Introduction
The story of the effort to desegregate Boston's public schools in the 1970s is often over-simplified, erroneously titled "Busing," and unfortunately only focused on violent events that occurred in and around five high schools when most schools were peaceful. That version of the story ignores the long campaign for school reform that preceded those events led by the Black community, the political and legal struggle that led to them, and the peaceful and positive steps that were also taken to promote educational justice. Yes, there was a great division in Boston 1974-1977 and some of those events still affect Boston's reputation and current Boston Public Schools policies. What follows is an attempt to provide a more complete, but still brief summary of that story.
Background
The modern effort to desegregate Boston's public schools grew out of a campaign for school reform by Boston's Black community and led by Ruth Batson of the Boston NAACP and others that began in the 1950s. It included repeated attempts to persuade school officials to take steps toward addressing issues of equity and improve the quality of education for all students in the system and repeated unsuccessful campaigns by Batson, Mel King, and others for election to the Boston School Committee itself. Frustrated by the unwillingness of school administrators and elected officials to respond to their efforts, Batson and other members of the Black community presented a list of 14 demands to the Boston School Committee on June 11, 1963.
Nine of the demands were for improvements in the entire system, and called for an enhanced curriculum, more and better educational materials, improved teacher training, and increased maintenance in school buildings throughout the city. Four of the demands had to do with eliminating inequalities between schools in Black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods. But it was the first demand on the list - for "an immediate public acknowledgment of the existence of De Facto Segregation in the Boston Public School System" - that would subsequently get the most attention and spark the most controversy.
The Boston School Committee and School Department refused to commit to making the necessary improvements to the system. It refused to acknowledge that there were inequalities in the education being offered to Black children and white children. It also rejected the charge of segregation, maintaining that students were assigned to schools strictly based on the distance from students' homes and on building capacities.
Demonstrations
and an Early Plan
The Boston School Committee's refusal to address any of those issues forced Boston's Black community and its supporters to engage in a years-long series of demonstrations designed to keep public attention on the pressing need for school reform. They included a School Stay Out for Freedom on June 18, 1963, organized by Rev. James Breeden, that involved over 3,000 students boycotting their regular classes to attend "Freedom Schools" in various churches and community centers, where they were taught by volunteer teachers using a "protest curriculum" created by Noel Day. A second Stay Out was subsequently held on February 26, 1964, in which some 8,000 Boston students were joined by hundreds of students from suburban schools, and where guest speakers included the Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts and Boston Celtic star Bill Russell.
The demonstrations included a sit-in at School Department headquarters by a dozen members of the Boston Branch NAACP, led by executive director Thomas Atkins. The protestors remained in the building overnight throughout the next day, and even during a crowded school committee meeting that evening. They left only when police cleared the building after a bomb threat had been received. A week after that demonstration, with the Boston School Committee still refusing to come up with a plan to address the issue of segregation, the Boston Branch NAACP came up with a desegregation plan of its own. The so-called "Atkins Plan" called for redrawing just a few school district lines, and reassigning students in 16 schools to other nearby schools. It did not call for busing students to schools outside of their neighborhoods, which the NAACP called the "least satisfactory way to handle the problem." But the Boston School Committee refused to even consider the plan.
Other demonstrations included A "March on Roxbury" in 1963, on September 22, 1963, in which some 6,000 people - Black and white - participated. The march was meant both to show support for civil rights efforts in the South and to protest the poor conditions in schools in the Black community. Two years later, a "March on Boston" was held, after which Dr. Martin Luther told a crowd of over 20,000 people gathered on Boston Common that "The vision of the New Boston must extend into the heart of Roxbury." Soon after, Rev. Vernon Carter of All Saints Lutheran Church began a solitary vigil outside Boston School Department headquarters that he continued for more than one hundred days and nights, and was joined many times by other supporters, until the state legislature and governor took action to try to force Boston to address the need to improve and desegregate its schools by passing the Racial Imbalance Law in August 1965.
