A walking tour of Boston's busing history

September 12, 2024

This map contains some images and descriptions of violence. Discretion is advised.

Massachusetts was the first state in the nation to outlaw segregation in public schools. Yet for years, the Boston School Committee refused to comply. The eventual Morgan v Hennigan ruling, which forced Boston to desegregate, unleashed an explosive chapter in the city's history.

This map, created in collaboration with the Boston Desegregation and Busing Initiative, takes you to historic locations behind the desegregation effort and Boston's busing crisis, from courthouses and protest sites to schools at the center of it all.

Learn the history of sites on this trail using the interactive map below. Map not loading? Click here.

For people who use screen readers or who cannot load the map, details of the sites on the desegregation trail are below.

State House (Room 428)

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who earned his doctorate in Systematic Theology at Boston University, attended a legislative session at the State House on April 22, 1965, and spoke about school desegregation. A state report had shown that of the 55 “racially imbalanced” schools in Massachusetts, 45 were in Boston — a finding that the Boston School Committee refused to discuss.

On Aug. 18, 1965, Massachusetts lawmakers passed the Racial Imbalance Act outlawing segregation in public schools, the first state in the nation to do so. Only legislators from Boston and Springfield voted against it. The act was met with continued disobedience from the Boston School Committee in the following years. In 1968, the Supreme Court rejected the school committee’s attempt to strike down the act, calling the effort unconstitutional.

Now, the State House captures the commonwealth’s history with murals, statues, and portraits while housing offices of the State Senate, House of Representatives, and Governor.

Boston Common

The day after meeting state legislators, King led the first-ever northeast Civil Rights march from Roxbury to Boston Common. A crowd of more than 20,000 people — “determined and resolute,” as reporter Hasan Sharif described them — gathered on the William E. Carter playground and walked down Columbus Avenue.

Nearly a decade later, in April 1974, the Boston Common hosted a different crowd of over 20,000 people gathering to protest public school integration and busing. Parents and children, mostly white, marched toward the State House wearing armbands: purple for Hyde Park, red for Dorchester, and green for South Boston.

Just months later, Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. issued the landmark ruling, Morgan v. Hennigan, mandating school desegregation by busing 20,000 white and Black students to classrooms across the city. The decision unleashed fury and violence in Boston for the next two years.

15 Beacon St.

On June 11, 1963, the Boston NAACP Education Committee staged a sit-in at a Boston School Committee meeting held in this building. Led by Ruth Batson, they brought 14 demands to the Committee and asked for “an immediate public acknowledgment of the existence of de facto segregation in the Boston Public School system.” The Committee dismissed the demands as representing only a minority of public sentiment.

A week later, the first Freedom Stay-Out Day was organized to refute that claim. Over 8,000 students boycotted classes or attended “Freedom Schools” in a show of support. Activists continued to push for school desegregation, and on February 26, 1964, over 20,000 Boston public school students participated in a second Freedom Stay-Out Day.

The same year, a community-led program called Operation Exodus began busing students from Roxbury to the Peter Faneuil School on Beacon Hill. At its peak, it sent over 400 students to available seats before ending in 1969 due to insufficient funds. In 1965, Reverend Vernon Carter held a 114-day “Freedom Vigil” outside the school committee’s offices until the Racial Imbalance Act was signed.

By 1966, the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, or METCO, formed to bus students from Boston neighborhoods to seven of the city’s mostly white suburbs, including Brookline and Wellesley. The first class included 220 city students.

Today, 15 Beacon Street is a hotel welcoming Boston tourists. The School Committee has moved its headquarters to Roxbury, where METCO still operates as well.

Boston City Hall

During King’s 1965 visit, he met with Mayor John F. Collins here. Nine years later, in 1974, Mayor Kevin White sat at the helm of a city in the throes of sweeping violence as a result of court-mandated school busing.

On September 12, 1974, jeering crowds in South Boston hurled racial slurs, rocks, bottles, and eggs at Black students arriving at South Boston High School. Students had to be escorted by police on motorcycles.

On April 5, 1976, students from South Boston and Charlestown high schools staged a walkout at City Hall with City Council members like Louise Day Hicks, the face of the anti-busing movement. As the students exited City Hall, they encountered Ted Landsmark, a 29-year-old Yale-educated Black lawyer, and attempted to stab him with a flagpole that still bore the American flag. The moment, captured by photographer Stanley Forman, epitomized the racial tensions gripping Boston.

JFK Federal Building

Three days before busing began in 1974, thousands of parents gathered on the City Hall Plaza to protest. As US Sen. Edward M. Kennedy tried to pacify the demonstrators, they shouted him off the stand, hurling insults, tomatoes and eggs. Kennedy was chased into the JFK Federal Building, where a large plate‐glass window was shattered by the protesters.

The violence was unceasing. Lawyer Ted Landsmark was not only accosted by a flagpole-wielding student who narrowly missed his face by inches. He was struck in the face and suffered a broken nose.

Two weeks after the Landsmark incident, on April 20, 1976, Richard Poleet, a 34-year-old white mechanic, was dragged from his car and beaten by a group of youths in Roxbury at night. Poleet passed away after suffering from a fractured skull and extensive facial injuries.

The JFK building is currently a federal government office building.

Federal Courthouse

Garrity’s 1974 ruling, Morgan v. Hennigan, combined students from South Boston and Roxbury high schools — two neighborhoods with the highest percentage of low-income families in Boston, one predominantly Irish Catholic and one primarily Black. But protests – some violent – also erupted across other Boston neighborhoods, including Charlestown, Hyde Park, Mattapan, and the South End.

The anti-busing group ROAR, or Restore Our Alienated Rights, commandeered an annual Boston Massacre commemoration in 1975, staging a protest during the reenactment.

In the 1974-75 school year, about 18,000 students were bused — while facing jeers, threats, and attacks. And more than 30,000 students left Boston’s public school system to attend private or parochial schools.

The number of white public school students in Boston has fallen since 1974. Today, less than 15% of BPS students were white.

South Boston High School

On the first day of mandated busing in 1974, only around 100 out of the 1,300 Roxbury students assigned to South Boston High showed up. And those who did faced attack and racist epithets. During that first semester, a Black student stabbed a white student during a fight, and angry crowds surrounded the school. Even the staunch anti-busing leader Louise Day Hicks couldn’t calm the mob, and officials had to sneak Black students out through a side entrance.

School years at South Boston High were filled with tension and violence. According to Phyllis Ellison, a 1977 graduate from the school, there were as many as 15 fights on a “normal day.” Black and white students separated themselves in classrooms, cafeterias, and even bathrooms, Ellison said, and the tension undermined students’ education.

South Boston High closed in 2003 and the building is now home to a college preparatory high school..

Freedom House

The community center on the border between Roxbury and Dorchester played a crucial role in the school desegregation movement, even before the 1974 Garrity ruling.

Founded in 1949 by Otto and Muriel Snowden, it started as a single office in the Old Humboldt Theatre Building. For more than 60 years, it drew community members advocating for education improvements. By the 1970s, the Freedom House Institute on Schools and Education worked to address problems stemming from the school desegregation effort.

In 2013, Freedom House moved to 5 Crawford Street, where it still operates as a community center and hub for student enrichment. The old building at 14 Crawford, a relic of the city’s history and civil rights movement, remained unoccupied until it faced demolition a few years ago. The demolition was eventually delayed, but not blocked, and the old Freedom House is still waiting for a solution today.