The Fight Against Boston’s Educational Apartheid
Segregation, Forced Integration, and Urban Planning
I have never heard White people cry in the face of racial injustice. But about a month ago, I could hear the quiet tears of the audience as I watched a screening of The Busing Battleground- a film by the American Experience about the decade long struggle to desegregate Boston Public Schools (BPS). The images of the violent White mobs that physically threatened and verbally attacked Black students outside of integrated schools year after year until the end of busing were overwhelming.
Busing to integrate BPS ended in 1989. But from 1974 to 1988, 164 Boston Public Schools took part in busing, shuttling thousands of Black children to White neighborhoods to attend school and vice versa.
The Road to Integration
After 1954’s Brown vs Board of Education ruled that state sanctioned segregation of public schools was unconstitutional, nothing much changed in Boston. However, in 1960, the fight for school integration began with Ruth Batson, a mom of 3 turned activist, who questioned the quality of her children’s education in Roxbury compared to their White counterparts. Batson worked with other local activists including Mel King and the NAACP to try to reform BPS but faced opposition from a racist Boston School Committee led by Louise Day Hicks. A survey of 13 predominantly Black schools found that they were in terrible disrepair, were overcrowded, and were underfunded. Four of the 13 schools had been condemned and 1 school meant to hold 600 students held more than 1000 children. Yet the School Committee refused to take action.
During the 1960s, Black Bostonians held multiple forms of protests against school segregation. Stay Out for Freedom Days took Black children out of school for one day to Freedom Schools (predominantly Black schools) where they sang, recited poetry, and were taught about the Civil Rights Movement. In April 1965, Martin Luther King Jr, a Boston University School of Theology alum, was invited to lead a march from Roxbury to Boston Common to support school desegregation. In 1966, the METCO program was founded as an alternative to BPS integration whereby 700 Black kids were bused to White suburban schools.
The Busing Crisis: Boston’s Ugly Past
Finally in 1974, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ordered Boston Public Schools to be desegregated. A busing plan was implemented and a race and class war was ignited.
In the first year of busing alone, more than 30,000 students left BPS to attend alternative schools, private schools, and Catholic parochial schools. White people refused to be integrated.
On the first day of busing, the Chief of Staff of the then Mayor of Boston, Kevin White, relaid the news that no Black children had been killed and that itself was considered a victory for their administration given the vitriol of the White antibusing protesters.
Poor Black children and poor White children were used as pawns to try to undo an unequal educational system that the powers that be had created themselves. South Boston High School, the first White school to be integrated, taught working class and poor White children in a mostly Irish community. This was the school that Black children from Roxbury were initially bused to. They faced angry mobs that hurled racial epithets at them, threw bananas, and threw rocks which broke the school bus windows. As integration moved from school to school, White mobs protested in different ways. Some groups sat in the middle of the street to prevent school buses filled with Black children from arriving. Many White parents refused to send their kids to Black schools. And inside the school building, the tension, fear, anger was just as palpable.
What Can We Learn From Boston’s Failed Busing Policy- Forced Integration Does Not Work
Today we can conclude that the busing initiative was a total and complete failure. Boston Public Schools remain segregated with 75% of their student body being made up of Black and Brown children. And educational disparities persist including a most recent 10% gap in graduation rates for White vs Black students.
So what can the City of Boston learn from their failed busing policy, especially as they undergo the first city wide planning process in 50 years?
One of the Black mothers interviewed during that time expressed her sentiments, “I don’t wanna bus my child to any school. I wanna have a good school in my community where my child can go and get just as much good education as anybody else.”
Though the focus of the Civil Rights Movement was integration, Boston’s busing policy demonstrated that:
1) forced integration does not work.
2) people want to send their kids to good quality schools in their own neighborhoods.
3) there are strong cultural identities and ethnic enclaves in Boston’s neighborhoods that should be preserved, enhanced and highlighted. This does not mean that these communities should close their doors to everyone else but that their identities should be leveraged as assets to redevelop the city. Cultural identities should be taken into context when we build schools, housing, parks, etc.
4) good urban planning must be grounded in history including both the joyful and painful events.
According to the Imagine Boston 2030 redevelopment plan, the City aims to address decades long educational disparities. They plan to implement educational initiatives that include:
1) modernization of BPS schools to increase equity and innovation.
2) a connected education system that connects and creates a pipeline between all the educational pathways in the City including early childhood education, summer learning, K-12th, and job training.
3) pathways to career ladders in Boston’s strongest and most well-paid sectors including education, financial services, technology, and healthcare.
Nearly 50 years since the busing crisis, we must confront and undo the City’s history of educational apartheid. Boston, the birthplace of public education, is now charged with responding to the calls of that Black mother and many other parents who simply want their children to be able to walk to a school right in their community and receive a quality education.
Black Beantown is a series from Beyond Wordz founder, Johane Alexis-Phanor, that aims to reimagine Boston, especially the neighborhoods of Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan as a Black cultural mecca for travelers from all around the world. It seeks to celebrate the rich Black history and cultural legacy of Boston that has been hidden for far too long. Black Beantown is written from the perspective that Boston’s Black cultural capital is a key asset that can be used to close the City’s racial wealth gap and drive economic prosperity for all of Boston but especially its Black residents.
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