In September 1974, television viewers around the world watched news footage from Boston of angry white residents throwing rocks and bottles at yellow school buses as Black students were bused to South Boston High School under a court-ordered desegregation plan.
But across town, another story was playing out in the shadows: Chinese students were also being bused. About 200 Asian youngsters were transported out of Chinatown and the South End to schools across the city to attend segregated classrooms with seemingly little regard to the quality of education.
Lawrence Wong, now 64, vividly recalls the fear and apprehension he felt traveling three miles from Chinatown to the old Michelangelo Middle School in the Italian North End.
“I didn’t know what to think,” he said, noting that because of pervasive racism, leaving Chinatown and the Chinese sections of the South End was widely considered to be dangerous. “We knew not to go to the North End. So of course we were worried.”
Today, Lawrence Wong is a successful contractor doing home renovations. But 50 years ago, this is not how he thought his life would turn out. He looks back on the day when he stepped into the Michelangelo School that September with sadness.
“It really didn’t help me on the education side of my life.”
Leaving Chinatown
Lawrence Wong was 14 at the time and, like many of the Chinese students bused to the North End, he had only recently arrived in America.
The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act opened the door to tens of thousands of Chinese nationals to come to the United States, mainly from Hong Kong. Boston’s Chinatown and South End were suddenly inundated with new residents, including many young families, said Andrew Leong, professor of philosophy, legal, and Asian studies at UMass Boston.
Boston’s Chinatown was a hardscrabble neighborhood at the time, where labor exploitation was rife and where illicit activities from the abutting “Combat Zone” often spilled into the night. Chinatown was also eyed hungrily by developers hoping to claim more land in downtown Boston. But it was still special to those who lived there.
“The role of Chinatown in the hearts of people of the Chinese community, no matter where you live, this is home,” said Suzanne Lee, an elder leader in the community, who served as an intermediary between parents and local and federal officials during the busing crisis. She was 25 years old at the time, teaching English to garment workers in Chinatown.
Like their parents, most young Chinese immigrant students, including Lawrence Wong, spoke little or no English. But he said busing Chinese students to the North End did little to address that shortfall.
“It was kind of strange. We actually had Chinese teachers that speak Cantonese that would give us these courses,” he said. “I did not understand why we had to have Chinese teachers there. I’m not sure if they actually were really qualified.”
Howard Wong — no relation to Lawrence Wong — was 12 when he was bused from the Chinese section of the South End to the Michelangelo School in the second year of desegregation in 1975. But perhaps because he was second-generation and spoke English, he says his educational experience during busing was considerably different than that of kids his age who had recently immigrated to the U.S.
Educational tracking — the practice in which students are separated into classrooms based on their perceived ability or achievement — was widely practiced in public schools at that time. At Michelangelo, many of the non–English speaking Chinese kids were tracked into lower rungs and often in segregated bilingual classes, while non-immigrant Asian students who spoke English were tracked into the upper academic tier.
Today, Howard Wong is the director of information technology for the Norfolk district attorney’s office. He credits his personal success in part to his education that began at the Michelangelo Middle School during desegregation.
“That’s the difference I think. I felt I was in a group of students that were similar to me in the sixth-grade class. I remember distinctly science class. I remember distinctly social studies. We learned Italian,” said Howard Wong.
But he also believes that the practice of “tracking” wrongly stigmatized other students.
The desegregation order coincided with a Supreme Court decision that mandated schools nationwide provide bilingual education for non–English speaking pupils.
But Lawrence Wong says Chinese students learned little English at the school they were bused to. In fact, he said, Michelangelo was more segregated than the South End school he and his peers were transferred from.
“We actually don’t interact with the Italians,” he said. “They keep to themselves. And, you know, we would just keep to ourselves.”
Safety in numbers
But unlike Black children, Chinese students were treated by white students and their parents more as a curiosity than a threat. One North End resident interviewed by the Boston Globe at the time was quoted as saying “We don’t mind having the Chinese bused in — better than anybody else.” That perspective wasn’t shared by the students.
Howard Wong, now 60, said his experiences in the North End during busing were “complicated.” “There were overt acts of racism towards us when we were doing a tour of Paul Revere Park. We had one group of kids that would spit at us.” But he said he made friends at the the Michelangelo School in 1975-'76 who he has stayed in touch with over the decades.
Lawrence Wong viewed the North End differently.
“One of the Italian girls got a hold of my number and she called me: ‘Would you like to come over and study with me?’ She lived in the North End,” he recalled with a laugh. “Then I go, ‘No, thank you very much. I don’t think that would be a very good idea. I don’t want to die.’”
But safety was no laughing matter for Chinese parents, said Suzanne Lee. “They were more concerned about their children’s safety than anything else.”
And their concerns were warranted, said Lee, herself a first-generation immigrant. The violence that greeted Black students in the first year of busing was on the minds of Asian parents. But so too was a more recent incident. In the lead-up to the second year of busing in 1975, their fears were amplified by a violent event that summer in Charlestown. Two immigrant teenage brothers, James and George Tam, were charged with the stabbing death of Patrice Borden, a white girl. Asian parents were convinced that the murder would lead to retaliation against Chinese students being bused into Charlestown, the North End and other white neighborhoods. Though the teenagers would later be found innocent, at the time, the incident informed almost every decision Chinese families made involving safety, said Lee.
To protect their children and ensure their education, Chinese parents organized, just as Black and white parents had done. Meetings in Chinatown were packed. Residents, long marginalized and with no history of organizing, formed the Boston Chinese Parents Association and sent a list of demands to the Boston School Committee and City Hall that included security at bus stops and Chinese volunteers to accompany the students on buses. When their demands were ignored, the parents and students staged a three-day boycott of schools.
Lee recalls it was a sunny morning that September when she boarded a school bus in the South End to accompany students on the first day of school during the second phase of desegregation.
“And by the time we got to the first stop in Chinatown, lots of people up there, but nobody got on the bus,” she said. “Second stop, nobody got on the bus.”
Asian parents won almost all of their demands — except a demand for more Cantonese-speaking teachers.
Another take on neighborhood schools
Historian Jim Vrabel, the author of “A People’s History of the New Boston,” says organizing by Chinese immigrants in 1974 and ’75 demonstrated the power of a largely ignored community. But he said despite the boycott’s initial success, school desegregation did not have the outcome Chinese immigrant parents had hoped for: Access to facilities that were considerably better than their neighborhood schools. Vrabel believes South End/Chinatown area schools might have been a better option for non–English speaking minorities.
“The courts saw neighborhood schools as a bastion for poor and working-class white families that did not want to desegregate,” Vrabel said. “And in fact, neighborhood schools are much more complicated and much more valuable, particularly to linguistic minorities who had to struggle to assimilate to get a good education.”
Leong said it was necessary for Boston to implement the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision banning school segregation. But approaching desegregation “holistically,” he said, might have yielded better results for all communities involved.
“Desegregation requires an examination of discrimination and racism across the board — in employment, and much more so in housing, because the main linkage is back to where you live,” Leong said. “Racial segregation is symptomatic of a deeper systemic issue at hand.”
The limits of busing for Chinese immigrants
Suzanne Lee, who became a well regarded school principal of the Josiah Quincy Elementary School in Chinatown, said the desegregation of Chinese students through busing failed her community. “It’s all about moving numbers around and moving people around. There was little evidence of real education about teaching and learning.”
Though Howard Wong’s experience was different Lee’s observation certainly rings true for Lawrence Wong, who today reflects on his experience being bused to the North End 50 years ago. “I wish that they could have done a lot better educating the kids from China,” he said, ruefully.
