keller, a lawyer who volunteers with progressive groups, started:

“Do you regret voting for Donald Trump knowing now how he acts not only personally but knowing how he is treating his powers and duties as a president?”

“So that’s kind of a gotcha,” Lopato said.

“I want to know why these people voted for him,” Keller said.

Denise Giacomini went next. She said some of the people she’d met on the red side “seemed reasonable.” But she had some questions for them.

“How are they able to get past Trump’s outrageous behavior. How can they block it out? How?” And: “What I want to ask is, what exactly are the positives to Trump?”

The moderator again tried to adjust the question.

“But just so you understand, they will be able to give you a list of positives,” Lopato said. “Is that what you’re wanting?”

Better Angels has its headquarters in a couple of small rooms in a midtown Manhattan office building. The man who started it is David Blankenhorn, who rose to national prominence as a vocal and influential opponent of same-sex marriage in the mid-2000s before publicly reversing himself.

He had spent years touring the country, talking about the sanctity of marriage and the risk to the institution that same-sex marriage posed.

“Everywhere I went, gay people would come up to me after my talk, and they would say, ‘I’d like to show you a picture of my children,’ and for the longest time, it bothered me, and I would be, like, ‘Look, wonderful kid,’ but I sort of felt like saying, ‘What? Would you like to see pictures of mine?’” Blankenhorn said.

His reversal on same-sex marriage did not come from new statistics or arguments but from something much simpler: He became close friends with a gay man.

“I realized that what they really were trying to do was just make a human connection,” Blankenhorn said. “They weren’t out to ruin America.”

Now a supporter of the thing he had fought, Blankenhorn wound down his nonprofit and sold his condominium to stay afloat financially.

After the 2016 election, he and two friends got together and led the first Better Angels workshop in Ohio. Now more than 15,000 people have gone through one of their programs (8,000 have joined as dues-paying members), and the group has trained more than 620 volunteer workshop moderators (a lot of whom were therapists) to continue the mission in dozens of towns.

One challenge among many is figuring out how to describe what they are doing.

“Dialogue, that’s a liberal word,” Blankenhorn said. “What conservatives want to do is discuss or debate issues.”

“Liberals want to sit in a circle and share,” he said. “Conservatives do not want to sit in a circle, and they do not want to share.”

So he and his colleagues are careful to hold Better Angel events at rectangular tables. And moderators are instructed to avoid words like share.

Common language is getting hard to come by as common ground gives way. Democrats and Republicans are more ideologically different from what they previously were and like each other less than they used to, according to a 2014 Pew survey.

“There isn’t now even agreement anymore on whether civility is a good thing,” said James Calvin Davis, a Middlebury College professor and author of “In Defense of Civility.”

Civility is engaging in respectful dialogue with people with whom you vehemently disagree, but the term has become loaded, Davis said.

It now implies docility or weakness. The word itself is a sort of insult.

“The left has become not only impatient with civility but suspicious of civility,” Davis said. “And the right — incivility is being endorsed on the highest level.”

Max Marty, a lanky 35-year-old, leads Civility, a San Francisco startup. Previously, he was head of business development for the Seasteading Institute, an effort to create autonomous cities in international waters. It did not work out. Now he just wants people to sit at a table (or a video chat) and talk.

One recent evening the conversation concerned the white nationalist movement. The white supremacist site The Daily Stormer was assigned reading.

In the Civility mindset, an idea might be offensive, but if enough people have that idea, then it deserves a fair hearing — and a seat — at the table.

“Instead of just hating on it, saying ‘Oh, I can’t stand it, so horrible, blah, blah, blah,’ it’s about really putting yourself in that mindset to be able to understand it more deeply,” Marty said, “and then be able to have a rational, civil discussion on it.”

Most of these civility efforts are bipartisan, and groups like Better Angels guarantee that every workshop will have an equal split between Republican and Democratic attendees. Events have taken place in every state. But most of their programs are in liberal cities. Marty is in San Francisco, TruStory is based in Los Angeles, Better Angels in New York.

In Rockville, Maryland, about 30 people gathered for a Better Angels workshop one recent Saturday. They went around the room introducing themselves.

