To evaluate events 50 years ago, consideration of the facts and concepts bearing upon that era is essential.
The Boston Housing Authority (BHA) opened its first project in 1938, the McCormick in South Boston. Federal policy then promoted operation of racially segregated projects. BHA long implemented this policy. Often, a complex served a nearby existing school or one built or added to later. These events in combination promoted racially segregated education, minimized opportunities for inter-racial and ethnic association and friendships at all ages, and enhanced the identification of Boston neighborhoods by race, including South Boston, Charlestown, and Roxbury. [Add restrictive covenants etc. to the mix, and the same point applies to the place where I live.]
Harvard consultants made a 1962 Report on Boston schools. It described, as examples, the decrepit condition of 5 schools. Their enrollments from 99 to 65 percent Non-White with the system 20 percent non-white. The report added: 35 schools enrolling 65 percent or more Non-White students, 27 built before 1914.
In 1963, Black leaders and others, including Charlie Glenn, petitioned Boston's School Committee to remediate racial segregation and many forms of discriminatory allocation of resources in the schools. The Committee refused to discuss segregation. The Black community later secured some relief, with the creation of privately funded programs using school bus transportation, Operation Exodus and METCO.
Two events evidencing the thoughts and values of that era followed. In 1964, the State Board of Education appointed a Committee to study and make recommendations regarding racial imbalance in schools. Their 1965 Because It Is Right –Educationally report included:
[*] “We have found that racial imbalance is educationally harmful to all children, white and non-white, because separation from others leads to ignorance of others, and ignorance breeds fear and prejudice.”
[*] “In our Commonwealth, white children rarely have an opportunity to meet Negro children as individuals.”
[*] “[Racial imbalance] too often produces inferior educational facilities in the predominantly Negro schools.”
[*] “The poor condition of most predominantly Negro schools necessitates a vigorous program to achieve racial balance.”
The Committee recommended remedial legislation. Approval of the Racial Imbalance Act followed. It required plans for schools enrolling a majority of non-white students; 45 in Boston. The School Committee for years publicly and vigorously resisted the efforts of the Dept. of Education and State Board of Education to implement the Act's State policy. One loud voice in this ill role modeling originated in South Boston. The efforts of the Black community intensified and persisted; opposition to it grew. Later, an author wrote that “Boston's racial climate was poisoned, especially by local political leaders who were entrepreneurs of the white backlash.”
The Department of Education developed and the State Board approved a Boston racial balance remedial plan; its implementation would increase Boston's already extensive school bus transportation. The MASS Supreme Judicial Court AGREED that the RIA authorized a plan increasing school bus transportation; BEFORE Judge Garrity's 1974 decision, the SJC had ordered the Boston School Committee to implement the State plan in Sept. 1974. In 1974, Judge Garrity did not initiate; he forbid departure from an already required implementation of MASS educational policy.
other context of the era before Judge Garrity's ruling.
[1] In its unanimous 1971 Swann decision, the Supreme Court approved the increasing of school bus transportation as one permissible remedy in addressing the segregation of students, NOTING: “the importance of bus transportation as a normal and accepted tool of educational policy is readily discernible in this and the companion case . . . .”
[2] The 1974 Morgan opinion cites a 1971 example of Boston school bus transportation: 63 buses for 35 routes brought students to the elite examination schools, Girls and Boys Latin and Boston Tech. The opinion noted they were “heavily white” in enrollment with faculties in the years 1967 to 1972 averaging only one black member per school.
[3] The SJC rejected the School Committee's 1973 attempt to give the promised new English High School to Girls Latin. This action would have drastically reduced black enrollment there; it was a public display of BPS white privilege, another mind-set builder for day one in September 1974 and thereafter.
[4] The 1974 Morgan opinion lists the parties' attorneys. Plaintiffs' first listed are Nathaniel Jones, General Counsel of the national NAACP, and Thomas Simmons of Boston, affiliated with the Boston chapter. The NAACP during Jones' tenure prioritized the filing of desegregation suits in cities outside the South. Boston's Chapter and Freedom House identified Morgan plaintiffs. The great Tom Atkins, then NAACP General Counsel, led plaintiffs' representation at the end.
The bus transportation increases in 1974 and later were not forced busing. RATHER they utilized bus transportation “a normal and accepted tool of educational policy” to, first, give life to adopted and approved MASS education policy and next the precious constitutional guarantee of equal protection of the laws.
[Holding up document] Letter of Dec. 18, 1971 from Jack Robinson, NAACP branch President to Nate Jones requesting filing of complaint which became the Morgan case.
bob pressman
Boston School Desegregation – a 50-years-later perspective by a lawyer for the black families
To attempt to distill seven years of involvement in what the Massachusetts Bar Association termed “the most important matter heard in the history of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts” into only six minutes, I offer three legal footnotes and three quotations – perhaps characterizable as the Law, the Facts, the Schools; the blacks, the whites, the truth.
