The box of red and white pinback buttons was pushed under a table near the door to the auction house, but their message was loud and clear: “Stop Forced Busing.”
It was not the only box full of nothing I came across that day. On the other side of the room, I spotted a box of rubber stamps with their own imprints: “Veal rib chops.” “Lamb shanks.” “Smoked SH Roast.”
The two boxes had nothing in common, except that they held so much merchandise. Both were obviously from an earlier era, tossed as they should have been because their time had long gone.
Busing was a hot issue during the 1960s and 1970s as some school districts across the country tried their hardest not to live up to the ideal of a quality education for all children, regardless of race. The Brown vs. Board of Education ruling by the Supreme Court had mandated in 1954 that separate schools for black and white students were unconstitutional. Such schools, the court wrote, were “inherently unequal.”
Busing became one of those methods of trying to equalize education, and it divided the country, with most school districts vehemently resisting it. Some districts opted for voluntary busing and magnet schools, which never really solved the problem of providing African American children with the quality education given to white children.
These old buttons were remnants of wasted money and wasted energy in a country that prides itself on being good but acting bad. It’s something we’re still grappling with. As the times and the country changed, the populace has mostly settled back into segregated unequal schools as the norm.
These pinback buttons were among several distributed to protest busing. I found one with an asking price of $10 on a political buttons’ website.
The rubber stamps go back even farther, from what I can tell. The lettering was faded on some, and the names of meats were repeated on others. I presume they were used by butchers or meat-processing companies to stamp different types of meat after animal carcasses were carved up.
These appear to be different from the stamps still being used by the U.S. Department of Agriculture inspectors after they approve meat for our consumption. The dye used in the stamps are vegetable based and are not harmful.
If you’d like to stamp your own meat before putting it in the freezer, there are several places online to buy both stamps and ink.