“I don’t know that many conservatives, and, should I ever encounter one, I’d like to know how to handle it,” one woman said.

Sara Kuhn, 31, is moving from the predominantly liberal Rockville to a smaller, more conservative town in southwest Virginia, and she wanted help learning how to talk to people there.

“Yeah, you’re going to need it,” someone nearby said, sympathetically.

Elle Karpman, a 68-year-old conservative retiree in Silver Spring, Maryland, came to the workshop because her daughter, who she described as liberal, asked her to.

“She said, ‘Mom, go to this workshop and learn these skills so you know the error of your ways,’” Karpman said. “Can you believe that? The error of my ways!”

Karpman, like many of the conservatives in attendance, said she feels unfairly labeled racist. She left the workshop early.

The moderator, Jan Rybeck, coached the group on how to make someone’s perspective — in this case, on the migrant crisis at the border — more comprehensible.

“Breathe into your belly. Find your feet on the ground. And ask them to tell you more,” she said.

Reflecting on her experience a few weeks later, Keller, the Bay Area lawyer who attended the San Francisco workshop, said she did not feel much closer to the other side.

“I saw all the red people smiling” while leaving the event, Keller said. “They felt validated and accepted. I think that was the object the whole time. And I thought, ‘Who are these people?’”

This article originally appeared in

How to Get Trump Voters and Liberals to Talk: Don't Make Anyone Sit in a Circle

SAN FRANCISCO — When four Republicans and five Democrats got together at a high-end condominium complex to talk for seven hours in San Francisco this fall, it was such a curiosity that a crowd of more than a dozen gathered just to watch.

<h1>SAN FRANCISCO — Tom Steyer is a former hedge fund investor and a billionaire. Those things could be a liability for a man running for president as a progressive. But Steyer, who this month joined a field of — what is it now? — 24 people, argued this was a selling point.</h1>

“Now you know, I know everybody always describes me as being rich.That is not how I see myself,” he told an audience at a bookstore here Wednesday night. “But I can tell you this, the one thing it does give me is the right to say nobody owns me. I mean I will do exactly what I think is right.”

Fighting inequality is one of his priorities, he said, and his wealth is a sign of his ability to finance that fight. He plans to spend $100 million of it on the race.

A little more than a week after officially announcing that he is running to be the Democratic presidential nominee, Steyer chose a progressive bookstore and event space for his first campaign stop in his hometown.

He sat in a blue velvet chair with his sleeves rolled up. Behind him was a portrait of local housing activists. The audience of about 150 was somewhat wary, young and many worked in tech.

Steyer is a 62-year-old philanthropist who has spent the past seven years campaigning for progressive causes such as clean energy, youth voter turnout, and, more recently, impeaching President Donald Trump. It was his effort there that made him a headache for the Democratic establishment, who were unsettled by a series of self-funded ads Steyer ran — starring Steyer — calling to impeach Trump.

“He’s a criminal,” Steyer said of the president Wednesday. “He’s a threat to the Constitution, and he’s dangerous for the American people.”

But his background may get in the way of that progressive image. He made his fortune as the founder of Farallon Capital, a hedge fund invested in coal mines and coal-fired power plants, as well as private prisons, among other industries.

If Trump ran as the billionaire of the people, appealing to working-class Republicans and swing voters, Steyer is a very California billionaire: a denim shirt, a tan, and a hip activist wife.

And since he announced his run, his wealth has been the story, as he jockeys to be seen as a radical for change.

“Should we put a limit on what Beyoncé makes?” he asked a reporter for the Guardian.

Billionaire doesn’t appear to be a great brand among a Democratic base calling for single-payer health care. Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg decided not to run when he figured that out, and the campaign for Howard Schultz, chief executive of Starbucks, fizzled.

Onstage, Steyer, a soft-spoken man with sandy blond hair, fielded questions.

“Why? Why have you decided to run for president, Tom,” the moderator and venue owner Manny Yekutiel, 29, asked, kicking the evening off.

Steyer said he believes he is the only person willing to fight Trump.