Other Efforts
Even as those efforts at school reform were continuing, Black parents were pursuing other avenues to improve access to a better education for their children. In 1964, they took advantage of the Boston School Department's Open Enrollment policy, which allowed children to transfer to other schools with empty seats available as long as their parents assumed the responsibility to provide for their transportation. Parents at the William Lloyd Garrison School in Roxbury rented buses to so their kids could attend the Peter Faneuil School in the Back Bay. Parents at the overcrowded William Endicott School in Dorchester did the same thing, so their kids could attend the less-crowded Pauline Agassiz Shaw and Roger Walcott Schools nearby.
In the summer of 1965, Ellen Jackson and Betty Johnson created Operation Exodus to take advantage of the Open Enrollment policy on a much larger scale. The program developed a complicated network of rented buses and vans, taxis, and borrowed cars that enabled parent chaperones to transport hundreds of their children to and from better schools every day. A year later, the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO) program began, led by Ruth Batson, which eventually enabled thousands of children to attend suburban schools to get a better education than they would have in Boston. Boston's Black community even started its own schools. Funded by contributions from residents and grants from foundations, a handful of so-called "Freedom Schools" sprang up in Roxbury and Dorchester over the next few years. The schools were staffed by underpaid teachers and administrators and parent volunteers, who were determined to do everything they could to get a better education for their children.
Racial Imbalance Law
In 1963, with the Boston School Committee still refusing to address desegregation, state representative Royal Bolling Sr. of Roxbury filed a bill that came to be called the Massachusetts Racial Imbalance Act. In its final version, it would require the state to take action against school districts in which there were schools where over 50 percent of the enrollment comprised minority students.
The Massachusetts legislature passed the bill and Gov. John Volpe signed the Racial Imbalance Law on August 18, 1965. Although it was hailed as the first attempt by a state to promote school desegregation, the law had its critics. Some thought that the 50% standard to define "imbalance" was arbitrary. Others pointed out that it was easy for legislators to vote for because it would initially apply only to Boston, Cambridge and Springfield, the only municipalities in the state with significant minority populations. Author Ronald Formisano subsequently compared it to U.S. draft policies during the Vietnam era, in which "once again poor blacks and lower-class whites were the foot soldiers for a war initiated and pursued by liberal elites."
The intent of the law was clear, however, to end school desegregation. But, year after year, the Boston School Committee refused to come up with a plan to comply with the law. Eventually, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court was forced to order the state Board of Education to draw up a busing plan for Boston.
Antibusing Movement
For years, opposition to efforts to desegregate the Boston public schools was led by Louise day Hicks, who served as Boston School Committee president when it was first raised in 1963. She and others found that portraying themselves as defending neighborhood schools against what they described as the "forced busing" that would be required to desegregate the system proved to be a good political strategy that rewarded them with reelection and, in Hicks' case, nearly won her the mayor's office. Year after year, they would file bills in the Massachusetts legislature to repeal the Racial Imbalance Law. Every year, more people would turn out when hearings were held on these repeal bills, and every year, more and more people would demonstrate in favor of those bills. In 1972, after 1,000 people turned out for demonstrated outside the State House, a repeal bill was first passed in the House of Representatives, but again defeated in the Senate. In 1973, after over 1,000 people turned up every day during the two weeks of hearings, the Senate also voted for repeal, and only Gov. Francis Sargent's veto preserved the Racial Imbalance Law for another year.
In 1974, the antibusing movement gave birth to two new organizations. One was the Massachusetts Citizens Against Forced Busing, a state-wide group that claimed 3,000 members. The other was Restore Our Alienated Rights (ROAR), a more militant South Boston group founded by Hicks in South Boston that would claim even more members after it expands to establish chapters in other neighborhoods. That year, over 25,000 people, led by the entire Boston School Committee and all but one member of the Boston City Council, turned out to demonstrate for repeal of the Racial Imbalance Law, a move that was subsequently approved by overwhelming margins in both the branches of the legislature in May, forcing Gov. Sargent to agree to amend the law to make public school desegregation efforts voluntary instead of mandatory in Massachusetts.
Morgan v. Hennigan
The growing resistance to school desegregation at both the local and state levels finally forced Boston's Black Community to take their campaign to federal court. On March 14, 1972, 14 adult plaintiffs representing 43 children filed suit in U.S. District Court, charging the Boston School Committee with engaging in segregation through its student assignment policies. The case was called Morgan v. Hennigan, after one plaintiff, Tallulah Morgan, and one of the defendants, James Hennigan, then president of the Boston School Committee. The case was assigned to Judge W. Arthur Garrity, who conducted over two years of hearings before reaching his decision.
