In 1974, U.S. District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. ordered the Boston Public Schools to bus students between predominantly white and Black neighborhoods. The plan was intended to integrate the schools, but it led to racial violence and protests. The talks here study what happened that year from different perspectives and the long lasting legacy.
Susan E. Eaton, in conversation about her book, The Other Boston Busing Story: What’s Won and Lost Across the Boundary Line.
METCO, America’s longest-running voluntary school desegregation program, buses children of color from Boston’s city neighborhoods to predominantly white suburban schools. In contrast to the infamous violence and rage that greeted forced school busing within the city in the 1970s, the work of METCO has quietly and calmly promoted school integration. But how has this program affected the lives of its graduates? Would they choose to participate if they had it to do over again? Would they place their own children on the bus to suburbia? In The Other Boston Busing Story, sixty-five METCO graduates who are now adults answer those questions and more, vividly recalling their own stories and assessing the benefits and hardships of crossing racial and class lines on their way to school.
Susan Eaton will be in conversation with Stephanie Leydon, executive producer of digital video at GBH News.
The book talk will be preceded by the screening of the GBH News documentary Never Cried: Boston's Busing Legacy and a talkback with the filmmaker Emily Judem.
On this 50th anniversary of busing, how do we take stock of this legacy and what needs to be done now with the Boston Public Schools?
The movement began in the 1960's to improve education for Black students in Boston, but the Boston School Committee refused to make changes and denied Black students were being short changed. The federal court in 1974 found Boston's schools were illegally segregated and then ordered desegregation with busing. There then followed deep racial divisions, turmoil, and white flight from the schools and from the city of Boston.
We hear also about what ways desegregation expanded opportunities for students, teachers, and administrators and the many court orders on hiring of diverse staff, establishing parent councils, bilingual education, university and business partnerships. But the big question is, were the aspirations for high quality education met?
The make-up of Boston schools in 1974 was 60% White, 30% Black, 10% other. The Boston Indicators Project says it is now 45% Latino, 29% Black, 8% Asian, 14% White. So it went from majority white to predominantly students of color school system. The Boston Public Schools were last year not rated well on a whole battery of educational benchmarks by the state's education department. BPS has many challenges to meet now with a more diverse student body, with significant numbers of students who are homeless, those with learning disabilities, and large numbers of recent immigrants whose first language is not English. We will begin to talk about further reforms needed now.
This forum is a collaboration between the BPL and the Boston Desegregation and Busing Initiative
These amongst the most important in Boston’s history forever impacted Boston’s reputation to its residents and to the whole country. It was a cauldron of divisions by race and class and this obscured steps forward that were taken... Boston’s Black community with leaders like Ruth Batson, Ellen Jackson, and Tom Atkins did a 10-year campaign starting in 1963 to try to address severe educational inequities. The Boston School Committee headed by Louise Day Hicks disputed, delayed, denigrated, and rejected all these proposals.
Finally in 1972, the NAACP filed a case in federal court on behalf of 14 parents and 43 children that became the Tallullah Morgan vs. James Hennigan case. Judge Garrity ruled on June 21,1974 that the Boston School Committee had segregated the schools and ordered them desegregated.
Busing began on September 12,1974. It was met with fierce resistance from white anti-busing organizations for the next 4 years. This included demonstrations, motorcades, rallies, and electing more anti-busing politicians to office.
Black students integrating white high schools in South Boston, Hyde Park, Charlestown, and Roslindale faced racial epithets, rocks thrown at school buses, and fights started in the schools. This spilled over into the neighborhoods with a number of violent attacks and some retaliations.
Most of the schools did open and remain peaceful. Judge Garrity also ordered many notable education reforms.
Some change started to come when 3 anti-busing politicians lost their elections and the first Black person was elected to the Boston School Committee in 1977.
This is part of a program hosted by the Boston Public Library and the Boston Busing & Desegregation Initiative commemorating the 50th anniversary of Boston desegregation and busing.
Suffolk University's Ford Hall Forum and Moakley Archive & Institute, The Boston Desegregation and Busing Initiative, and GBH Forum Network, continue a series of programs examining the lasting impacts of the l974 landmark decision to desegregate Boston’s Public Schools. This panel discusses upward mobility in Boston, exploring the city’s historic institutional roadblocks that have hindered progress for people of color fifty years after busing. It explores solutions to address these persistent issues such as enhancing educational opportunities, closing the wealth gap, increasing home ownership, and broadening access to job opportunities.
The panelists are Ron Bell, longtime community activist and founder of Dunk the Vote, and alumnus of Boston Latin School; Karilyn Crockett, Ph.D., assistant professor, Urban History, Public Policy & Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Tatiana M. F. Cruz, Ph.D., assistant professor and interdisciplinary program director of Africana Studies, Department of Critical Race, Gender and Cultural Studies, Simmons University. The program’s moderator is Kris Hooks, editor-in-chief of The Boston Globe’s newsroom team, Money, Power, Inequality: Closing the Racial Wealth Gap, which focuses on addressing the racial wealth gap in Greater Boston.
