Desegregation Walking Tour
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