Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Boston Desegregation Crisis

WYTS: New England Patriots. Original post here. 

One of the nice effects of going city by city for these riot stories that is that we get to attack America’s injustices from different angles. Western New York meant we could talk about prisons, Pittsburgh meant we could talk about railroads, and now we’re in Boston, the subject will be education. You ever wonder why we joke constantly that Boston is full of dumb racists? Is Robert Kraft helping that stereotype today? This is the Boston Desegregation Crisis.

In Fairfax County, Virginia in the Jim Crow era, Black students had to be driven 36 miles to go to the one high school available for them. That was much worse than the traditional 16 miles, uphill both ways, and it could even be in the snow! Entire classes got stuck in bus wrecks in the woods, terrifying their parents. Opposing integration was what they called "Massive Resistance" engineered by some of the worst politicians in American history. Virginia shut down Norfolk’s entire public school system for a few months in 1958, so nobody would get educated at all. The resistance to integration was horrible, extreme, and preposterous.

And yet, these battles over education did not happen only in Dixie. Racist rhetoric doesn’t just come from a corn bred good ol’ boy dialect, it also comes in a hilarious Southie accent. It is a kind of irony that in Boston, and in many other school districts, integration meant not the end of long bus commutes, but the implementation of them. Only this time it was not snowstorms attacking the students, it was moms with glass bottles and rocks.

In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education clipped the wings of Jim Crow forever. This was the single most important decision in America’s education history: it would define the course of schooling until today. All the politics around education from School Choice pseudo-capitalist schemes, home schooling, and yes, again racial issues, can be tied right back here to the ugly decades-long fight to desegregate schools. That's a battle we actually lost.

The clumsy assumption in Brown had been implicitly that Black schools were always going to be worse than white ones. They thought Black students needed access to white schools, not the other way around. However, by 1971, in many urban districts, integration needed to be a flow in both directions. We need more than merely “don’t segregate” but rather “do integration”. In 1971, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education was just as big of a landmark case as Brown, forcing the school district of Charlotte, NC to bus its students in every direction. By 1973, West Charlotte High, a previously overwhelmingly Black school, was something of a model success story. Somehow the district found a lot of money to improve it the moment white kids had to go there, and the lives of all the students improved. We’ll never know how that happened, must have been just good luck, or Santa Claus did it.

If it could work in Charlotte with relative ease, how was Boston such a disaster?

Boston built the first public high school in the nation in 1821. The school district here was already 300 years old by Brown. One of the great successes of public schools is that they are felt to be core parts of their communities. Parents love their local schools and are very protective of them. (Kids, less so, going to school sucks.) But Boston, like everywhere else in the US, was a heavily segregated city, with a large Irish population in South Boston and Black populations in areas like Roxbury. These were both rough working class neighborhoods, but the color difference meant a lot even to those at the bottom. Informal segregation patterns were seen as the natural state of the things for most Americans, even as they did not really have a choice in the matter. People hoping to dissolve the races into a light brown slurry were extreme outliers.

One of the problems in Boston was that the city lacked many Black teachers. About 1 in 200 teachers in this era were Black, the vast majority were white. Schools in Roxbury and other neighborhoods were overcrowded and neglected. The school district itself may have drawn its lines specifically to segregate. The housing authority in the city was complicit with all of this, continuing segregation in public housing well past the point that had been made illegal in the 1960s. Roxbury was partially bulldozed to build the I-695 highway that was never completed. (Highways in Boston are a disaster, even the Big Dig did not fix anything, but say it with me, "we don't have time for that now".) Of the 55 schools in the state with severe segregation issues, 46 were in Boston.

In 1965, Massachusetts’ legislature passed the Racial Imbalance Act, to fix the state’s segregation issues. However, no movement was actually accomplished in Boston. The all-white school board did nothing at all for an entire decade while Black organizers moved their case through the various courts. Leading the resistance, the Orval Faubus or Harry Byrd Jr of the North, was school board chairwoman Louise Day Hicks. She was a mother with a college degree from a wealthy family. Sounds like a nice lady until you learn she was completely intransigent on every level. As far as Hicks was concerned there was no segregation, and when she admitted there was, it was good actually. No matter what the court said, she was not going to budge. In 1967, she’d run for mayor on a segregationist platform, and Hicks would serve in Congress in the 70s. She’d found a movement called ROAR, Restored Our Alienated Rights, a parents’ organization to push for Massive Resistance to desegregation a la Virginia a decade earlier. While Hicks resented comparisons to George Wallace, her rhetoric was the usual dog whistles, I don’t need to quote any of her bullshit.

Ironically, by the mid-70s, Boston's schools were more segregated than Southern cities. We can thank Hicks for that.

This case continued to work its way through the court system, eventually ending up in federal hands. In 1973, it reached the bench of Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. Judge Garrity was a WWII veteran, an Army Sergeant in the Signal Corps, who served in the Normandy Campaign. He probably did not think he’d spend decades of his career as basically dictator of Boston education at any point in his legal training. In 1974, he ruled in Morrigan v. Hennigan that Boston’s school system was indeed segregation and that integration would have to happen. In Charlotte, this had taken months. In Boston, this took years, with this federal judge forced to run the school district at certain times. He’d be working on this case until 1990.

Judge Garrity’s ruling demanded that in the next school year, 17,000 or so students should be bused, a crude forcing of the issue. He also demanded the school committee create a real plan to integrate by 1975, hopefully with a better, long-term solution. Instead, the school board did nothing at all. The board was found to be in contempt of court on December 27th. By 1975, the Judge and the federal government had taken control of the integration due to such ugliness from the local government. For the ROAR parents, this meant effectively federal occupation of their schools, and they raged all the further. In the case of South Boston High School, the feds did take over, with Garrity himself having to assume personal control of the school.