Legal footnote 1, the Law: Judge Garrity was repeatedly villainized as a tyrant, a dictator, and an extremist judge. Yet, our legal system provides a remedy for judicial overreach: appellate review. During my involvement, sixteen appeals of Judge Garrity’s orders were made to the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the First Circuit (by the Boston School Committee, Boston Teachers Union, Mayor White, and the Boston Home and School Association). The First Circuit rulings on those appeals led to six petitions for certiorari to the United States Supreme Court. The record of Judge Garrity’s rulings on those twenty-two appeals was 22-0. There were no reversals, no remands, not even minor tweaking in any higher court reviews.
As Judge Coffin wrote for a unanimous First Circuit panel regarding Judge Garrity’s liability finding, “in the light of the ample factual record and the precedents of the Supreme Court, we do not see how the court [Judge Garrity] could have arrived at any other conclusion.”
The legal principles Judge Garrity applied in Boston were the same legal principles that numerous other federal judges applied in numerous other cities across our country.
Legal footnote 2, the Facts: The Boston School Committee’s team of lawyers was top notch. From the prominent Boston law firm Hale and Dorr (now Wilmer Hale), the team was led by James StClair, “the silver fox,” a renowned Boston lawyer selected a few months later by President Nixon to represent him during his impeachment and before the US Supreme Court. It also included John Mirick, pillar of the Worcester bar, and Stephen Oleskey. It was a powerful legal team. But it was handcuffed - handcuffed by clients – and their irrefutable past acts.
In racial discrimination cases, proving discriminatory intent can be a challenge because of plausible non-discriminatory explanations. Here, however, hundreds of pages of verbatim transcripts obtained through federal court discovery documented the precise words and thinking of Boston School Committee members (including in executive sessions). A flavor:
-- “The Southern Negro child is not as spry usually in his eagerness to learn as other children”
-- “Negro immigrants from the South are disinclined to put their effort into our northern type of education” [perennial School Committee member Joseph Lee]
-- “let the Negroes have their own schools and the whites their own schools”
-- “the State won’t find out until it’s too late.” [The Superintendent of schools in executive session after adding a loophole to a policy required by the State Bd of Ed]
In short, the proof at trial included an arsenal of “smoking guns,” direct statements from Boston School decision-makers articulating many years of racially-motivated decision-making.
Legal footnote 3, the Schools: The first year of Boston school desegregation precipitated a racist outpouring, enormous violence, massive law enforcement, and great public outcry. However, it is much overlooked and misunderstood that Judge Garrity’s first year student desegregation order was but a single sentence: the Boston School Committee is “enjoined from failing to comply in any respect [with the] plan [previously] ordered by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court” to be implemented in September 1974.
In other words, the initial student busing plan which engendered the massive outcry, racial backlash, and criticism of pairing South Boston with Roxbury had been developed by Massachusetts state officials (despite repeated BSC sabotage efforts) under the state Racial Imbalance Act. It had been the subject of multiple public hearings and judicial reviews and appeals. Prior to any federal court order, it had been ordered into effect by our state supreme court. Because it was designed to comply with the state law, its chief focus was the racial composition of student enrollments without a significant explicit focus on education.
The second year of Boston school desegregation was the first time a Judge Garrity-formulated plan was implemented. In developing this plan, Judge Garrity hired the Dean and Assistant Dean of Boston University Education School as expert assistants. In addition, he appointed four independent Special Masters to review the plan: the former US Commissioner of Education, a Harvard professor with nationwide school desegregation experience, a former Massachusetts Attorney General, and a former Justice of our Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The plan provided for the involvement of nearly two dozen colleges and universities and businesses (“from Harvard to Hancock”). And other Judge Garrity orders mandated additional nonwhite teachers and administrators throughout the school system.
In short, and importantly, the student school desegregation plan developed by the federal court included a significant educational component – all but forgotten in the racial violence of the time.
II. Following are three quotations taken from the short film shown at the beginning of this program. The clip is an excerpt from the PBS American Experience film “The Busing Battleground” by Emmy Award winners Sharon Grimberg and Cyndee Readdean of Winter Pink Films.
Quotation 1, the Blacks: From Ruth Batson (Boston NAACP Education Committee), a long-time equal educational opportunity advocate : “We were not pushing for desegregation because of the brotherhood of man concept. Where the white students [were is] where the money went.”
