Boston desegregation busing crisis
The Boston desegregation busing crisis emerged in the mid-1970s as a contentious response to efforts aimed at racially integrating the city’s public schools, following the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which deemed school segregation unconstitutional. After a lengthy battle against discriminatory practices, the Massachusetts Supreme Court mandated a plan for swift desegregation in 1973, leading to significant protests from various segments of the community. The busing plan required both Black and White students to attend previously segregated schools, which instigated widespread demonstrations, violence, and a considerable backlash, particularly in neighborhoods like South Boston. Protests often escalated into physical confrontations, necessitating police and National Guard intervention to maintain order. The crisis highlighted deep-rooted racial tensions and resistance to change in Boston, reflecting broader national struggles with desegregation. By the late 1980s, the court released the Boston School Committee from direct supervision, prompting a new approach called Controlled Choice to create racially balanced schools while attempting to ease community tensions. The legacy of this crisis continues to influence discussions about race, education, and social justice in Boston and beyond.
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Boston desegregation busing crisis
The Boston desegregation busing crisis was a period of time in the mid-1970s in which school officials, students, and parents in Boston, Massachusetts, protested the racial desegregation of the city’s schools. In 1954, the United States Supreme Court made segregating schools by race illegal in its decision Brown v. Board of Education. Boston, like all American cities, was ordered to develop a plan to implement school desegregation. A major component of the plan was to create a system of shared transportation that allowed Black and White students to ride the same buses to school. When Boston was forced to implement these plans, protests erupted across the city, and on several occasions, students and counter protesters were assaulted. The initial process of desegregating the city’s schools required two phases and more than a decade of work. When the city was removed from direct court supervision in the 1980s, the system was redesigned in an effort to reduce White families moving to other parts of the city to avoid certain schools.
Background
For nearly a century after slavery was abolished in 1865, Black and White Americans remained separated by race, with Black Americans continuing to face discrimination in many aspects of American society. Facilities such as bathrooms, water fountains, sections of restaurants, modes of transportation, and schools were often designated solely for use by White or Black people; while segregation was particularly severe in the American South due to the existence of discriminatory laws known as Jim Crow Laws, racism in public and private life was widespread throughout the country, including in Northern cities such as Boston. In 1896, the US Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation was legal in the United States as long as both races were provided with facilities “equal” in quality. As the civil rights movement gained strength in the twentieth century, African Americans began to demand equal treatment and segregation laws were increasingly challenged in court.
Over time, through the hard work and sacrifice of civil rights activists such as Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., many of the laws targeting African Americans were struck down. In the early 1950s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) brought numerous court challenges against school segregation. In one of those challenges, an African American father named Oliver Brown filed a lawsuit against the Topeka, Kansas, Board of Education when his daughter was denied entry to a White elementary school. The NAACP helped bring Brown’s case to the Supreme Court, which in turn incorporated several similar cases into one case under the name Brown v. Board of Education.
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that school segregation violated the rights of African American students and declared the practice unconstitutional. While the verdict made segregation illegal, the Court did not specify how the practice was to be implemented. In 1955, the Court issued a second opinion, which directed school boards to move forward with desegregation at rapid, deliberate pace. This ruling put the impetus on state and local school districts to come up with their own plans.
Overview
Many school districts in the United States, particularly those in the southern United States, either delayed or fought the ruling. One well-known example of slowing the desegregation movement occurred in Little Rock, Arkansas, when Governor Orval Faubus used the National Guard to stop Black students from entering a school in 1957, causing a crisis. President Dwight Eisenhower decided to use federal soldiers to break up the protest, but the Black students still required an armed escort to enter the school.
By the early 1970s, most of the United States had begun desegregating its schools. However, many government officials and residents of Boston continued to oppose desegregation. The school board in particular was stubbornly opposed to opening the city’s schools to children of all races. At that time, most public school students in the city attended racially homogenous schools.
