Reflecting on the legacy of Boston desegregation architect Charles Willie, dead at 94

Updated at 4:19 p.m. on Jan. 21

A driving force behind school desegregation efforts in Boston died. Dr. Charles Willie passed away last week at the age of 94. His family announced his death on Monday. Scholar practitioner Marcy Murninghan was one of Willie's doctoral students at Harvard University's School of Education who worked on desegregation herself.

She spoke with Arun Rath on GBH’s All Things Considered to look back on Willie’s academic work and his legacy in Boston’s desegregation effort: as one of the “masters” on a court-appointed panel to integrate schools.

Arun Rath: Marcy, thanks for joining us.

Marcy Murninghan: Thank you very much, Arun, for the opportunity to both remember and reflect upon the contributions of a good and decent man.

Rath: Well, start off telling us a bit more about him. Can you lay out some of the basics of Charles Willie’s biography for us, and how he came to be who he was?

Murninghan: He graduated in the same class as Dr. Martin Luther King. He was a graduate of Morehouse College. Chuck was a first. He came from Dallas, Texas, grandson of a slave. His mother was one of the first college-educated women in Texas, who could not get a job teaching because she was married. So his roots are both in slavery and also in knowledge. And he was the first in many settings. He was the first Black to teach at Syracuse. He ascended in the hierarchy of the Episcopal Church.

He was really a door opener in many ways, and what he did throughout his life was to, as both a human being and as a scholar practitioner is really apply the sensibilities of holistic learning — or sociology, was his profession. But he really looked at the various dimensions of economic, ethnic, cultural, social, political, even spiritual dimensions, and particularly as they applied to race in schooling.

My memory of him was as an extraordinarily dapper man who just sort of reeked integrity and goodwill. He had a brilliant smile, always wore a three-piece suit and was the kind of guy that, for all of his sort of heavy education and knowledge and experience, was very, very accessible.

His notable accomplishments had to do with control choice in student assignments and school desegregation cases. But one part that was missing, and I think is just such a crucial chapter in Chuck's life as well as the city of Boston, was his important role in the Boston school desegregation case in the 1970s.

Rath: Yeah, and tell us a bit more about that when federal Judge Arthur Garrity issued the ruling that the city schools should be desegregated through busing.

Murninghan: I should preface my comments by the statement that that case is still not very well understood. I mean, it is it is fraught with misinterpretation and even just bad history. But Chuck came in. Chuck and his family had just moved to Massachusetts from Syracuse in the early ’70s, and the court had made a determination.

The court case itself, the “deseg” case, was years and years in the making. And it was in 1974 — before Chuck came into the situation — that Judge Garrity issued his liability opinion, which is basically saying, “You're guilty, school department of violating the constitutional rights of young children of color in Boston.”

And that was referred to as phase one. There was busing that year, which just blew the city apart, but the busing plan was not the courts, it was a modified version of a plan that had been created by the state.

So that as all hell was breaking loose in the city of Boston in ’74, ’75, the court also had said in his June 1974 findings that the school departmen, should implement this plan as a sort of temporary holding pattern kind of thing, but that the school department and the city — the defendants — were to come up with a more comprehensive plan within a year to erase all vestiges of segregation.

And that's when Chuck came into the picture, because in that ’74 ruling, from ’74 to ’75, there was busing and the city was experiencing just a lot of turmoil and violence and so on. But at the same time, there was a lot of the work to go on to create a more expansive desegregation plan. And that's what Chuck was involved with.

The court couldn't do it. No judge is trained to do public management, and certainly not build a “deseg” plan. So what Garrity did was appoint more masters, and it was referred to as the “masters’ panel.”

And then when Judge Garrity issued his plan, which is kind of the real desegregation plan and the beginning of phase two, which was issued in May of ’75, it included a lot of what the masters had recommended. Chuck helped to create that plan long before he was retained by Mayor [Ray] Flynn in the early 1980s.

Rath: Can you talk a little bit about that work with Mayor Flynn in the 1980s? Was that when you got to know Charles Willie?

Murninghan: No, actually. I ended up working in a superintendent's office in 1978, and I was responsible for the implementation of one part of that desegregation plan — the ’75 order. I knew Chuck because I was a doctoral student at Harvard in 1975 through to ’83, and his having been a master, he was one of my thesis advisors. But my experience was with that very contentious phrase, early.

But what they were doing — and it was a very big challenge — is try to adhere to sort of certain conditions for racial balance within a highly constrained system. And I think that the key takeaway in terms of what was going on then, and what Chuck was able to do and continue to do in the later part of his life, is that the balance always was trying to take quality and equality and make them work together. It's not just equality in terms of student assignments and racial balance or staff or faculty, it's also quality education. And the equality-quality balance, Chuck was able to bring a holistic view, looking at choice, diversity, looking at ways in which those students and their parents might be more empowered, even as they were part of a larger plan to rebalance by race, by ethnicity, school populations.

He did not look just at the numbers. He looked behind the numbers to try to figure out how best to achieve the desired outcomes. And perhaps the nicest and most powerful remembrance — Gary Orfield is now the co-director, co-founder of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. As he wrote yesterday, as Gary wrote yesterday, “A man of deep faith, a Morehouse man in the very best way. Chuck was a collector of Noah's Arks, which symbolized his understanding that we were all in a boat together, and that Martin Luther King's beloved community was the only valid destination.”

Rath: Marcy Murninghan, it's been great speaking with you. Thank you.

Murninghan: Thank you very much.

Rath: That's scholar practitioner Marcy Murninghan, reflecting on the life of Charles Willie, one of the driving forces behind desegregation in Boston Public Schools. Willie has died at the age of 94. This is GBH's All Things Considered.

Correction: This story was updated to correct a misspelling of the word "busing."