Decades of Boston public school experience convinced nonwhite parents that racially separate schools were grotesquely unequal. Nonwhite teachers were rare (81 schools had never had a single one); and nonwhite administrators, rarer still. If parents wanted their children to have a better education than crumbling buildings, untrained teachers, and second-hand books, they felt they had no choice but to move them to white-majority schools. Boston 1974 NAACP President Tom Atkins: “A decision of last resort. Black parents in Boston were committed to doing whatever had to be done to rescue [their] children from schools we knew were killing them educationally.” And at that time, before desegregation, 30,000 Boston students, black and white alike, were bused or used other public transportation to get to school - peacefully.
Quotation 2, the Whites: From Boston City Councilor Albert “Dapper” O’Neil: “Busing will never work in this city. Never. [The court] will not take the rights away from these [white] people.”
After President Eisenhower ordered federal troops into Little Rock to desegregate Central High School, civic and business leaders in cities like Atlanta, Charlotte, and Nashville, were determined not to become “another Little Rock.” They adopted a consistent message: “we don’t like it, but it’s the law, and we are law-abiding citizens.” Here in Boston, elected officials preached “never” and “resist,” City Hall windows held huge ROAR signs (Restore Our Alienated Rights), the Mayor (a JFK admirer, who had defeated Louise Day Hicks better than 60-40 in 1971) failed to provide a “Profile in Courage,” and the powerful business group known as the Boston “Vault” appeared similarly silent. The Boston business and political establishment declined to support the judge and the rule of law. The result was sadly predictable - and tragic.
Quotation 3, the Truth: From 1st Circuit Chief Judge Sandra Lynch, who represented the State Board of Ed before Judge Garrity -- speaking many years before becoming a judge: “The people of Boston elected people to public office who campaigned on deliberately racist platforms.”
Some (Louise Day Hicks) campaigned in code (“You know where I stand”). Others, like “Dapper” O’Neil, were more direct. Moderate officials were voted out, and more extreme candidates were elected. Again, this occurred for years before, as well as during, the federal court orders. Dishonest and racist public officials misled the public and brought tragedy on Boston.
One goal for today is to provide a corrective to history.* The corrective is that the court was not the culprit. Elected officials stoked violence by preaching resistance; Profiles in Courage were absent. Business and media leaders contributed to disintegration through silence or tepid support for the rule of law. Citizen voters were complicit by electing extremist candidates. This mix brought tragedy. [*Sponsor BDBI/ the Boston Desegregation and Busing Initiative]
I hope these six snippets – on Law, Facts, Schools, blacks, whites, and truth – provide some insight into what tore our city apart fifty years ago. I welcome your questions. [6/20/24]
Eric E van loon
Caroline playter
After Black parents had sued the Boston School Committee in 1972 (Morgan v. Kerigan-72-911-G), and as litigation proceeded towards and into the remedial phase and planning for desegregated assignments, Latinx parents were concerned and organizing in Boston. They and their children were also victims of past and continuing racial and ethnic discrimination in the BPS and the Court had found that "other minorities" were entitled to remedial action. The parents recognized that the remedies appropriate for Black students might in some cases adversely affect the educational rights and needs of Latinx and other linguistic minority children. They realized that they needed formal recognition by the Court and a voice in the remedial phase of this case. A group of Latinx BPS parents, many with children in need of bilingual programs, approached attorneys associated with the National Lawyers Guild and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund to help them ensure that the rights and needs of Latinx children were represented. El Comite de Padres Pro Defensa de la Educacion Bilingue was formed in 1974 and moved to intervene on behalf of Latinx and other linguistic minority children. The intervention and the representation through El Comite de Padres was approved by Judge Garrity in January, 1975 only after full hearing and presentation of evidence. This included expert testimony on the importance and effectiveness of properly supported bilingual education programs. As a result, Judge Garrity in his June 5, 1975 Memorandum of Decision and Remedial Orders recognized specific needs of Plaintiff Intervenor students including the educational effectiveness of bilingual programing.
Judge Garrity's remedial orders address a three way desegregation remedy he found required for the Boston system. In terms of the initial remedy phase Judge Garrity clearly understood the importance of ensuring that Latinx and other minority students were not totally isolated with the new assignment plan percentage goals, since Latinx and other minority students constituted approximately 10% of the student population at that time. He established their right to be assigned in "clusters" of at least 20. Further the BPS in the assignment process was prevented from labeling Latinx children as "Hispanic Black and Hispanic White" (outrageously many children within the same family being conflictingly designated).
As Plaintiff Intervenor had secured recognition of the importance and effectiveness of bilingual programing from the Court, the assignment remedy was adjusted to allow for proper grouping of bilingual classes in schools where such programs were to be located. It also permitted the clustering of Latinx students in regular education in these schools to allow for supported transition from the programs. In an interesting aside to one of the initial assignment plans, the BPS had included an open choice for bilingual programs in an assignment mailing to all parents. This briefly allowed both linguistic minority and non-linguistic minority parents to chose bilingual programing for their children. More than a thousand non-linguistic minority parents did so, recognizing the importance of dual language skills in a modern Global economy. This was of course an "error" that was then reversed by the assignment unit.