“I am more than willing to take this fight on if no one else will,” Steyer said. “And I don’t see anyone else who sees it’s a very simple fight. It’s hard. But it’s not complicated.”

For locals, Steyer’s run for president is a curious quest. Even as he has worked to grow his image nationally, he is hardly a household name in San Francisco. No one was peering in the windows. It was a quiet evening in a cozy event space.

Asked how he could have empathy for people in less privileged positions, Steyer talked about the importance of eye contact.

“If you see someone and have the conversation with them, they’re not a statistic anymore,” Steyer said. “That is something that you now own in your heart.”

He pointed to his work with NextGen America, an environmental advocacy nonprofit and progressive political action committee, which has brought him into contact with people of different backgrounds, as well as his more recent pro-impeachment town halls and the start of his campaign.

“I said to the woman next to me, probably a 20-year-old African American woman going to UNC Greensboro or maybe to the historically black college next door, and I said, ‘What is the biggest issue for you?’ ”

This is how he has gotten to understand the needs of American voters, he said.

Many in the room wanted to know why an older white male should win the nomination over some of the female candidates or candidates of color.

“What are you saying to that question, that it’s time for someone that doesn’t look like Tom Steyer to be our president,” Yekutiel asked.

Steyer responded: “Look, I think the question here is about vision. The question for us is going to be what is the vision that Americans can support and rally around.”

Throughout the evening, he gave long, thoughtful, sometimes wandering answers to questions. It was warm, and the demure audience became more so as the night wore on. Many yawned. Someone looked to be asleep on the sofa.

Steyer said strongly progressive lines that ought to cause a stir, but somehow, in his delivery, the zingers did not always rouse. The ones that got the biggest applause were his digs at Trump. His announcement video is four minutes long and did not go viral.

Before Steyer began his run, his wife, Kat, maxed out on contributions to Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington.

“We need to take the government back from big business,” Steyer said. “They’ve bought the democracy.”

The evening ended, and Steyer’s hometown audience stayed around at the bookshop, drinking wine.

“I had my concerns that he was just a distraction,” said Alexandra Ballato, 25, who works in farm relations and produce buying. “But he’s impressed me with his modesty.”

“He’s the most low-key billionaire ever,” said Daisy Pistey-Lyhne, 37, a climate and sustainability consultant.

Many in the audience were involved in environmental activism and appreciated his work in the field. They were curious and open-minded about this new local candidate. The event had sold out several weeks before.

“I like what he’s done with climate action,” said Carol DiBenedetto, who works as a consultant on climate and water issues. “I just wonder why he’s getting involved when there are candidates who say similar things.”

Some wished he would spend his money boosting other candidates and causes.

“I would love to see him take the $100 million he’s spending on his campaign and plow that into progressive causes rather than running for president even though that might be more high-profile,” said Jonathan Lack, 27, a software engineer.

But the word that kept coming up was billionaire.

“I’d heard of him before just because he’s a random billionaire,” said Henry Grunzweig, a 26-year-old who works in education technology in San Francisco. “I guess I’m curious how an old white man billionaire is going to beat an old white man billionaire.”

As fighting inequality becomes the rallying cry of the left, many were confused what it might mean to have such a rich person running as a progressive.

“He said grassroots a lot, but I wonder how true that is when you can fund your own campaign,” said Evan Hynes, 28, who runs the eco-friendly job hunting site Climate.Careers. “Is there a person who can be a billionaire in politics and not be a bad guy?”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/us/politics/tom-steyer-2020-campaign.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Call him a progressive, Tom Steyer asks, but don't call him rich

Fighting inequality is one of his priorities, he said, and his wealth is a sign of his ability to finance that fight. He plans to spend $100 million of it on the race.

But options are thin. A government-subsidized program fills up fast and fits only a small fraction of the town’s 4-year-olds, he said. A private program that closed a decade ago was unaffordable for many of the 6,500 residents of Fowler, a predominantly Latino community of agricultural workers in California’s Central Valley. Otherwise, there are a handful of private day cares.

So Cardenas recently seized on an unusual preschool alternative that a group from Utah presented to him. “This is something that I have never seen before,” he said. “I wanted to be on the front line right away.”

