Most scholarly literature on school desegregation treats opposition to busing as racist, reactionary, or as springing from deeper conditions of alienation or anomie. From this viewpoint, anti-busing demonstrations are episodic, unorganized and not founded on any thoroughgoing comprehension of the immediate policy issue. Busing is merely the triggering event which releases the individual's anger at social injustice. A case study of opposition to busing in Los Angeles (surveying its leadership, members, activities, and organizational characteristics) challenges this description. The account of the anti-busing movement which views it in terms of the collective mass behavior outbursts hypothesized by mass society theories is found to be inappropriate. The reasons individuals join and participate in anti-busing organizations appear to be quite different from the "symbolically racist" characteristics which correlate with verbal opposition to busing in public opinion surveys. Given the undesirability of white flight, anti-busing claimants should be included in pluralistic bargaining over the desegregation plan. (Author/WI)