On a high note for the parents, El Comite de Padres won the right to have a two-way Spanish language bilingual/bicultural school designated. It was allowed a special exception from the desegregation assignment percentages for proper programing. This was the Hernandez school, which became a model for later two-way bilingual/bicultural schools in the system.
Also included in the initial remedial orders was an order to finally desegregate the elite Examination Schools won for Black and "Hispanic" children.
In summary, the Intervention of El Comite de Padres resulted in supported transitional bilingual programs for not only Latinx but Asian, Haitian, Greek, Italian, and other linguistic minority immigrant children. The three way desegregation remedy resulted not only in school desegregation but also in three way Administrator, teacher and staff desegregation orders and agreements in remediation for Latinx, Asian and other minorities. The fully constituted bilingual programs led to the formation of the Bilingual Master PAC, which negotiated a Lau Compliance Plan with the Boston School Committee that was filed with the Court.
Unfortunately so much has changed since then with the ascendance, in todays terminology, of white nationalist (English only) and anti-immigrant politics and policies. It has been and is dismaying and angering to have watched the dismantling of so much of the progress attained through the Intervention of El Comite de Padres.
Caroline Playter,
National Lawyers Guild
alan d. rose
One day during the three week trial of Morgan v Hennigan in February and March 1973, Judge Garrity announced that he wished to take a bus tour of the City, so he could see first hand some of the schools about which there would be testimony. This photograph, taken on the sidewalk outside the John W McCormack Post Office and Courthouse, appeared in The Boston Globe the next day of trial and also appeared at times during other notable phases of the case. The bus is on the right. We toured the school system that day. This was not aberrational behavior on the part of the Judge. Two years earlier, the Judge and his then law clerk, my predecessor John Kane, had famously spent a night in the Charles Street jail, because that case, filed by Max Stern, had involved a claim that jail conditions were unconstitutional….The Judge needed to see for himself.
*********
From the left in the photograph taken outside the federal court house prior to boarding a bus to view various Boston schools.:
Steve Moynahan, the judge’s long-time deputy clerk (courtroom clerk).
Judge Garrity, then 52 years of age; today, June 20, happens to be his birthday; 7 years on the bench at that point; the Morgan v Hennigan case was drawn to him by random selection in the US District Court’s clerk’s office. There were several other judges the case could have been drawn to. When we law clerks commissioned and presented the Judge’s portrait to the District Court in 1994, Judge Woodlock remarked that the Morgan case “was the most challenging case ever presented to a judge of this Court.” Chief Judge Barron, it may interest you to know that one day after court, when Judge Garrity and I were back in his Chambers, one of your illustrious predecessors, Chief Judge Bailey Aldrich, came down to visit the judge; he knew how much time Morgan v Hennigan would take for the judge, and he offered to take some of the judge’s civil cases and handle them himself, sitting as a trial judge, which of course he was entitled to do -- an act of humanity and colleagueship, really, and one I have never forgotten.
Alan D. Rose (faintly visible behind Judge Garrity’s left shoulder) – I was Judge Garrity’s Law Clerk from July 1972 – July 1973. In those days, federal district judges had one law clerk each year.
Unidentified person – probably a Boston School Department employee.
James D. St Clair – senior partner at Hale and Dorr (now Wilmer Hale), lead counsel to the Boston School Committee. An historic person in his own right. Jim St. Clair was regarded as one of the greatest trial lawyers of his era. Nine months after this picture was taken, President Nixon hired St. Clair as White House Counsel to handle the burgeoning Watergate scandal following the Saturday Night Massacre. St Clair later argued United States v Nixon, the famous tapes case, in the US Supreme Court. It’s interesting to reflect on the Judge and St Clair together. Born in the same year, both served their country in World War II, St Clair three years in the Navy, and a young Arthur Garrity two plus years in the US Army Signal Corps, including at Normandy, both of them members of what John Brokaw has named the Greatest Generation, men who quietly served their country, came back, and went to work. Both St Clair and the Judge went to Harvard Law School, before practicing in Boston, St Clair to Hale and Dorr, and Garrity as a law clerk to Judge Ford, then became an Assistant US Attorney, then 10 years of private practice, followed by 5 years as US Attorney appointed by President Kennedy.
John O. Mirick – St Clair’s young associate at Hale and Dorr, who knew every fact and procedural step in the case. John practices at Mirick & O’Connell in Worcester and like me is a former Chair of the Board of Bar Overseers. I used John as an expert witness in a legal malpractice case I tried two years ago.