Cardenas was referring to a “kindergarten readiness program” for 4-year-olds that takes place almost entirely online. Called Waterford Upstart and run by a nonprofit group, Waterford.org, it has children spend 15 minutes a day, five days a week over the course of nine months, tapping through lessons on a computer. About 16,000 children in 15 states graduated from the program this year, and the Waterford expects to expand the program to a projected 22,000 students by 2020.

This is not a program for children of the rich, who are generally enrolled in play-based preschools that last at least several hours. Instead, it is geared to lower-income families with fewer prekindergarten options. Like hospitals that have doctors consulting through teleconferencing and elder-care facilities that offer nursing via avatar, online preschools are cheaper than traditional schooling.

Many Democratic presidential contenders have universal prekindergarten prominently on their agendas. But the arrival of the digital preschool alternative raises questions about education quality and what exactly preschool is meant to teach. As the economic chasm in the United States grows, who gets access to human interaction is becoming a stark dividing line through every stage of life.

“Children who come from families of means have always gone to and still go to terrific quality pre-K programs,” said Nancy Carlsson-Paige, a co-founder of Defending the Early Years, a nonprofit campaign promoting universal pre-K. “Any program, you see the same thing — it’s kids engaged with teachers, blocks, paints and other kids. It’s all these things that everybody knows is quality.”

Not surprisingly, many early-education experts balk at the idea of preschool online. Steve Barnett, co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, said a good preschool program typically developed a child’s social and emotional abilities, as well as ingraining lessons like thinking before you act.

“All of that can’t be done online,” he said.

But some advocates and Waterford Upstart argue that an online program is better than the current preschool options available to most low-income families, which are often nothing. Through the program, children can learn nursery rhymes and letter sounds from the comfort of their homes, with just a computer. In one lesson, for example, children can listen to a song and watch a video about how “gh” is silent in many words. The program is free to families that register.

Waterford Upstart says the quality of its videos is higher than most YouTube content for youngsters, and an independent study from 2014 found that children who had completed the reading program outperformed those who hadn’t used it.

For parents like Toni Butler, a single mother of four in Rushville, Indiana, who could not afford $164 a week to pay for preschool, Waterford Upstart has been a revelation. One of her children, Jameson, will graduate from the program Wednesday.

“Each lesson was animated, so it made it funny and interesting and kept his attention on it,” said Butler, 34. The graduation will be the only in-person event of the program, aside from registration.

While the at-home, laptop program is not what longtime advocates of universal pre-K imagined (and some fear it could undermine their fight), it may increasingly be what they get. Most states have a vast patchwork of preschool choices — some public, some private, half-day, full day, local and state run. But many families still fall in between, earning too much to qualify for public programs while not being able to afford private ones, or living too far from the nearest school.

That has pushed statehouses and city managers to search for other options. In Montana, Gov. Steve Bullock, a Democrat who is running for president, tried passing bills to bring in money for brick-and-mortar universal pre-K in 2015 and 2017, but the efforts largely failed and the state is now rolling out a Waterford Upstart pilot. In Indiana, where legislators worked for years on more preschool funding, $1 million was set aside for online kindergarten readiness in 2017.

“We simply don’t have the money to provide a quality pre-K experience to every child in North Carolina, even though I absolutely agree that a face-to-face, high-quality pre-K is the best option,” said state Rep. Craig Horn, a Republican leading an effort to get North Carolina to fund an Upstart program. “But when it’s not an option for the child, I refuse to ignore that child.”

Upstart was created by the Utah Legislature in 2009, with Waterford.org, which focuses on technology in education, chosen to provide the program. The group is funded by state legislatures; private donations from programs like TED’s philanthropic arm, the Audacious Project; and grants from the federal Department of Education.

Claudia Miner, Waterford’s executive director, said Utah had been trying to provide a cost-effective early-education option and turned to tech as a solution.

“For families, private preschool can be as expensive as college,” she said. “So what do you do?”

Now nearly half of Utah’s 4-year-olds are enrolled in Waterford Upstart, Miner said, and the program has spread to states including Delaware, Mississippi and Wyoming.

