Abstract
This introduction to a special issue rethinking the Boston “Busing Crisis” seeks to examine how the misleading ‘busing crisis’ narrative took hold as a way to understand Boston race relations. The piece examines the long struggle for school desegregation in Boston and the myriad of tactics used to deflect and delegitmize that struggle through frames of “busing,” “neighborhood schools,” “choice,” and “cultural deprivation” which provided a palatable way for Bostonians to explain and hide school inequalities. Finally, the piece considers the role of the media in legitimating these white framings and delegitimizing the urgency of the struggle against school inequality in the Cradle of Liberty.
Keywords
As school was set to open in 1974, the Boston Globe cast federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity’s June decision ordering systemwide school desegregation of Boston Public Schools (BPS) as out of the blue. Twenty years after the Brown decision, Judge Garrity had found that Boston’s School Committee had “knowingly carried out a systematic program of segregation affecting all of the city’s students, teachers, and school facilities,” and ordered comprehensive desegregation to begin in September. For twenty-five years, black activists had organized meetings, organizations, rallies, boycotts, independent busing programs, independent schools, and candidacies for public office all to draw attention to the inequalities endemic in BPS. Yet in its extensive coverage of school opening, the Globe acted surprised. They framed the event around “busing,” refused to grapple with the long history of school segregation in the city, and ignored three decades of black activism challenging the structures of school segregation in the city in school resources, zoning, hiring practices, and curriculum and sustained white resistance that had brought the city to this juncture (protests the newspaper itself had covered over the years). 1 The black activists who had labored for decades to challenge the city’s entrenched segregation—Ruth Batson, Ellen Jackson, Muriel and Otto Snowden, Mel King, Melnea Cass—barely hazarded a mention in the drama that would unfold on the pages of the city’s most regarded newspaper over the next months. The fact that students had been taking school buses for decades to segregated schools without any complaint from white parents was completely left out.
While the politicians, school officials, and white parents who resisted desegregation criticized the Globe’s coverage, 2 the paper actually echoed their preferences by framing the issue around “busing” rather than desegregation. 3 These distortions were not new. The Boston School Committee had ended meetings at the first mention of “segregation” and started attacking “busing” in the mid-1960s. 4 This would continue for the next decade, with the Globe and other news outlets often following suit, casting the issue in terms of parent opposition to “busing,” rather than the maintenance of Boston’s segregated schools.
Leading up to the opening of school in 1974, the Globe obsessed about safety while revealingly referring to Garrity’s desegregation plan in a first-day-of-school editorial as the “opening of racially balanced schools” (the preferred northern euphemism for desegregation). 5 An editorial the next week referred to the large-scale white boycott of schools as “legitimate,” never used the word segregation or desegregation in describing what was occurring in Boston, and called Boston a “city to be proud of.” 6 From the Globe’s coverage, then, it would be impossible to understand that the turmoil the city faced at the opening of school was due to a longstanding, intentionally segregated school system that many white parents, public officials, and other citizens had gone to great lengths to defend. 7
Forty years later, as the city marked the fortieth anniversary of Garrity’s decision, the Globe took a similar approach, framing the story largely around “busing,” not around segregation. An op-ed was titled “Still Deciding What Busing Gained and What It Cost,” foregoing a more honest title like “Still Deciding What Segregation Gained and What It Cost.” 8 A lengthy feature reflecting on the fortieth anniversary of court-ordered desegregation, “History rolled in on a yellow school bus,” began and ended the story in 1974. Character after character (black student, white student, black mother, white mother, bus driver, cop), the story was framed singularly around their experiences and perspectives on busing between Roxbury and South Boston in September 1974. 9 How different a sense of the city’s history readers would have gotten if the Globe had detailed what segregation looked like in those decades before (meager classrooms, racist textbooks, overcrowded schools, language exclusion) and included the fact that the city used busing prior to 1974 to maintain segregated schools. Had the newspaper included a section on the various movements, strategies, and tactics black and Latino community leaders and parents used, which garnered little change in the structures, hiring, and resource allocation in BPS, or examined the frustration and resolve that ultimately led some parent activists and the NAACP to resort to a federal lawsuit in 1972, its anniversary coverage would have gone a lot further to grapple with the city’s history.