Roger Abrams, one of the lawyers for Tallulah Morgan and the plaintiff class. Roger was an associate at Foley Hoag and Eliot, a firm which deserves tremendous credit for devoting manpower, brainpower, and resources to the Morgan case. Roger later became a law school professor, the Dean of Northeastern University Law School, and was a leading expert and author on sports law.
Eric Van Loon, one of the team of lawyers for Tallulah Morgan and the plaintiff class. Eric was then at the Harvard Center for Law and Education. Eric is far too modest to tell you that he is a leading mediator in Boston. Like John Mirick, he knew every detail of the case and its procedural history. And, referring to mediation, if ever there were a case that cried out for mediation, it was probably Morgan v Hennigan.
Unknown – may have been a pedestrian.
Paul Reynolds – the Judge’s longtime Bailiff……… in the raincoat, holding an exhibit in the case….likely a map of the City.
There are at least three other people, not present in the photograph, who deserve recognition because they played important roles in the case.
John Leubsdorf, also at the time an associate at Foley Hoag.
Bob Pressman, here with us today.
J Harold (Nick) Flannery, lead lawyer for the plaintiff class, also at the Harvard Center for Law and Education, who much later became a Judge on the Massachusetts Appeals Court.
**************
For me, as a young law clerk fresh out of law school, the case was both a seminar in trial practice and an introduction to race relations in Boston.
The evidence in the case was overwhelming, both in its massive scope, time frame, and documentation. Of particular note was the evidence concerning:
Feeder patterns – which demonstrated the ways in which elementary schools fed into middle schools and then high schools, becoming more segregated in the process
Selective use of portable classrooms, overcrowded schools in some cases and underutilized schools in other cases, that promoted segregation at 26 schools
Selective use of busing to perpetuate segregation
Selective use of optional attendance practices
Selective enforcement of the neighborhood school policy
Building of new schools for a decade with sizes and locations that promoted segregation
The refusal to take steps to comply with the Racial Imbalance Law
Assignment practices regarding teachers and administrators
Minutes of Boston School Committee meetings, that revealed members’ intentions
Also of note was that a former member of the school committee wrote a letter directly to the Judge, at his Chambers, containing the former member’s views on race; the letter sought to justify the separation of the races in the Boston public school system. Years later, I happened to be a judge on a moot court panel with Jim St. Clair. In a conversation after the moot court, he told me that when he saw that letter, he knew the case was lost.
In Chambers, we tracked the many other cases around the country that addressed the same kinds of allegations that the plaintiffs’ lawyers were making in Morgan v Hennigan. The Keyes case in Denver was noteworthy, because the evidence was similar to that in Boston. The Supreme Court ultimately affirmed the findings in Keyes, a significant development during the period between trial and when the Judge issued his opinion in June 1974.
The Judge was particularly interested in high schools in other cities that had specialized in particular subjects – science, the arts, technology. He knew that the best way to gain acceptance of remedial orders was to improve the overall quality of the school system.
After reviewing all of the evidence, the Judge found that the defendants “knowingly carried out a systematic program of segregation affecting all of the city’s students, teachers and school facilities and have intentionally brought about and maintained a dual school system.” Six months later, the Court of Appeals wrote that Judge Garrity had given “the most deliberate and sensitive attention to this traumatic issue….in light of the ample factual record and the precedents of the Supreme Court, we do not see how the court could have arrived at any other conclusion.”
What can we say about the uproar that greeted the Judge’s opinion and orders? The response is inscribed on the wall of this courthouse, along Northern Avenue. In the Little Rock School case, Justice Frankfurter wrote, “The responsibility of those who exercise power in a democratic government is not to reflect inflamed feeling but to help form its understanding.” Did our elected representatives acquit themselves well when confronted with inflamed feelings? It’s your turn to be the Judge.
One final reflection from the best possible source: in 1998, Judge Garrity gave his Morgan v Hennigan judicial papers to UMass Boston. At the ceremony marking the gift of his papers, the Judge, who did not often speak of the case outside of court, reflected on the case and its meaning. He said, “The overarching challenge to our institutions is to fit the rule of law into the rule of life…” There is, he said, “tension between the two. The problem will be with us always, with the Morgan litigation a classic illustration. The effort and hope, of all of us there involved, was first to vindicate the rights of the plaintiff class to equal educational opportunity while at the same time improving the educational opportunity of all students of every race, color and creed.”
charles l. glenn
1974-75 was just at the midpoint of thirty years when the primary focus of my life was on racial justice in education, first as a pastor and community activist in Roxbury, then for two decades as the Massachusetts state official responsible for equal educational opportunity.
I’m tempted to use my five minutes to talk about the earlier period, when Black community leaders in Boston, Springfield and other cities, with their suburban allies, sought and used the authority of state government to require that urban school systems remedy the isolation and neglect of minority students.