Stuart Adams, a Republican state senator in Utah, said the program was a way to serve rural children and religious communities where parents believe young children should be educated at home. Waterford Upstart costs hundreds of dollars per child, he said, compared with thousands per child in preschools.

Parents are often scared of the idea of an online school, Adams added, “but once they get past the initial fear and you look at the data, it’s all there.”

In Fowler, Cardenas faces a tight budget for education each year. So when Waterford reached out to him this year, he was curious. Instead of building preschools, hiring teachers and navigating thorny transportation logistics, he said, he could watch preschool almost magically manifest in every home through the program.

“I thought this was too good to be true,” he said.

Recently, a dozen families gathered at Fowler’s senior center to hear about the program. Isaac Troyo, the director of national Upstart implementations, spoke for 30 minutes explaining how it worked, first in English and then in Spanish.

“When your children sit down to use the program, they’re going to learn with games, with songs and puzzles,” he told the audience. “Activities that are visually appealing and engaging for them, so they’re going to have a good time, but they’re really going to learn all the things that they need to be successful when they get to kindergarten, which is really a win-win.”

He said Waterford Upstart would give participants a computer that they would keep, plus internet service for the duration of the program. Jose Molina, 4, immediately ran up to the front and asked if he could get his computer, prompting laughter.

His mother, Rebecca Molina, 31, once had Jose in a day care program that cost $30 a day. But Molina, who is an office clerk, said her husband was a field laborer, which meant gaps in wages between crop cycles. So they pulled Jose out of the day care. (Her husband now works at a grocery store.)

“It was an internal struggle for me,” Molina said. “I wanted him to be with kids his age and in that routine. But just financially, it didn’t make any sense for us.”

Molina and others at the event said their children were “tablet kids,” often left during the day with relatives and a tablet stocked with youth-oriented content.

When a demo of the program played, it featured an entrancing series of animated sketches focused on letters and sounds. Even the adults in the room recited the answers.

Resources are scarce in farming towns, said Brenda Quintana, Waterford’s community liaison. “It’s not like folks are bending over backward to bring in resources for these kids,” she said. “One of the best things about Waterford is they’re willing to go into these rural areas.”

As the event wrapped up, Cardenas cleaned the room. The mayor had spent the day canvassing the town with the Waterford Upstart team, knocking on doors to encourage families to sign up. About 50 have signed up so far; the goal for the county is a pilot of 200 families.

“With this program, those kids who were left out in years past, now they’re going to be included,” he said.

Virtual pre-k closes a gap, and exposes it

FOWLER, Calif. — David Cardenas, a mechanic and the mayor of Fowler, knows families in his town want high-quality and free daylong preschool.

<h1>BERKELEY, Calif. — In 1967, the superintendent of the Berkeley, California, school district had resolved to desegregate the city schools. “We will set an example for all the cities of America,” he wrote in a report called “Integration: A Plan for Berkeley,” which he presented to the Berkeley Board of Education. “The children of Berkeley will grow in a community where justice is part of their pattern of life,” the report stated.</h1>

Several years later, a young girl named Kamala Harris, the daughter of a Tamil Indian mother and a Jamaican father, boarded a school bus — part of that school integration program that would change her, the city and the country’s conversation about racial politics.

“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day, and that little girl was me,” Harris, now a senator and candidate for president, said on Thursday evening onstage at the Democratic debate. She was directly addressing former Vice President Joe Biden, and what she described as his history of opposition to mandatory busing.

In that moment, Harris invoked a complex part of American history, and the way cities tried to address how segregated the country’s classrooms remained more than a decade after Brown v. Board of Education was decided. She also made plain how the conversation about integration that took place in Washington and in cities around the nation directly affected the life of a first-grader on a school bus. They played hand-clapping games to pass the time, a classmate remembered, aware that their bus ride took them to a neighborhood different from theirs, but not that it was something a superintendent had to fight for.

Students who attended Berkeley public schools during the early years of the integration effort recall the experience as a defining one for them.