While the anniversary garnered numerous public commemorations and pages of reflection in Boston, most of it focused on the problem of “busing” rather than lingering on the more-structural segregation, and so the violence and upheaval that ensued in the mid-1970s were treated as perhaps unnecessary. There was little public reckoning for the decades of inequality around schools, housing, and jobs and black and Latino demands for change that public officials and white Bostonians repeatedly ignored and disparaged. The systematic racial inequality endemic in the city’s schools, policing, housing, and jobs was reduced to personal prejudice and parochialism, to a simple morality tale of good (middle-class) people who could not be said to be racist and mean (working-class) people who might have been but were motivated by love of children and neighborhood and whose anger was fueled by their own dispossession in the city.
“Out of the blue,” “racially balanced,” and “busing” are not mere descriptions of the Boston’s history but political constructs that privilege the perspectives of whites opposed to Boston’s school desegregation and treat the events of 1974 as hard on everybody, thereby obscuring Boston’s history of race relations for a more palatable public mythology. 10 Most Boston officials and white citizens wanted to distinguish their opposition to desegregation from Southerners, and were offended by charges that they were racist. With “busing,” Northerners found a palatable way to oppose desegregation without appealing to the explicitly racist sentiments they preferred to associate with Southerners.
Maintaining the “Boston busing crisis” frame serves to reduce Boston’s racism to working-class ethnic parochialism, privileges the prerogatives of those who thought desegregation of Boston’s schools was unnecessary or unfair, and obfuscates the long history of systematic racial inequality in the Cradle of Liberty that led to a decades-long protest movement in the city and Judge Garrity’s finding that Boston’s schools were intentionally segregated. It maintains a dangerous fiction that what happened in Boston was far different from what happened in Little Rock or Birmingham—that there may have been racism in Boston but it was personal and parochial rather than systemic and intrinsic—and thus necessitates different words to describe it (racial imbalance not segregation, antibusing not segregationist).
Such framings are not just the product of journalists but are employed by scholars and writers, most notably J. Anthony Lukas’s prize-winning book Common Ground, which helped engrave these framings of “Boston’s busing crisis” into historical common sense. 11 Still cited as an indispensable source (in 2016, the New York Times named it as the book to read to understand Boston), 12 Lukas’s book examined “Boston’s busing crisis” by tracing the experiences of three local Boston families—the working-class black Twymons, the working-class Irish McGoffs, and the middle-class Yankee Divers—from 1968 to 1978. Seven years in the writing, Common Ground discounted black leaders as key players in the decade, and focused on a black family not active in community and whose children embodied a variety of social ills. Lukas had found the black family he profiled through a social worker—and while he abandoned the first working-class white family he spent four years with (calling them “fanatics”), when criticisms arose about his choice of a black family, he held on tight. 13 In the process, black people became bit players in Boston’s most famous civil rights event, and the pathological lens Lukas used on the Twymons became the way to see enduring educational problems in the city—as largely the fault of black culture and behaviors.
A new generation of historians has resoundingly challenged this dominant narrative. Fundamentally, they argue, a full history of Boston’s school desegregation cannot begin in 1974 with a judge’s action but must start with the longstanding pattern of segregation and inequality and the decades-long movement by blacks and Latinos that forced the city to have to address these systematic inequalities. They reject the frame of “Boston’s busing crisis” as a way to understand Boston’s postwar racial history, and argue that part of the task must be to identify and investigate the mechanisms and contemporary investments that keep these mythologies in place.