On September 12, 1974, Judge Garrity found the Boston public schools to be "unconstitutionally segregated." He found it had gotten that way because the Boston School Committee had been using "busing, open enrollment, multi-school districts, magnet schools, citywide schools and feeder patterns, [that] were antithetical to a neighborhood schools' system." Judge Garrity also found that the schools in the black community "were the most crowded, the oldest, the least well-maintained, and the most poorly staffed that the School Committee could offer," confirming the complaints that Ruth Batson and others had been making for years.
As part of his remedy, Judge Garrity did not just order busing, but ordered increased hiring of minority teachers and administrators, improvements to the system's early learning and bilingual education programs, the establishment of school and city-wide racial, ethnic parent councils, increased numbers of students of color for the 3 exam schools, and the formation of partnerships between individual schools and Boston businesses, colleges, non-profit and cultural institutions. But the most consequential part of the remedy was to choose two new student assignment plans to desegregate the Boston public schools. One would be a "temporary" plan for the upcoming 1974-1975 school year. The other would be a "permanent" to replace it in September 1975. The two plans came to be known as Phase I and Phase II.
Phase I
On June 27, 1974, just six days after his ruling, Judge Garrity ordered the Boston School Department to implement the plan drawn up Dr. Charles Glenn of the state Board of Education to satisfy the original Racial Imbalance Law to be implemented when schools opened ten weeks later - something that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court had already done. Under the plan, some 18,000 students in newly created school districts were assigned to schools that were racially balanced, but also within state guidelines for the distance from the homes of students at various grade levels. To achieve both things, the plan covered less than half of the city. Yet it was immediately met by fierce opposition.
A few days before schools opened, some 10,000 people marched from Boston Common to a rally at Government Center to protest the soon-to-be-implemented plan. When Senator Edward Kennedy attempted to speak, he was pelted with eggs and tomatoes, and forced to take shelter in the federal office building named for his slain brother. Chasing him into the building, demonstrators shattered the windows.
When school started on September 12, 1974, many white parents engaged in a boycott and kept their children home. At some high schools, Black students entering the school building had to walk past crowds of angry residents shouting racial epithets, and some buses carrying students were barraged with rocks and bottles. Inside these high schools, fights between White students and Black students were common, sometimes prompting walkouts by one group or the other. This especially happened at South Boston High School, Charlestown High School, Hyde Park High School, Roslindale High School. On the other hand, most other schools did not experience anything like this behavior and desegregation proceed peacefully. But busing opponents continued to hold numerous weekend marches and protests, including motorcades to the suburban houses of perceived busing supporters like Judge Garrity, the state's education commissioner, and the president of the Boston Globe.
Phase II
Despite periodic incidents of violence, the school year continued. Meanwhile, Judge Garrity reviewed several proposals for the "permanent" desegregating plan that was to be implemented in September 1975. The most promising of these came from the four "masters" he had appointed to advise him in the case - a former U.S. Commissioner of Education, a former Massachusetts Attorney General, a former Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice, and a current professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The Masters Plan proposed reducing the number of students reassigned to other schools and bused to some 15,000 by dividing the city into nine school districts and requiring school to reflect the racial percentage of the students in the district in which they were located. The plan won widespread support, and even ROAR, by this time the most active antibusing group in the city, said they would not oppose it.
But it was criticized by the Boston Branch NAACP, which supported the national organization's position that all schools undergoing court-ordered desegregation reflect the racial percentages of the entire school system. Judge Garrity rejected the Masters Plan for one created by Robert Dentler and Marvin Scott. But by doing that, the so-called "Experts Plan" increased the number of students bused to over 25,000 and increased the distance between their homes and the schools to which they were reassigned. The Boston Globe called the plan one "almost no one now defends and most of the city detests," and it revived the antibusing movement, which had been losing momentum and splintering into factions. Many students went to a new school for Phase One and then had to go to a different school for Phase Two; so that could be 3 different schools over three years.