“Racism didn’t go away because we were bused,” said Doris Alkebulan, 58, who was part of the initial group of black students in Berkeley to be bused to a majority white school. “What about play dates? Were you going to be invited to the birthday party? Would you be chosen for the team?” She remembered that kids would say, ‘Oh we can’t play with you’ and explain the reason with a racial slur.

“I didn’t even know I was black until then,” Alkebulan said.

Alkebulan said that the experience profoundly shaped her life and that it was emotional watching Harris call upon that history. “She got it right,” Alkebulan said.

If Biden represents a more moderate vision of the Democratic Party, Harris onstage at the debate reflected on a time in Berkeley history when moderate politics were falling apart. Though the city was a microcosm of seismic political changes in the country as a whole, including anti-war sentiment and free speech activism, one major catalyst for transformation was school busing. As white families who opposed busing left town for the suburbs in 1967, they gave way to an insurgent new left.

“Busing was really when Berkeley split and became leftist because a lot of people who couldn’t handle that change, they left,” said Jef Findley, a librarian at the Berkeley Public Library specializing in city history, who helped make an oral history of the city’s busing and desegregation. “The moderate, pro-business rightist town became a leftist town.”

Carole Porter, 55, who now works in information technology, lived around the corner from Harris. The two girls took the bus up the hill from the middle-class Berkeley flats where they lived to Thousand Oaks, a school in the more affluent white Berkeley hills. Porter recalled that the ride took about 40 minutes.

Harris attended a Montessori school for kindergarten and joined Porter at Thousand Oaks in first grade. On the debate stage, she described herself as “part of the second class to integrate her public schools,” and her classmates were the second group of kindergartners to be bused to schools outside their neighborhoods. A campaign spokeswoman confirmed that Harris joined the class in 1970, her first-grade year, which was the third year of integration. The school had been 2.5% black in 1963. In 1969, it was 40.2% black as a result of integration.

Porter, who has donated to Harris’ campaign, remembered her former classmate as a responsible student who was being raised by a single mother.

They played games like “Miss Mary Mack,” did cats cradle with yarn and discussed recess plans, Porter said. She remembered the neighborhood the two girls shared as a lower-middle class area full of working people.

“It was very diverse — we had a United Nations in our neighborhood,” Porter, who is black, said. “Busing gave us opportunities to leave our neighborhood and see affluence.”

Most Americans at the time were in favor of integration, but few thought busing was the best method, according to a 1973 Gallup poll. Given alternatives like low-income housing in middle-income areas or changed school boundaries, only 9% of blacks said they preferred busing, and just 5% of whites did.

Approval of busing largely broke along racial lines, though often opposition was framed around mandatory busing, or rules set at the national level, rather than on integration itself. Biden expressed a version of that view at the debate last week.

“I did not oppose busing in America,” Biden responded to Harris. “What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education. That’s what I opposed.”

Across the country in the 1970s, courts were ordering schools to desegregate. In Boston, thousands of whites marched carrying U.S. and Irish flags to protest court-ordered desegregation. In Los Angeles, voters recalled the school board president.

Berkeley was different. The opposition to integration in Berkeley was quieter. An attempt to recall the school board failed.

School segregation in Berkeley had never been enforced by law in the first place. There were neighborhoods where black families could not buy houses, a tactic known as redlining, and each neighborhood had its own schools, leading to de facto segregation.

The city’s flat western side, where Harris lived as a child, was generally black, while the eastern hills were white.

Nor did the federal government have to step in to force integration: Berkeley’s comprehensive two-way busing program was undertaken by the school board voluntarily, and it was the first large city to do so when the program began in 1968.

After Harris spoke about her elementary school experience on Thursday, conspiracy theorists quickly sprung on the story, arguing that Berkeley’s schools were never segregated because some black students attended Harris’ predominantly white school before busing began. The district put out a statement on Friday supporting Harris’ account.

“Our elementary schools,” the district’s statement said, “reflected the racial composition of our neighborhoods, which like many neighborhoods across America reflected the history of segregation stemming from policies which restricted the opportunities of nonwhite residents.”

The late 1960s and early 1970s in Berkeley was a time flush with idealism, and advocates envisioned school integration ushering in a new, better society.