This special issue brings the work of some of these scholars to the fore. The essays assembled here move the timeline decades back from 1974 to examine the systemic nature of racial inequality in the Cradle of Liberty. Foregrounding the concerns and experiences of black and Latino Bostonians, these pieces illuminate the structures of racial discrimination in the city that impelled this twenty-five-year struggle, and challenge the pathologizing frameworks that scholars and journalists have used toward black and Latino communities in Boston. These authors also analyze the investments, political strategies, and media proclivities that enabled the “Boston busing crisis” frame to take hold and continue to dominate to this day. And by centering on black and brown perspectives, they force us to look at the “Cradle of Liberty” with more clear eyes, reckoning with how racial injustice was a constitutive part of the city and the lengths people went to deny it.
The story of Boston’s court-ordered desegregation began long before the NAACP’s case came before Judge Garrity’s courtroom. From its formation in 1950, the Boston NAACP’s Public School subcommittee sought to demonstrate the segregated nature in the city’s schools but faced opposition from both blacks and whites over whether segregation even existed in this northern city. As NAACP subcommittee leader and longtime activist Ruth Batson explained, “We were ‘raising a false issue.’” 14 Yet the subcommittee saw firsthand that keeping black students in separate facilities was a way for the Boston School Committee (the elected body that ran the BPS) to provide them with an inferior education: six of the city’s nine black elementary schools were overcrowded. Four of the district’s thirteen black schools had been recommended for closure for health and safety reasons, while eight needed repairs to meet city standards. 15 Per pupil spending averaged $340 for white students but only $240 for black students. Teachers at predominantly black schools were less permanent and often less experienced than those assigned to white schools. The curriculum at many black schools was outdated and often blatantly racist, and the school district overwhelmingly tracked black students into manual arts and trade classes rather than college preparatory ones.
As a former BPS student herself and the mother of three school-aged daughters, Batson lead the NAACP Public School subcommittee, which sought to document how resolutely segregated Boston’s schools were, with vast differentials in funding, school resources, and teacher quality between schools serving white students and those serving black students. According to Batson, in the years following the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, “northern states were very smug” and did not think that the decision applied to them. 16 In the early 1960s, the Boston NAACP tried to persuade the Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination (MCAD) to recognize the existence of racial segregation in Boston’s schools. But MCAD refused, claiming that racial segregation was not a problem in the city. While the existence of public commissions such as MCAD seems to attest to a more open racial climate in Massachusetts, its unwillingness to investigate institutions such as the BPS—and indeed to proclaim them as not segregated—protected the city’s discriminatory practices.
The NAACP responded by taking its case en masse to the School Committee in June 1963. Supporters packed the hearing while more than eight hundred congregated outside the building singing freedom songs. 17 Saying it was “too late for pleading,” Ruth Batson laid out the NAACP’s fourteen-point program, decrying the existence of “de facto segregation,” curriculum bias, tracking, and hiring discrimination in BPS. 18 In response, according to Batson, “We were insulted. We were told our kids were stupid and this was why they didn’t learn.” 19
To continue the pressure on the School Committee, black community leaders turned to direct action. A week after the hearing, they organized a school boycott. Nearly half of the city’s black high school students participated in these Freedom Schools (Noel Day, executive director of St. Mark Social Center, who spearheaded these Freedom Schools, would journey to Mississippi in 1964 to help build the freedom schools Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee initiated during Freedom Summer). 20 The School Committee then agreed to a second hearing with the NAACP but shut the meeting down when civil rights leaders used the phrase “de facto segregation.” Calling it “a horrible time to live in Boston,” Batson later explained, “The press came out: NAACP is wrong . . . We got very little public support and we got absolutely no political support . . . All kinds of hate mail. Horrible stuff.” 21
According to Batson, the subcommittee had also found a “general consensus” among principals that black students did not do as well as white students because “the parents did not seem to care.” 22 School officials thus did not defend segregation in itself but blamed the problems in black schools on black children’s motivation and their parents’ values. In 1964, William O’Connor became the new head of the Boston School Committee declaring, “We have no inferior education in our schools. What we’ve been getting is an inferior type of student.” 23 Fellow school committee member Joseph Lee concurred, “The Negro can make their schools the best in the city if they attend schools more often, on time and apply themselves.” 24 Indeed, pathologizing black and brown youth and their parents was a key tool used by Boston officials to justify and deflect the educational inequalities found in BPS.
