Desegregation Walking Tour

We can consider leading a Walking Tour on the Key Events in Boston Desegregation and Busing History for organizations, schools, government departments, companies, institutions. Contact LewFinfer@gmail.com on this.

The tour covers key events 1961-1980 and visits sites of the events including:

  •   15 Beacon Street, the former headquarters of the Boston School Committee and Boston School Department where numerous demonstrations led by the Black community, including sit-ins, picketing, and 800 attending a School Committee meeting on June 12, 1963 to present 14 education demands..

  • Boston Common where 25,000 rallied in April 22,1965 led by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King on issues including the failures in the Boston Public Schools system. And where in April 1974, some 25,000 rallied for the repeal of the Racial Imbalance Law. On April 23, 1976, 50,000 marched in a Procession Against Violence from Boston Common to City Hall Plaza.

  • Massachusetts State House where the Racial Imbalance Law was passed in August 18,1965. The all white Boston School Committee resisted implementing the law and that resistance led to the federal court decision ordering school desegregation in Boston.

  • City Hall Plaza where 10,000 anti-busing demonstrators rallied on September 9,1974 and booed, pelted, and chased Senator Ted Kennedy into the JFK Federal Building and then shattered the first floor windows.  And on the other side of the plaza where anti-busing students from Charlestown and South Boston High Schools on April 5, 1976 attacked African-American leader Ted Landsmark.

  • The McCormack Federal Courthouse on Congress Street where the Tallulah Morgan vs. James Hennigan Boston School Desegregation case was filed on March 14, 1972. Judge W. Arthur Garrity found in favor of the plaintiffs on June 21, 1974 and ordered the desegregation of Boston schools and that began on September 12, 1974 with school busing.

September 14th Walking Tour

Join us on our group walking tour as we stroll through Boston’s rich and fraught history of racial segregation and collective action.

If you can’t make September 14th, you can take the walking tour on your own anytime. Just follow along below.  

STATE HOUSE AND BOSTON COMMON

• Passage of the Racial Imbalance Act August 18, 1965

• Efforts by the State Department of Education, then located at 182 Tremont Street, and the State Supreme Court to get Boston to abide by the law and Boston’s stonewalling for years and years.

• Racial Imbalance Act greatly weakened May 1974 following April 1974 demonstration of 20,000 anti-busing demonstrators

15 Beacon Street

former headquarters of the Boston School Committee

June 11, 1963 - Ruth Batson and 400 people bring 14 proposals to the Boston School Committee on education equity and they are rejected by the School Committee chaired by Louise Day Hicks.

  • June 18, 1963 - First Boston School Stay Out of 8000 students

  • September 5, 1963 - Two Day overnight Sit-In led by Tom Atkins, who later became a City Councilor and then NAACP Lawyer on this case

  • February 26, 1964 - Second Boston School Stay Out of 10,000 students

  • September 1964-1969 - Operation Exodus led by Ellen Jackson to take Black children from Black schools to better resourced White schools; at one point it served 976 students.

  • April 28, 1965 - Rev. Vernon Carter conducts 114 day picket of the School Committee, jointed by others regularly, helped in putting spotlight for passage of the Racial Imbalance Law

  • September 7, 1966 - METCO begins to bus Black children to suburban schools; started by Ruth Batson 

City Hall Plaza, City Hall, &
JFK Federal Building

  • September 9, 1974 - anti-busing rally attended by 10,000 - Senator Ted Kennedy tries to speak and he’s booed, people turn their backs on him, he’s pelted with fruit, he’s chased into the JFK Federal Building, demonstrators pound on the glass walls of the building and shatter them.

  • September 12, 1974 - Mayor Kevin White and staff plan and react to the many incidents of violence during first years of busing such as meeting at Freedom House in Roxbury September 12, 1974 - when Black parents and community leaders confront Mayor White for allowing buses to be stoned in South Boston

  • April 5, 1976 - Anti-Busing students walk out of South Boston High School and Charlestown High School and meet at the Boston City Council with City Councilors Louise Day Hicks and Albert “Dapper” O’Neil. Students then walk to the nearby federal courthouse to demonstrate against Judge Garrity.

  • Ted Landsmark, an African-American community leader, on his way to a meeting in City Hall starts to walk through the students outside of City Hall, in the corridor leading from City Hall to Court Street and they turn on him and beat him including one of them seeming to stab him with an American flag on a flag pole.

  •  April 24, 1976, Richard Poleet, a 34 year old white mechanic was dragged from his car in Roxbury by Black youth and robbed and had a fractured skull which he died from.

Federal Courthouse

@ Post Office Square

  • June 21, 1974 - Judge Garrity ruled on Tallulah Morgan vs James Hennigan that Boston’s schools were segregated by act of the Boston School Committee and were ordered to be segregated. That summer Judge Garrity affirmed that busing would start that September with the State Plan had been drafted.

  • Garrity stayed with this suit into 1982 making over 400 orders related to its implementation, before turning over the implementation to the State Board of Education.

  • March 6, 1975 - On the way to the court, at the marker for the Boston Massacre at Devonshire and State Street, the ROAR anti-busers staged a protest.

  • July 13, 1975 - ROAR also staged a protest at the Boston Tea Party ship at 306 Congress Street throwing tea they called “GarriTEA” after Judge Garrity and assignment letters into the Harbor…on.

South Boston High School,

95 G Street,
South Boston

  • On the first day of desegregation with busing on September 12, 1974, South Boston High School was the scene of intense opposition to busing with rocks thrown at buses, epithets at Black students. On the first day of school 124 of the assigned 1300 students showed up largely due to white students boycotting to protest desegregation. Inside the school, many racial incidents occurred especially in the first three years. Judge Garrity put South Boston High School into receivership on December 10, 1975.

Freedom House

5 Crawford Street, Dorchester

  • After what happened on September 12 at South Boston High School with rocks thrown at Boston and a tirade of racial epithets,  several hundred Black residents met at Freedom House that night. They lambasted Boston Mayor Kevin White for not keeping their children safe. He apologized and said he’d do better. Black community leaders met frequently there over the years to devise strategies for more safety and better schools.  Freedom House was a multi-service center founded back in 1948 by Muriel and Otto Snowden.

“South Boston's lower end held one of the highest concentrations of white poverty in America. We were not working class. We were poor. To focus on a school that had so many students on welfare, that's not really the place to get equity.”

-Michael Patrick Macdonald, Writer