In 1974, Barbara Fields taught elementary school in Brighton, one of the very few Black teachers at her school.
Fields and other educators across the city watched with horror as school desegregation in Boston unleashed white rioting and furious racial violence at schools across the city.
“You also felt a sense of responsibility for not only teaching children, but the safety of the children,” Fields said, recently recalling the era from her home in Mattapan. “There was always a consciousness that this goes beyond just me as a Black individual. This goes to ... what our community is fighting for and your responsibility to assist in the struggle.”
If Black students found themselves on the front lines of Boston’s desegregation battles, a small number of Black educators were right there with them trying to navigate a system that had largely excluded them.
The federal desegregation ruling also required the city to diversify its nearly all-white teaching corps. Ultimately, that led to a requirement for the district to build a teaching force that mirrored the percentage of Black students: specifically, that the district’s teaching staff be 25% Black.
Fifty years later, that mandate often remains unmet. About 28% of the students in Boston are African American, but just about 23% of Boston teachers and guidance counselors are Black.
Kim Parker, the former president of the Black Educators’ Alliance of Massachusetts, believes more can be done.
“It’s incredibly frustrating that we are still having these conversations and the progress that we were promised and have been fighting for has not been realized,” she said.
When the court order was handed down to integrate schools, it was police and teachers who helped usher scared students into classrooms.
WGBH evening news reporter Greg Pilkington rode the bus with students in 1974.
“When the bus got to the school and there was all the jeering and the big crowd out in front of the high school the kids were really frightened 'cause they didn’t know how well they were gonna be protected,” Pilkington said.
Back in 1973, the school year before desegregation started, only about 7% of BPS teachers were Black. Eighty-one Boston schools had never employed a Black teacher.
U.S. District Court Judge Arthur Garrity also found the absence of Black teachers was the result of a discriminatory cut-off score on the National Teacher Examination. Garrity also cited inadequate recruitment efforts, and the reputation of Boston as an anti-Black, segregated school system that kept Black teachers away.
One year after the landmark order, the number of Black educators in Boston had risen to about 10%.
But that effort was met with often intense pushback from some teachers, including some within the Boston Teachers Union, which was predominantly white.
“They felt that there was a white teacher in that classroom — and because you’re here now, you’re being assigned here, then it means you’ve taken my job,” Fields said.
As Fields remembers it, people began to view desegregation differently when some of the positive impacts became more apparent.
“Such as our Black students being able to see somebody who looked like them in the classroom teaching,” she said. “Or administrators running the schools.”
Peggy Kemp taught at the Lewenberg School in Mattapan when desegregation began. She said, prior to 1974, she was one of the few Black teachers her students at the majority-Black school had ever had.
And at first she was against the order to desegregate. She felt that the school was on a positive trajectory and wanted to see how far it could go.
“I also had concerns about the message being sent to students that, in order for them to learn, they needed to be around white students,” she said.
But Kemp began to see that desegregating her school meant that problems that had previously been ignored were resolved. Bathroom stalls that had gone without doors were fixed. There was an effort to get textbooks in every classroom.
“It made me understand why these parents had worked so hard to force the district to integrate,” she said. “Because these students really didn’t have what they needed.”
Both Fields and Kemp said the experience of desegregation in their schools was mostly peaceful. But as more Black teachers entered the profession, the reaction wasn’t always welcoming.
“There was this just ongoing attitude on the part of some white educators — not all — that if you’re an educator in Boston and you’re a person of color, it’s all because of desegregation,” Kemp said. “You didn’t earn it.”
Fast forward a decade. In the 1988-89 school year, just over 23% of teachers in the district were Black, a percentage that has fluctuated higher or lower ever since, but never surpassed 26%.
Experts say this is due to a shortage of Black educators and competition between Boston and other cities for them. Boston employed a third of all the state’s Black teachers in the 2022-2023 school year.
Parker, the former president of the Black Educators’ Alliance of Massachusetts, credited desegregation-era Black educators with leading the way.
“They’ve done so much work for us to be here today and we need to remember that, always,” she said.
About 23% of so-called “Garrity Educators,” a group that includes teachers and counselors in Boston, were Black this school year, according to BPS.
By any measure that is an improvement on what the district’s teaching staff used to look like during the segregation era. But Sophia Hall, a litigator for Lawyers for Civil Rights, said it’s inadequate.
“Often what I hear is BPS saying: ‘Well, we’re doing better than other place in the country,’” Hall said. “But that’s not good enough. For Boston to be known as sort of a mecca of education, we should always be first in line.”
Generations of Black parents, students and educators are still waiting for a future that embraces parity.
Al Holland remembers school days at South Boston High starting with flashing lights and sirens as police escorted school buses to schools where angry crowds awaited them.
“It was a frightening experience. Cops all around. Cops on the rooftops,” said Holland, who began his education career at South Boston High School in 1975 as an educational consultant. “You thought you were going into an armed encampment.”
He recalls trying to break up fights, prevent kids from getting injured. When Holland was brought in, it was essentially to help “keep the peace” at the embattled campus. Some days, he and a few of the other adults would huddle to try to make sense of what they had seen.
“We would get together and try to, I don’t know, debrief. But figure: What the hell did we just go through?” he said.
“There was this just ongoing attitude on the part of some white educators — not all — that if you’re an educator in Boston and you’re a person of color, it’s all because of desegregation.”Peggy Kemp, who taught at the Lewenberg School in Mattapan
Holland would go on to lead the Jeremiah E. Burke High School. Fields would become the district’s first Diversity Equity and Inclusion officer, and Kemp, the teacher in Mattapan, went on to teach at the prestigious Boston Latin School.
But Holland, now 78, questioned how much has changed in a district where the number of white students has dropped to less than 15%.
“People didn’t want busing to work,” he said. “And people still don’t want our children sitting next to each other. And I think that it’s taken an emotional toll on me.”
Fifty years is a long time to wait for a fix. Holland asked: When do things get better?