By the mid-1960s, “busing” had already emerged as a useful political term and organizing tool for white Bostonians. School Committee member Louise Day Hicks (who later won a city council seat and became the public leader of the antidesegregation movement) played on the fears of “forced busing” and characterized those pushing for desegregation as “outsiders” while asserting that “there has never been any discrimination in the city of Boston and those who say there is are doing a great disservice to this great city.”
25
Politicians like Hicks employed the disingenuous phrase “forced busing” along with “problem students” to advance their own political careers and galvanize white support against desegregation using a more veiled racial language that appealed to northern sensibilities. As historian Gerald Gill observes, Boston’s escalating protests took place
in the political aftermath of the Birmingham campaign and at the same time as the organizing thrust in support of the March on Washington . . . Sharing a sense of solidarity with demonstrators in Birmingham, Boston’s activists were equally determined to confront a powerful and racially insensitive institution and were firmly empowered to press forward, not retreat.
26
Busing itself was already going on in BPS without cry from white parents or politicians—and was often used to maintain segregation. By the mid-1960s, the Boston School Committee was taking more deliberate and costly actions to avoid any desegregation, which often included busing (or refusing to bus students) to protect and maintain its segregated schools. For instance, they decided to buy an old synagogue, Beth El (which cost $125,000 to buy, $10,000 to repair, and $90,000 a year to operate), rather than bus nearly two hundred black students from the crowded Endicott District to white schools (which would have cost only $40,000). Claiming that busing was an infringement on the rights of taxpaying families (read white families), the School Committee then moved to institute double session days in black schools rather than bus black children from overcrowded schools to white schools—though they were busing white children to other white schools to eliminate overcrowding. When black parents protested the double session day, the Committee gave up the idea but did nothing to alleviate the overcrowding. 27
To appear compliant with federal mandates, Boston had passed an open enrollment policy in 1961 (much like the freedom of choice plans that popped up across the South in the mid-1960s). In reality, there were numerous barriers for black families to actually use it, while white families often took advantage of it to transfer out of schools in transitional neighborhoods. The School Committee forbade the use of school funds to bus children to the seven thousand open seats through the city. In 1965, black parents under the leadership of Ellen Jackson and Betty Johnson took the unprecedented step of creating Operation Exodus, where they paid for buses to take their children to schools with open seats in other parts of the city. They started METCO to enable black students to attend suburban schools. They formed independent black schools. And by the late 1960s, black students had taken the fight for desegregation, hiring, and curriculum change into the high schools, holding protests and walkouts.
Civil rights activists, parents, and students in Boston were organized, creative, and persistent in their protests of school segregation and educational inequality. Muriel and Otto Snowden founded Freedom House in Roxbury in 1949, and the organization went on to become a hub of community activism in Boston for the next several decades. Ellen Jackson, like Batson, was also a parent activist with five children enrolled in Boston schools. Her activism had started in the NAACP Youth Council with acts of civil disobedience and went on to become a parent organizer with the Northern Student Movement, a civil rights group that organized tutoring programs in cities in the Northeast. Mel King, a community organizer who ran unsuccessfully for the Boston School Committee three times in the 1960s before being elected as a state representative in 1972, fought for better housing, employment, and educational opportunities for black Bostonians. Active for two decades before the “busing crisis” King noted the level of white resistance those efforts garnered, “In the fifties, people opposed to our activism would say ‘This is Boston, not Birmingham.’ Yet in fact this city is to be compared in every way to the most entrenched opposition in the deep South.” 28
Similar problems existed for Latino children. Excluded and underserved in BPS, five thousand Latino students, according to a 1970 report, were systematically excluded from schools. For those Latino children in school, language barriers and the lack of bilingual education, inadequate teachers and counselors, dilapidated buildings, shortages of books and other materials, and racist curriculum meant that Latino students were receiving a separate and distinctly unequal education. Similar to the discourses used against black students, Latino students were treated as deficient and a problem in need of fixing—not the school system itself. Language exclusion deprived many Latino youth of an education in Boston public schools and imperiled the educational success of many more young Latinos in school—who were regularly cast as the problem. Latino parents and community groups began to sound the alarm, exposing the problem and pushing for bilingual instruction and access.