The day before Phase II was implemented, some 10,000 people from neighborhoods throughout Boston attended an antibusing rally drew on City Hall Plaza. Once school opened, the demonstrations and protests continued, as did fights between students inside some of the high schools. This continued for a third year, and the violence peaked in April 1976, when Ted Landsmark, a Black lawyer, was attacked by a group of white youths from South Boston High School and Charlestown High School who had just attended an antibusing rally, one of whom wielded an American flag on a staff as a weapon. The photo of that attack on Landsmark by a flag wielding white student was printed in newspapers across the country and around the world and cemented a reputation of Boston being an unwelcoming city to people of color. People have labored for decades to take actions to change that reputation. Nine days later, in what was a reaction to that incident, Richard Poleet, a white auto mechanic, was pulled from his car at a traffic light in Roxbury and suffered a beating by a group of young Black men, which left him in a coma from which he never recovered.
PoLITICAL CHANGES
But political changes did follow the turmoil around busing that happened 1974-1977. Community and civil rights leader Hubie Jones pointed out that anti-busing leaders Louise Day Hicks, John Kerrigan, and Pixie Palladino all lost elections in 1977 as they hadn't been able to keep their vow to never allow integration of the schools. And John O'Bryant was elected as the first Black member of the Boston School Committee in 1977 and Jean McGuire as the first Black women member in 1981. And the passage of district representation for City Council and School Committee in 1981 to insure some minority and progressive representation. And the 1983 Mayoral race, where Mel King became the first Black finalist with his Rainbow Coalition. The mayoral final campaign between him and Ray Flynn was notable for statements on racial healing. And that work continued.
legacy and epitaph
Historian Ron Formisano, summarized it, "The rich sat it out, the middle class fled, and the poor did the desegregating". A more nuanced version may have been, "The middle class
whites in the suburbs sat it out, the working-class whites fled the city, and the remaining working-class and poor whites and blacks did the desegregating.
African American journalist Bryant Rollins said this, "If there had been a way for a deep dialogue between blacks and whites, a lot of the conflict that arose during the '60s and '70s was avoidable. People were in a state of violent agreement. What we agreed about was the inefficacy of busing. White parents didn't want it for their kids, and black parents would have preferred not to have to have busing if they had quality schools. We did not slow down, take a deep breath, take a step back and ask ourselves what's possible together. That's a tragedy. Everybody has lost."
Aftermath
The demonstrations, protests, and violence eventually abated. But the impact on the school has not. In the five years after the desegregation/busing plan was implemented, some 30,000 predominantly white students left the school system and many of their families left Boston for surrounding suburbs, where school districts still assigned students to schools closest to their homes. Today, total enrollment in the Boston public schools is some 45,000, down from 93,000 in 1974. Some 15% of students are white, 28% Black, 45% Hispanic, and 12% other ethnicities, compared with some 60% white and 40% minority in 1974. Race was eventually dropped as a factor in assigning students to Boston public schools in 1999, but the system has not returned to a neighborhood school assignment plan because of concerns that there are not enough quality schools in every neighborhood. Many Boston students are attending charter schools, parochial schools, METCO, and private schools.
In Boston's public schools today, test scores are significantly low, attendance rates have increased, and programs for English Language Learners and for Special Needs Students have been criticized by educators and parents. The system has too many buildings for the number of students enrolled, and not all schools have equal access to the same programs. Adding to the challenge is the fact that students come from many countries all over the world, bringing with them not only different languages but different cultures. Several thousand students attending public schools are homeless. Many students have been diagnosed with learning disabilities and require EPs. All of this makes it more difficult to give all students the quality education they need and deserve.
No big-city school system has been able to solve all these challenges. There is no one model for success. But there are model programs - in other systems and within the Boston Public Schools and in other systems - that can be adopted and used as a path forward. The Boston public school system has many teachers, administrators, volunteers, and parents who are working hard to make the schools work better for students and to ensure that important learning takes place.
There was and is a long way to go, but some changes happened though not enough for our schools and their students.
The Boston Desegregation and Busing Initiative pledges to do our part to bring people together and support and/or bring proposals forward to further efforts to improve the Boston Public Schools.