Or I could describe how the state Board of Education courageously faced down strong political opposition to force Boston, Springfield, and New Bedford to adopt racial balance plans as well as to provide support for the growing presence of Latino students.
Or I could discuss the fifteen years after Judge Garrity’s decision, when, learning from the Boston experience, we worked with sixteen cities across the Commonwealth to implement educational equity plans based on parental choice among distinctive schools.
This strategy created an intense focus on making sure that there were no bad choices, no schools that failed to educate students adequately.
I could report that, ten years after Judge Garrity’s ruling in Boston and without further court rulings, 25 percent of public school students in Massachusetts were attending schools under state-approved equity plans.
But today my focus is on the racial balance plan implemented in Boston in September 1974, of which I was the primary author some eighteen months earlier.
The state’s Supreme Judicial Court had ordered that, if the Boston School Committee failed to adopt an adequate racial balance plan, the state Board of Education must do so. With Boston refusing even to propose an inadequate plan, the task fell on me and my staff and consultants to produce a plan that the state Board could order implemented.
Unfortunately, the Boston School Committee refused to allow its staff to work with us, counting on our producing an inadequate plan that would be rejected by the courts. Certainly we could have devised a much better plan in many details if we had been provided up-to-date information about facilities and other planning considerations.
Parenthetically, I would note that the Springfield School Department, under the same mandate, did produce a plan which, after the Springfield School Committee refused to adopt it, we simply adopted and ordered as the state’s plan; this was implemented in September 1974 with none of the disruption that was occurring at the same time in Boston.
Our 1974 Boston plan was developed under guidelines adopted by the state Board stipulating that elementary students not go more than a mile, intermediate students not more than a mile and a half, and high school students not more than two miles. This had the effect that parts of the city were left unaffected. For example, South Boston elementary and intermediate schools were not included, but the high school was.
Of course, Judge Garrity’s second stage plan had no such restrictions, and so far more students were affected. I urged Bob Dentler, its primary author, to create non-contiguous attendance districts and thus leave untouched the schools that had been desegregated under our plan; refusing, he told me that he could produce a better plan than mine with both hands tied behind his back! I found it ironical, four decades later, when I inherited his role as Boston University’s Dean of Education!
I’d be happy to answer questions about the 1974 plan, under which I might note that two of my own children attended elementary school in Roxbury, as have their five siblings subsequently.
Charles L. Glenn, EdD, PhD
Professor emeritus, Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, Boston University
books since 2010:
(ed) Balancing Freedom, Autonomy, and Accountability in Education, volumes 1-4, Wolf Legal Publishers
The American Model of State and School: An Historical Inquiry, Continuum
Contrasting Models of State and School, Continuum
Native American/First Nations Schooling: From the Colonial Period to the Present, Palgrave Macmillan
African American/Afro-Canadian Schooling: From the Colonial Period to the Present, Palgrave Macmillan
Muslim Educators in American Communities, Information Age
Terry seligmann
I’m Terry Seligmann, and I served as Judge Garrity’s law clerk from the summer of 1974 through July of 1975, which was both the first year of busing under the state plan known as Phase I, and the year in which the more comprehensive remedial orders and opinion known as Phase II were developed and issued. In my time today, I want to talk first about the breadth of the concept of equal educational opportunity and the degree to which Judge Garrity was concerned with what would happen at the end of the bus ride to school.
There were many aspects to this—the desegregation of faculty and administrators was seen as significant not only in numbers, but in affecting the curriculum and checking further discrimination within the schools.
Magnet schools were not the court’s invention, but they were a part of the effort to draw students to schools and to foster excellence in a system that was not known for it; they were part of the court-ordered plan. The pairing of Boston’s powerful corporations and Universities with public schools also sought to generate resources for schools and students, including potential employment with partners such John Hancock, to undo some of the damage of segregation, as well as to involve these entities and invest them in the success of the public schools.
A new structure for community involvement in the schools was also a major move away from segregation-dominated politics and towards a focus on students’ education and safety at school. The plan called for broadly representative councils to serve as advisors in each school, district, and Citywide.
Not all these aspects of the Phase II plan may have ultimately been successful, but some have left their mark beyond the end of the Court’s involvement, and the lens of history has largely ignored them in assessing the impact of the case.
Busing
Finally, I want to touch on the adoption of the Phase II districting and assignment plan, which was primarily developed through the use of experts and Masters’ hearings only after the default by the school committee of its responsibility to propose a remedy for the results of the indisputable intentional segregation of the school system that you have heard about today.
First, the Court was forced into its role; it did not choose it and certainly did not prefer it. The school committee refused to propose a plan and contempt hearings followed.