The school district also segregated individual facilities through pupil assignment policies that fed black students into high school in ninth grade but whites in tenth grade—and often into different junior high schools before that. As parent activist Ellen Jackson explained,
you could live on the same street and have a white neighbor, as I did, and you went to one junior high school and she went to another junior high school . . . It was not de facto at all.
29
In addition to the racial gerrymandering of attendance zones (many schools were located at the edges of irregular shaped districts) and unequal resources, the Boston School Committee reserved the overwhelming majority of jobs for white employees through racially discriminatory hiring and promotion practices. Many schools had no black or Latino teachers on the faculty (blacks made up only 0.5 percent of the city’s teachers, and Latinos were even fewer), and there were no black or Latino principals in the system. 30 After two decades of rallies and student walkouts, parent organizations, community initiatives, and independent schools, there was still little change in BPS. And so as a last resort, black parents with the NAACP decided in 1972 to file a federal suit against the School Committee in Tallulah Morgan v. James W. Hennigan. In 1972, fifty of the 201 schools in BPS had a majority of black students, and there were only 356 black teachers in a school system comprising 4,500 teachers.” 31 Eighty-five percent of Boston’s high school students were already being bused without complaint from white parents and thousands of white students were bused past black schools to other all-white schools. 31
Boston’s approach to its race problem fit with a broader Cold War investment of the era to frame the race problem as Southern. Northern segregation was treated as less systemic and more happenstance, and resistance to desegregation in Boston was defined as fundamentally different and not as segregationist as in the South. In drafting the 1964 Civil Rights Act, for example, the bill’s northern and western sponsors drew a sharp distinction between segregation by law in the South and so-called “racial imbalance” in the North, amending Title IV, section 401b to read as follows:
“Desegregation” means the assignment of students to public schools and within such schools without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin, but “desegregation” shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance.
This language was directly designed to keep federal civil rights enforcement of school desegregation focused away from the North, and white politicians and parents in Boston, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere regularly pointed to the 1964 Civil Rights Act to justify the maintenance of white schools. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), the federal office charged with enforcing school desegregation policies, lacked the political support and resources to successfully hold northern cities accountable for school segregation. HEW’s limitations placed the burden of proving that northern schools were intentionally segregated largely on black parents and civil rights lawyers. 32
Media outlets also enabled the framing of civil rights and school desegregation as southern issues. Northern newspapers increasingly covered the southern movement in ways more righteous than they covered the movement in their own backyards. Southern black people and the movements they built were treated as noble and necessary, while northern black people and the movements they built were deemed largely irrelevant, disruptive, or whiny. While the Boston Globe covered many of the activities of Boston’s freedom movement, it tended to treat them as discrete and episodic protests—not a movement—and, at times, problematic in their disruptiveness. Indeed, similar to how local papers in the South obscured civil rights issues in their own backyards, the Boston Globe enabled many white readers to feel like the racial politics of the city were overall good and contributed to the gap between a growing black protest movement and the soothed consciences of many white Bostonians. Given this repeated myopia, in 1966, troubled by the “liberal use of stereotypes, i.e., cultural deprived, agitators, forced busing,” by many Boston media outlets, black leaders convened a roundtable meeting with media representatives to try to change coverage of black protest and community issues. 33 But little change resulted, and the massive media coverage that attended the opening of school in 1974 only furthered the problems black community leaders had identified a decade before.
