Forums & EVENTS

10:00 AM

**Meet in front of Family Hardware Store, 1106 Blue Hill Avenue, Dorchester, two blocks north of the intersection of Blue Hill Avenue and Morton Street.

We will visit the sites of the redlining and blockbusting that harmed the Dorchester-Mattapan neighborhoods and their residents….and the major connection this had in the Boston school desegregation case, Morgan vs. Hennigan.

• The Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group program of home mortgages for Black families led to a series of scandals that led to massive neighborhood deterioration: redlining, blockbusting, failure of the government to do required inspections of homes being sold, fast foreclosures, mismanagement of foreclosed buildings, the spread of abandoned buildings. These were failures by banks, realtors, HUD, Mayor White, and the City Council. 

• Meanwhile, the Black community starting especially in 1963 was pressing the Boston School Committee to improve education for Black students. Their schools got less funding, needed the most repairs, and got the most inexperienced teachers. 

• In this context, the School Committee made an agreement with the State Board of Education in 1967 to receive 75% state funding to build 4 state of the art schools in areas of Dorchester with adjoining Black and White neighborhoods and to open them as integrated schools.

• When the schools opened like the Lee School in Dorchester, due to the redlining and blockbusting, there was no longer much of an integrated neighborhood there.  The School Committee assigned 200 White children to attend the Lee School. The White parents rebelled and 600 met on September 21, 1971, at the O’Hearn School in Dorchester and demanded and got the School Committee to reverse their vote so all their children could attend the all-white O’Hearn School and almost all-white Fifield School.

• This breaking of this commitment to open these schools as integrated was the last straw that led to the NAACP Boston and NAACP National to begin the process of filing a court suit for the desegregation of the Boston Public Schools.  This was filed on March 16, 1972, 6 months after the School Committee reneged on opening these schools as integrated. This was a major piece of evidence cited by Judge Garrity in Tallulah Morgan vs. James Hennigan, the Boston school desegregation case decision made in 1974.

• Tour and Discussion led by Lew Finfer, Co-Chair of the Boston Desegregation and Busing Initiative and community organizer in Boston and MA since 1970. He experienced these events firsthand as a community organizer back then.