Background
In our first program, Driving for Desegregation: Boston 50 Years After Busing, Adrian Walker, columnist for The Boston Globe, led a panel that explored the long-term impacts of busing on the city of Boston, including the current state of Boston’s public schools and racial equity in a myriad of arenas. In our second program held last week, our panel, moderated by Stephanie Leydon, GBH News, the panel explored race, housing, and education equity 50 years after busing. This discussion explored the impact of race-based discriminatory housing policies and education funding formulas while addressing the more recent problems of gentrification and housing affordability and how Boston positions itself to compete with its suburban neighbors when it comes to educational outcomes.
Suffolk University’s Ford Hall Forum, the Moakley Archive & Institute, and GBH Forum Network present a program exploring the relationship between access to affordable housing and educational opportunity in Boston’s public schools nearly fifty years after the school busing crisis. This program, moderated by Stephanie Leydon, Executive Producer of digital video at GBH News, is the second in a series examining the lasting impacts of the landmark decision to desegregate Boston’s Public Schools in 1974. This discussion will take a look back at the impact of race-based discriminatory housing policies and education funding formulas while addressing the more recent problems of gentrification and housing affordability. How does Boston position itself to compete with its suburban neighbors when it comes to educational outcomes?
Join us and lend your voice to this important discussion.
Event sponsored by The Boston Desegregation & Busing Initiative.
Boston, April 5, 1976. As the city simmered with racial tension over forced school busing, newsman Forman photographed a white protester outside City Hall assaulting the Black attorney Landsmark with the American flag. The photograph shocked Boston and made front pages across the U.S. and the world and won a Pulitzer Prize. Masur has done extensive research, including personal interviews with those involved, to reveal the unknown story of what really happened that day and afterward. This evocative "biography of a photograph" unpacks this arresting image to trace the lives of the men who intersected at that moment, to examine the power of photography and the meaning of the flag, and to reveal how a single picture helped change race relations in Boston and America.
The Soiling of Old Glory, like the photograph itself, offers a dramatic window into the turbulence of the 1970s and race relations in America.
Adrian Walker of The Boston Globe moderates a discussion with Zebulon V. Miletsky, PhD., associate professor of Africana Studies, Stonybrook University and the author of, A History of Boston’s Long Black Freedom Struggle, Alisa R. Drayton, Executive Director, Yawkey Club of Roxbury, and Marilyn Flowers-Marion, chairperson, Retired Teachers Chapter of the Boston Teachers Union, on their lived experiences of court-ordered busing in Boston during the 1970s. The panel also explores the long-term impacts of busing on the city of Boston, including the current state of Boston’s public schools and racial equity in a myriad of arenas. Looking to the future, the panel considers what a more equitable Boston Public School System might look like.
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Farah Stockman and Boston Public Library President David Leonard discuss the historical context around what is commonly known as a time of “busing in Boston” that took place in the early 1970s, as well as the wider effort to desegregate public schools across the U.S. Ms. Stockman shares her experiences reporting decades later on the busing crisis and gives a thoughtful take on the impacts of this monumental moment in Boston and United States history.
Image: Public domain
The four women Ms. Stockman names in the opening of this event are:
• Ellen Jackson, founder of Operation Exodus, a program in the 1960 that raised private money to bus students from overcrowded black schools in Roxbury to schools with seats in other parts of the city.
• Ruth Batson, an early architect of METCO, a voluntary busing program that still exists that brings black students in Boston to schools in the suburbs..
• Jean McGuire, first black woman on the Boston school committee, who fought for black teachers in Boston schools
• Kim Janey, now president of the Boston City Council, who has fought for equity in schools for years.
Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Farah Stockman hosts a conversation in Roxbury's historic Hibernian Hall to celebrate the culmination of weeks of neighborhood readings on the historic busing crisis that ripped Boston apart in the 1970s. An upcoming film, _The Harvest_, co-produced by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist/historian Douglas Blackmon and award-winning documentary filmmaker Sam Pollard is the impetus for the conversation. Portions of the film inform the conversation. The discussion, moderated by Stockman, includes two former residents of Boston: Michael Patrick MacDonald, who grew up in South Boston’s Old Colony housing project during the 1970s busing crisis, and Cheryl Harris, who grew up in the Mission Hill neighborhood of Boston and experienced the social and political upheaval first-hand as a young mother. The film explores the legacy of public school integration in Blackmon’s hometown of Leland, Mississippi. This Roxbury conversation will find the parallels in the Boston busing crisis and Boston's ongoing issues of system racism.
The Boston busing crisis and public school desegregation of 1974 to 1988 was an extremely contentious period in local history that reverberated nationally. To help students and others understand what happened and why, the Boston Public Schools have created online resources for teaching about the history of segregation, desegregation, and busing in Boston. **Josue D. Sakata**, Assistant Director for History and Social Studies for Boston Public Schools, reviews that history and discusses how it is presented in the Boston Public Schools today, including how the online resource was created and how it is used with students. (Image: Herbert E. Glasier [Public domain], via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:South_Boston_High_School_-_0403002157a_-_City_of_Boston_Archives.jpg "South Boston High School"), image cropped)