At the same time in the 1970s, television and newspapers dramatically overcovered white opposition to “busing.” Television news contributed to an “epistemology of ignorance” through regular coverage of antibusing protests without the historical or legal context for the desegregation orders. 34 If television news played an important role in highlighting southern civil rights protests for a national audience in the 1950s and 1960s, by the 1970s television news offered frequent and sympathetic coverage to busing opponents in cities like Boston, Pontiac, Los Angeles, and Denver. When massive pro-desegregation events were organized, they received far less television coverage than antibusing protests. 35 “Busing” dominated news coverage, but it was a key strategic distortion. Most northern and western cities—Boston definitely—bused most kids before “busing.” As the U.S. Civil Rights Commission observed in 1972, the school bus has been a “friendly figure in the North” for fifty years. Busing itself was often a tool of exclusion; for years, busing enabled white students to go to “white schools,” but that fact did not make it into the news stories. As Julian Bond would wryly note, “It’s not the bus, it’s us.” 36 But this fact did not make it into the news coverage. Unlike much of the southern coverage that drew attention to racial inequalities black protests were highlighting, TV coverage of these northern struggles sympathized with white families and largely foregrounded their perspectives. Through this framing of “busing,” journalists and political leaders succeeded in deeming systemwide desegregation as a failed strategy in northern cities.
Despite years of organized protests in the North, in the face of Garrity’s order, public officials and journalists (like the Boston Globe) repeatedly forgot black grievances and persistently claimed that systematic segregation did not exist in the city. While their white southern counterparts in the 1950s and early 1960s were largely willing to defend segregation and states’ rights, a different lexicon of race emerged in the North—one that celebrated “color-blindness” and was “surprised” by black anger, cast African American and Latino youth as “problem students” whose “cultural deprivations” (along with that of their parents) hampered their educational success, and framed white resistance to racial integration in a language of “neighborhood control,” “taxpayer’s rights,” and “forced busing.” This culturalist discourse provided a socially acceptable rhetoric to harness many white Bostonians’ virulent opposition to desegregation. But it drastically distorted what black and Latino parents wanted—and struggled for over two decades—to secure for their children’s education. As Batson noted,
It angers me when I hear and read that black parents do not help their children—do not participate in their educational growth . . . what parents wanted was to get their children to schools where there were the best resources for educational growth . . . Is that too much to ask for?
37
Following from these discursive strategies of the time, many historians have continued to treat white northern opposition to homegrown civil rights movements differently from southern resistance. While “southern segregationists” seek to prevent school desegregation, similar movements in northern cities are often described as “white backlash” or “antibusing movements” and rarely termed “segregationist.” Southern white assumptions about the culture and behavior of blacks are interrogated more vigorously than northern officials’ explanations of “problem students” and “cultural deprivation.” Historians have treated southern “surprise” when the sit-ins erupted in 1960 as calculated and contrived but not northern “surprise” over Garrity’s ruling. The violence and upheaval that ensued with school desegregation in Little Rock (and the federal intervention it required) is treated as horrible but necessary; in Boston, it is seen as horrible but not fully necessary. The attempts to “understand” northern white residents’ overt opposition to desegregation—as historian Ronald Formisano writes, “thousands of decent, moderate whites across the city [of Boston] cannot be said to have been racists” 38 —reflect the problematic assumption that racism did not pervade northern city structures and preferences as it did the southern ones.