South Boston High School and its counterpart Roxbury High School were both had very poor student bodies, but each had severe racial disparities. Judge Garrity ordered them mixed-together. Maybe that was not the best solution, but it was *a* solution, of which none were coming from Boston itself.

On the ground, ROAR and other family groups resisted in every way they could. Their politicians like Hicks had promised this would never happen, and they were lying. This all started badly when two days before the integration was to begin, Senator Ted Kennedy tried to make a speech, only to be met by thrown tomatoes. The crowd then surged after him. He fled indoors before he was forced to join his brothers in martyrdom. (I should note that his own children went to private school, not public, which was an option not afforded to the Southies.)

South Boston and the similarly heavily-white Hyde Park were the main battlefields of these riots. On September 12th, 1974, the busing began, and in most schools, it was orderly with business as usual. However, in South Boston High, many white students stayed home in protest, and their own busing assignments to Roxbury High were ignored. Eventually they relented thanks to truancy laws forcing them to go to class. Through October, there were hundreds of arrests outside schools. You can imagine how this felt for the Black students traveling across the city, having to be escorted by police motorcades. Then they met furious crowds of white families throwing rocks at the sides of their vehicle. It was scenes out of Little Rock, 1957 but in New England minus Jerry Jones. Many of these students would report PTSD symptoms well into their adulthood, having seen their very existence turn so many white faces bright red.

There were about 40 separate small riots in the mid-70s in Boston around the busing issue. Most were outside the schools, forcing Judge Garrity to outlaw any congregations of three or more people within 100 yards of a school. Many were inside schools, however, as students fought each other, with a giant 1,300 student rumble happening in Hyde Park. There were a few near-fatal stabbings and a bomb threat. Still the majority of students simply went to class and interacted calmly, heroic teachers held the city together despite what their reckless politicians were doing. Outside the schools, the hatred only kept growing uglier. A teacher in South Boston reported the mood as, "This school is DEATH. The mood of the school is black."

Anti-racism rallies in winter 1975 were attacked repeatedly. By the summer, the city of Boston was a powderkeg of random racial violence. A Black lawyer was assaulted by white teenagers in 1976, beaten with an American flag. In response Black youths stoned a white auto mechanic in Roxbury, who never recovered from his coma. The city never exploded completely, thankfully.

Things were so bad that Boston TV stations thought the sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter might be too spicy for their audience, so refused to air it for a time.

Through the 80s, Judge Garrity continued to devolve his control of the system to the state and city of Boston. Louise Day Hicks and her ROAR organization began to fade away by the mid-70s. People got tired of this fighting, or simply left the city. By 1990, the Judge gave his “final ruling” in the Morrigan v. Hennigan case. He could declare a kind of victory and go home.

Unfortunately, integration in Boston was largely a failure. Even by the 90s, at the height of peaceful integration and busing, white schools remained heavily white and Black schools remained heavily Black. One issue was White Flight, as families left the city in droves, fleeing to safe suburban districts. The 1974 ruling of Milliken v. Bradley about the Detroit segregation issues stated that integration had to end at the district border. If say, the entire town had a racial disparity, the courts could not help anybody. In Detroit, with white populations fleeing in the millions, they could not force the suburbs to accept busing. The urban schools became Blacker and poorer and more terrible in many cities.

Boston was not the worst of these busing crises, in places like Louisville, KY, whole buses were burned. On September, 6th, 1975 there was riot of 1,500 people there. This was such a large national issue that a junior Senator from Delaware, Joe Biden, made opposing busing his first major concern. He got better once in the White House, but he would always be a disappointment.

One of the grim things of this research is reading about Pre-Civil Rights schools and the “horror stories”: old books, bad equipment, no funding, students going hungry, and realizing… well, nothing has improved. Urban schools became more heavily policed and were effectively prisons by the 2000s. I grew up in North Jersey, so segregation was obvious, town by town. In one place the schools would be beautiful and modern, then within mere miles, they were covered in barbed wire fences. My own high school had heavy internal segregation, the “smart kids” were being prepared for college in one part of the building, while the “bad kids” were prepping for prison in other places. Even in Charlotte, the “model busing story”, by the 2000s had worked so well that the busing program ended. Within a decade the once-thriving West Charlotte was facing closure thanks to No Children Left Behind’s idiotic demands, sub-standard scores on the dreaded standardized tests.

We’ve seen a million crackpot solutions for solving America’s school problems: charters, magnets, vouchers, faith-based programs, STEM-fetishization, terrible reform plans, now all anybody seems to care about is that school sports have the right genders. Really the issue is a lot simpler: we need to fund the schools we have.

Also, to get up on a soap box for a moment: there are good reasons to want diverse schools and classrooms across racial and economic lines. Studies have shown diverse classes have better outcomes - for everybody. One of the goals of public education is to break down the barriers of our society, so people can understand that other people and other cultures exist. Same reason Affirmative Action is good, DEI is good, and children having the freedom to be human beings and not dolls for dictator parents is good. I know the current government is overtly segregationist, but we don’t need to agree with their underlying assumptions. Yeah, it sucks to have culture shock but it’s good for those with means to see real poverty and understand those are real people, and the other way around. Otherwise, you end up with horrible tribalism, and avoidable tragedies. Say, in Boston in 1974, when poor whites and poor Blacks attacked each other, while missing the key truth: the suburbs were plundering the schools, not integration.