Second, no desegregation plan for Boston could avoid the use of busing, and not only was that clear from the Supreme Court’s decisions, which bound the district court, but it was clear to the school committee, as John Kerrigan testified:
I ran for office stating that I would never vote for a plan that involved the busing of school children. It is unfortunate that is the way our society exists, the way the housing patterns are laid out, but the only way you are going to desegregate city schools is through forced busing . . . I can't vote for a plan that includes the forced busing of school children. The hypocrisy in that statement is there is no way that it can be done without the forced busing of children.
Third, some alternative proposals maintained largely white schools in some areas, in an effort to avoid the effects of “white flight.” As you are aware and will hear, the turmoil in Boston did likely accelerate of the “white flight” from city schools that was already underway, and that has left not only Boston but most urban cities with majority-minority student populations. For the court, however, to have refused to desegregate portions of the school system based on the fear that white parents would leave it would have been to deny the rights of the black plaintiffs because of popular opposition to the enforcement of a constitutional right. The law was and still is clear on that.
Neighborhood schools have always been places where kids and parents could make lifelong friendships, where teachers could get to know families, and where parents could more easily get involved in school affairs. They've also usually been the most important institutions for promoting local civic engagement.
In 1850, Benjamin Roberts sued the city of Boston after his daughter Sarah was assigned - because of her race - to the Abiel Smith School on Beacon Hill, when he wanted her to enjoy what he described as "the blessings of the nearest school to their home" in the North End. After he lost the case, many Black families left Boston. As Roberts wrote, "Boston is fast losing many of her intelligent, worthy, aspiring citizens, who are becoming taxpayers in adjoining localities, for the sole advantage of school rights." Those "localities" included Charlestown, Roxbury, and Cambridge.
In 1963, when the Boston public schools were first charged with de facto segregation, the School Committee refused to come up with a plan to address the issue. So the Boston Branch NAACP came up with one of its own. The Atkins Plan called for redrawing a few school district lines and reassigning students to 16 schools that were still within their neighborhoods. It attempted to balance desegregation with preserving neighborhood schools. But the School Committee rejected the plan.
In 1973, after the Boston School Committee had for years refused to come up with an assignment plan to that complied with the Massachusetts Racial Imbalance Law, the state Board of Education was ordered to come up with one for Boston. The plan created by Dr. Charles Glenn created districts in which kids were reassigned to schools that were balanced racially, but were still within state-guidelines for distance from the homes of students at all grade levels. It balanced racial balance with assigning kids to schools that were close - if not the closest - to their homes. It was a good plan that never was explained properly or got the support it deserved.
In 1974, Judge Garrity made what was unquestionably the right decision when he found that the Boston public schools had been "unconstitutionally segregated." And he explained that they had gotten that way because the School Committee had employed a "Byzantine" assignment plan "antithetical to a neighborhood schools system." Unfortunately, so was the plan that Judge Garrity eventually chose as a remedy.
Judge Garrity first reviewed a number of other proposed plans. The most promising was the Masters Plan - also known as the McCormack Plan. It called for reassigning fewer kids than the Glenn Plan had, by dividing the city into districts, and calling for schools to reflect the racial percentages of the students in the district they were in. The plan balanced desegregation with assigning kids to schools that were still roughly in their neighborhoods. It received widespread support. The most vocal of the anti-busing groups said it wouldn't oppose the plan. If - if - it had been chosen, Boston might - might - have avoided much of the division and disruption that followed.
But Judge Garrity rejected the Masters Plan in favor of the so-called Experts Plan that came to be called Phase II. It required every school in the city to reflect the racial percentages of the students in the entire system. This might seem like a small detail, but details matter. This one dramatically increased both the number of kids reassigned to schools as well as the distance those schools were from their homes. In doing so, it abandoned any pretense of a neighborhood school system.
The Boston Globe called the plan one “almost no one now defends and most of the city detests.” Over the next few years, Boston once again lost many of its "worthy, aspiring citizens" due to what they considered "school rights." And ever since, Boston hasn't had anything resembling a neighborhood school system - even though surveys have found parents in every neighborhood would "prefer to send their children to quality schools near their homes.” I know any mention of neighborhood schools raises concerns about equity. And I know the fight for desegregation was just part of the larger fight that Ruth Batson began back in 1963 to improve all of Boston's public schools.
What I don't know is why, with all the progress the city has made since then - in terms of improved leadership, increased diversity, and additional resources - Boston can't have good schools in every neighborhood and Boston families can't enjoy the "blessings" of the neighborhood school that Benjamin Roberts and his family were denied in 1850.
jim vrabel
Martha minow
After Desegregation in Boston
Martha Minow (1)
In 1975, protests over the court orders in Morgan v. Hennigan and related arguments spilled across the city just as I pursued graduate work in education. I studied with Professor Charles Willie, one of the masters appointed by Judge Garrity, and worked with another professor on the pending Delaware desegregation case (2). I then took up the role of project manager for an empirical evaluation of the second year of busing in Boston. With enrollment data entered on punch cards and analyzed using multiple regression and factor analysis, our project’s report pronounced the desegregation effort successful by the measure that most of the system’s schools moved to racial mixes in student enrollments staying within a few percentage points of the district-wide racial composition (3).