“We will not fail here,” the superintendent wrote in his integration report. “Where else would there be hope of success if there were failure here, in Berkeley?”

Harold Williams, 61, was at a predominantly black school when white students started being bused in, changing the demographics from 26% white to 47% white.

“It had a very positive impact on me,” said Williams, who is black and now lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. “For Kamala, or for anyone who went through it, I think it puts them in a position to have a lot of empathy.”

Other students felt they were sometimes fending for themselves in a complicated new dynamic.

“We were all just kids trying to figure it out on our own,” said Ned Garrett, 60, who is white and was bused to a black school in West Berkeley. “It stuck with me. I try to tell my kids now, ‘Don’t make assumptions, always give people a chance to show who they are.’”

Tucked away in the Berkeley Public Library are the city’s archives of the era. There in big folders are stacks of newspaper clippings. Those against busing say they worried about bus safety, travel times, neighborhood integrity and school district costs.

“To force total mixing in schools is neither constructive nor effective; individual families should have an option as to where their children go to school — and this applies to all races,” a group of Berkeley residents wrote in an open letter to the superintendent on Sept. 19, 1967.

“Berkeley was going too hard, and I don’t think they got it right a lot of the time,” said Mike Davisson, 61, who is white and was in fifth grade when he began being bused to a different elementary school. “It was scary and hard for the black kids as well as the white kids, but overall, in the end, it worked out.”

Along with integrating the students, the school district embarked on an effort to hire more black teachers.

Lynn Sherrell, 78, taught sixth grade the first year of integration.

“Among the black and white teachers there tended to be a division, and there was lunchroom segregation,” Sherrell, who is white, said. “It got ugly.”

Black faculty members were meeting separately, she said, and white teachers felt left out.

But she and her friends believed a better, less racially tense future was ahead, Sherrell said. Sometimes now she is less sure.

“It was one of the primary elements of my life and my career,” said Sherrell, who later became a tax lawyer. “We’re so much wondering now — did it do anything? Did it do any good? Was it just a big waste?”

Berkeley voted to phase out its busing program in 1994. Busing has largely been seen as a failed effort: Across the country today, schools are still segregated, and the number of intensely segregated schools is growing.

Harris has argued that school integration is one of the reasons she could become a senator. During the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett M. Kavanaugh, during which Harris grilled the future justice, she also wrote about her own life.

“I wouldn’t be part of Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings had Chief Justice Warren not been on the Supreme Court to lead the unanimous decision in Brown v. Board,” Harris posted on Twitter in September 2018. “Had someone else been there, I may not have become a U.S. Senator. I know the impact one Justice can have.”

Now, Berkeley is a wealthier and whiter town than when Harris was growing up. In 1970, the city was 23% black; today it is only 10% black. The median sale price for a two-bedroom apartment is $1.2 million, up from $682,500 just five years ago, according to the real estate listings site Trulia. Many of the historically black neighborhoods have been gentrified.

Alkebulan, who was bused to an integrated elementary school, went on to become a civil engineer, but it was housing prices that drove her out of Berkeley. She moved to Sacramento.

“I can live in Sacramento a lot better than I can in Berkeley, so we moved,” Alkebulan said. “And then we could afford to send our sons to private school.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/30/us/politics/kamala-harris-berkeley-busing.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Busing in a Divided Berkeley Shaped Harris and Her Peers

Several years later, a young girl named Kamala Harris, the daughter of a Tamil Indian mother and a Jamaican father, boarded a school bus — part of that school integration program that would change her, the city and the country’s conversation about racial politics.

Busing in a divided Berkeley shaped Harris and her peers

All day long, Sox and Langlois, who is 68 and lives in a low-income senior housing complex in Lowell, Massachusetts, chat. Langlois worked in machine operations, but now he is retired. With his wife out of the house most of the time, he has grown lonely.

(Sunday Review) ; (News Analysis): SAN FRANCISCO — Bill Langlois has a new best friend. She is a cat named Sox. She lives on a tablet, and she makes him so happy that when he talks about her arrival in his life, he begins to cry.

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