In March 1972, the NAACP filed a lawsuit alleging that the Boston School Committee was discriminating against African American children and working to keep them out of desegregated schools. On June 21, 1973, the state Supreme Court of Massachusetts ruled that Boston was engaging in discriminatory policies, and ordered the department of education to create a plan for rapid desegregation in the next school year. Following that ruling, the federal district court issued a decision on the NAACP’s lawsuit against the school committee. The court found that racial segregation was prevalent in every school and at all grades in Boston, and that the school committee was intentionally and systematically putting African American children at a disadvantage. In response to these rulings, more than four thousand protestors gathered at the Boston Common on September 9, 1974, to voice their displeasure with desegregation.
That same year, the first phase of the plan to desegregate Boston schools was enacted. This phase affected eighty schools where both Black and White students lived nearby. It also facilitated the hiring of 280 Black teachers. When schools opened on September 12, 1974, nine Black students in South Boston were injured when protestors threw rocks at school buses, and an organization called Restore Our Alienated Rights called for a boycott of Boston schools. By October, state police were being used to secure the school system, and the National Guard had been placed on alert. When a White student was stabbed by a Black student at South Boston High School, parents barricaded the school and refused to allow Black students to leave. Police were required to rescue the students and police were called in to keep order at the school.
In September 1975, the second phase of desegregating Boston’s schools began. This phase desegregated all areas of the city except East Boston. The plan ensured that each area of the city was racially balanced and required more than half of the students to be bused to school. In order to accommodate this, many students were reassigned to different schools, resulting in a sharp drop of school attendance by White students. Violence between students increased, including an incident where a Black student protester was beaten with a flagpole, and an incident in which a high school football player was shot during halftime of a game.
In 1987, the courts released the Boston School Committee from court supervision. The committee immediately worked on a new busing plan in an effort to reduce tensions across the city. Their plan, called Controlled Choice, divided the city into large areas that were required to be racially balanced. Though this caused a shift in racial distribution across the city, the large districts made it less likely that families would relocate to other areas of the city in order to avoid certain schools.
Bibliography
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Delmont, Matthew. “Rethinking “Busing” in Boston.” The National Museum of American History, 27 Dec. 2016, americanhistory.si.edu/blog/rethinking-busing-boston. Accessed 27 Feb. 2019.
Delmont, Matthew. “The Lasting Legacy of the Boston Busing Crisis.” The Atlantic, 29 Mar 2016, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/the-boston-busing-crisis-was-never-intended-to-work/474264/. Accessed 27 Feb. 2019.
Irons, Meghan E. “History Rolled in a Yellow School Bus.” The Boston Globe, 7 Sept. 2014, www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/09/06/boston-busing-crisis-years-later/DS35nsuqp0yh8f1q9aRQUL/story.html. Accessed 27 Feb. 2019.
“Remembering Boston’s Busing 40 Years Later.” Schuster Institute, 2017, www.schusterinstituteinvestigations.org/busing-desegregation. Accessed 27 Feb. 2019.
“Segregation in the United States.” History.com, 28 Nov. 2018, www.history.com/topics/Black-history/segregation-united-states. Accessed 27 Feb. 2019.
“Timeline: The Chain of Events That Brought Chaos to Boston’s Schools.” Spare Change, 6 Mar. 2016, sparechangenews.net/2016/03/boston-busing-timeline/. Accessed 27 Feb. 2019.
“Violence in Boston Over Racial Busing.” History.com, 21 Aug. 2018, www.history.com/this-day-in-history/violence-in-boston-over-racial-busing. Accessed 27 Feb. 2019.
Woolhouse, Meg. “Boston Schools Desegregation, Then And Now: Through The Eyes Of A Black Student Who Survived The 1970s Turmoil.” WGBH, 30 Sept. 2021, www.wgbh.org/news/education/2021/09/30/boston-schools-desegregation-then-and-now-through-the-eyes-of-a-black-student-who-survived-the-1970s-turmoil. Accessed 6 Jan. 2023.