But white enrollments were dropping significantly; “success” meant the distribution of diminishing numbers of whites across the city. Even before the desegregation plan went into effect, white enrollment in Boston Public Schools as Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrant populations moved to the suburbs or shifted to private schools while Black, Hispanic, and Asian populations moved to the city and residential segregation hardened. The vision pairing cultural resources with the Boston public schools had not been achieved. By the time Morgan v Hennigan ended—the federal appeals court ruled that Boston had implemented the plans and complied with the law--13 public schools were defined as "racially identifiable," meaning over 80 percent of the student population either white or Black. The court ruled that "all these schools are in compliance with the district court's desegregation orders" because their make-up "is rooted not in discrimination but in more intractable demographic obstacles (4)."
It seemed in 1975 that lawyers were key to the search for educational equality, so I went to law school. I then served as a law clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall. Justice Marshall often reminded me that he and others at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund believed that “green follows white”: legislatures and school boards could not deny funding for the education of Black students if they were seated next to white students. He also said the promise of school desegregation remained unfulfilled. My book on the legacies of Brown v. Board of Education, and further educational equity lawsuits and reforms are efforts to examine what have been and what should be the measures of success for educational equality—and to advocate for laws and policies get us closer to that goal.
Substantial evidence demonstrates real educational benefits come to all students from integration along racial and class lines. Yet racial integration has receded for legal and political reasons; for some whites, the Boston conflict fed into a narrative that racial justice involved taking something away from whites. Schooling can be assessed in terms of where students go—to what further opportunities and jobs –after K-12, or by student achievement. Even how to measure student achievement is debatable. Boston schools are rated as “above average” yet according to state test scores, only 34% of high school students tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and 27% tested at or above that level for math (5).
Inadequate schooling means that the talents of so many remain unrecognized and undeveloped with costs to society and self-governing democracy as well as to those individuals. Transformative reforms are needed. What’s next must include more serious investment and support for teachers and schools—and now also in new tools, such as digital resources. It is now possible to connect a student with the very best teachers and experts in any field as well as digital resources that can offer learning opportunities through games and real-time interactions. The United States Military already uses games as part of its efforts to educate and improve decision-making among its members. The military schools also follow the commitment to mastery by each student; they cannot afford to have any who do not know how to take care of a gun, or advance in literacies of all kinds. Why can’t the public schools in Boston proceed in the same way? Meantime, integration may be possible now with virtual features—including zoom--permitting students to connect both within their own community or school and with peers from other communities and countries in discussions, debates, and joint projects. Digital tools can also connect students with personal mentors, animated avatars, and adjustments to address individual learning styles, abilities, and disabilities. Check out Khan Academies and its personalized tutors (6).
Education now more than ever must invest in connecting students, teachers, and parents across different identities and backgrounds. Justice Thurgood Marshall once noted: “[U]nless our children begin to learn together, then there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together (7).” Morgan v. Hennigan was a flawed but worthy effort. Now, it falls to all of us to pursue the commitment to educational opportunity for all.
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(1) 300th Anniversary University Professor, Harvard University; dean of Harvard Law School, 2009-2017; author of In Brown’ s Wake: Legacies of America’s Educational Landmark (2010).
(2) See Larry Nagengast, School Desegregation’s Impact – Four Decades Later, Delaware Public Media (Oct. 21, 2016), https://www.delawarepublic.org/education/2016-10-21/school-desegregations-impact-four-decades-later .
(3)“Education and Enrollments: Boston during Phase II” (Massachusetts Research Center 1976) (statistical analysis of enrollment patterns before and after Boston desegregation plan and evaluation of magnet program).
(4) UPI, "Boston Schools Desegregated, Court Declares", Chicago Tribune (September 29, 1987).
(5) U.S. News & World Report, Boston Public Schools; further, “31% of elementary students tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and 17% tested at or above that level for math. Also, 29% of middle school students tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and 16% tested at or above that level for math.”
(6) See KHAN ACAD., https://www.khanacademy.org/ [https://perma.cc/F5WT-37H5], (providing exercises, instructional videos, and a personalized learning dash- board across field ranging from math to art history, and including K-14 and test preparation (i.e., SAT, Praxis, LSAT) content); see also World-Class AI for Education, KHAN ACAD. LABS, https://www.khanacademy.org/khan-labs [https://perma.cc/3GW9-SU2A] (providing A.I. tools to assist teachers and parents).
(7) San Antonio Indep. Sch. Dist. v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1, 71 (1973). (Marshall, J., dissenting).