The attachment to the busing story follows from an attachment to a story of the civil rights movement as a rousing southern story—one born on the dusty roads of the South, nurtured by noble southern students, church ladies, and ministers and that concluded with the signing of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. Yet struggles for school desegregation rippled through the North in the decades before and after Brown. And over and over, they were met with denials and surprise: this is not the South; we do not have systemic segregation. Repeatedly, black parents and civil rights activists pressed for desegregation and were told that their children were the problem. 39 Repeatedly, school zones were drawn in ways to maintain segregation, and black and Latino teacher applicants screened out and not hired in Boston public schools. And yet, time and again, activists were asked to prove that there was a segregation problem in the Cradle of Liberty.
What is the cost of that ever-dominant story of “Boston’s busing crisis?” The work gathered here offers a number of answers. First, these authors show how one-sided that story is and how it misses the whole cast of black and Latino parents and community activists who labored, pressed, protested, and documented the inequity that brought the judge and the city to this juncture. They detail the ways it obscures the significant harms and character of northern segregation in jobs, housing, and schooling, and thus makes northern plans for desegregation look ill-considered and ill-advised. The “Boston busing crisis” narrative, they argue, makes this “crisis” seem to come out of nowhere rather than out of the city’s actions and deliberate inaction; it misses the decades of protest and challenge that went unheeded and structural advantages that white citizens, politicians, business leaders sought to protect. Finally, they demonstrate how the continued embrace of the “Boston busing crisis” narrative fits with contemporary political interests that see the southern civil rights as proof of the perfectability of American democracy, northern “busing” as a foolhardy failure, and the combination to demonstrate that the task of civil rights is long since complete.
Each of these articles makes a key intervention in understanding the history of Boston’s segregation and critiquing what is missed and distorted in the “Boston busing crisis” frame. Tess Bundy examines the black student movement in Boston, showing how activists staged school boycotts, formed community controlled schools, ran their own desegregation programs, formed parent groups, and lobbied for legislation. The constitutional rights of black students were at the heart of Morgan v. Hennigan, but they have been treated as peripheral to the story of Boston’s “busing crisis” and often blamed for the inadequacies of their own schooling. Bundy’s article moves these young black student activists to the center of the story. Whereas the Boston story is almost always presented as a white–black conflict, Tatiana Cruz shows how Latino organizers established a comprehensive educational agenda and movement based on ideas of community control and the right to bilingual education. Latino activists and parents, Cruz argues, worked strategically in and outside of the school system to develop their own education programs, petition the school system for reform, stage public protests, and seek legal appeals. These fights for bilingual education started before the mid-1970s “busing crisis,” intervened in the case before Judge Garrity, and continued well afterward. Zebulon Miletsky explores a range of organized activism by black Bostonians in the decades after World War II against segregation and racial exclusion in housing and employment. This work shows the inequality that characterized all aspects of life in the Cradle of Liberty—that the school battle was part of a larger citywide fight over racial discrimination.
People outside of Boston came to know and care about the city’s “busing crisis” because television news featured the story regularly and Matt Delmont examines how television news framed this story for national audiences. Footage of confrontations between protestors and law enforcement provided television producers with compelling visuals to illustrate “forced busing” but said little about the students or schools that were ostensibly at the center of the story. Television’s emphasis on the white ethnic neighborhoods of South Boston and Charlestown, moreover, obscured the ordinariness of the racial attitudes in these neighborhoods, and focused attention away from resistance to school desegregation in more middle-class areas like Hyde Park or West Roxbury. Finally, Lynnell Thomas explores how two contemporary works of children’s literature (Busing Brewster, an illustrated children’s book for young readers, written by Richard Michelson and illustrated by R. G. Roth, and Gold Dust, a middle-grade novel for adolescents by Chris Lynch) set during or inspired by Boston’s desegregation busing plan reflect and respond to the ongoing battle over the history and memory of Boston’s civil rights movement. Both texts elide Boston’s civil rights movement by erasing the racial inequities in the public school system and the grassroots activism that precipitated Garrity’s order. They are ultimately more concerned with resuscitating a nostalgic American heroism and white innocence than with reclaiming a historical memory based on black struggle and resilience.
In her call to examine the “long civil rights movement,” historian Jacqueline Dowd Hall expresses a desire to “make civil rights harder. Harder to celebrate as a natural progression of American values. Harder to cast a satisfying morality tale. Most of all, harder to simplify, appropriate, and contain.” 40 If the tale of the golden age of the southern civil rights movement is comforting because it is nonviolent, Christian, patriarchal, and reformist, then the narrative of Boston’s “busing crisis” is comforting in its failure, its erasure of black and Latino perspectives, and the “common ground” of hardship blacks and whites supposedly encountered with busing. This failure authorizes people to accept the continuing racial and socioeconomic segregation of schools in the United States as inevitable and unchangeable.
As the late historian Gerald Gill observed, “Policy concerns pertaining to racial redress and equity have become increasingly more difficult to adjudicate and resolve in the years since 1974.” 41 If racism is pictured as “southern backwardness,” as historian Charles Payne has observed, and we would add “South Boston backwardness,” then Americans today can rest easy. Conversely, if racism is pictured as parents who assert their rights as taxpayers and question whether the Brown v. Board of Education decision applies to “their schools,” as public officials who deny responsibility for any systemwide inequality, as culturalist arguments of “parents who don’t care” and “culturally deprived students” to explain gross differentials in schools, then it also raises questions about how much progress has actually been made and where we need to go from here.
This special issue aims to make the story of school desegregation in Boston harder to contain by foregrounding years of activism by black and Latino parents and students and looking critically at how different forms of media shaped the meaning and memory of “busing.” Reading the fortieth anniversary coverage of Boston’s “busing crisis” was deeply disheartening. Despite the publication of important work on the history of busing and civil rights in Boston and the persistent voices of civil rights activists, the needle has not moved past Lukas’s Common Ground and that book’s emphasis on busing as a policy inevitably destined to fail and a tragedy felt equally by families across racial lines.
Much like the reaction of Mississippi activists to the movie Mississippi Burning (which backgrounded black activism while glorifying the FBI’s role in the civil rights movement in Mississippi), Boston activists were horrified by Lukas’s portrayal of the black community, which backgrounded black activism in Boston and focused on a black family’s dysfunction. Deeply frustrated by the errors, omissions, and biases of Lukas’s book, black community members organized a conference in 1994 at Northeastern University to document the history of community struggle for racial equality and educational justice. Describing Lukas as a “faulty historian,” longtime activist Ruth Batson lamented the seduction of Lukas narrative and the difficulty of dislodging it: it’s “like swimming against a strong tide, like being in a large crowd, trying to reach a destination, advancing twenty steps and being pushed back forty steps.” 42 Batson researched, solicited questionnaires and primary documents from conference participants, and subsequently published a nine-hundred page chronology of the black educational movement in Boston from 1638 to 1975 to ensure that black activism would be part of the historical record. 43 Like Batson’s epic Chronology, community organizer Mel King’s book Chain of Change, court-appointed desegregation expert Robert Dentler’s Schools on Trial, and the Eyes on the Prize interviews for the episode Keys to The Kingdom include research, analysis, and perspectives sadly still absent from the dominant Boston busing story.
Nonetheless, “busing” has become synonymous for Boston’s racial history and Boston’s “busing crisis” continues to be taught in high schools and colleges across the country as one of the few stories of racial struggle in the North. Our hope is that this special issue can help reshape how it is taught by presenting a more nuanced and accurate picture of the decades-long black and Latino struggle for school desegregation in Boston, and raise harder questions of the public investment in the “busing crisis” narrative. By revealing the distortions at the heart of “Boston’s busing crisis” frame, it points the way for what needs to be done to address deep inequalities in our schools and cities today. Finally, this special issue is dedicated to the work and memory of Gerald Gill whose trailblazing research and public role in documenting Boston’s movement paved the way for this work.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.