Phyllis Ellison Feaster: The first day of school desegregation my brother and I had our bus assignments and we collected students and other buses to drive up to South Boston High School.
Officer: L-Street Annex, right over here. First two buses, please.
Bob Monahan, South Boston Resident: I went up to Southie High. There was staging for the television cameras. And the first one I noticed was the BBC. We all knew something was going to happen.
Leon Rock, Student Activist: As the kids were getting out the buses, there was a line of police holding back residents from South Boston screaming at the Black students. We were fearful for our lives.
Ruth Batson: We were not pushing for desegregation because of the brotherhood of man concept. Where there were white students, that's where the money went.
Bob Monahan, South Boston Resident: How adults in Boston could not have come up with a better plan? It still baffles me.
White woman: I’m not for this. I don’t care. My one will not go to school. But it’s tearing them apart.
White Woman: I wouldn’t care if they are green or purple. It’s the idea of putting my kid on the bus when I have a school right across the street from where they should go.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: White families and some black families felt that the decision of where their children should go to school should be up to them.
Albert “Dapper” O’Neil: First of all busing will never work in this city never. They will not take the rights away from these people.
Leon Rock, Roxbury Resident: Many Black parents were saying, “This is crazy. No, we can’t send our kids into the lions’ den.”
Black Woman: I don’t want to bus my child to any school. I want to have a good school in my community where my child can go and get just as much good education as anybody else.
Matt Delmont, Historian: The battle over busing in Boston exposed the important truth that the majority of white Americans didn’t actually support civil rights if it meant they had actually to address racial inequality in their own cities.
Sandra Lynch: The people of Boston elected people to public office who campaigned on deliberately racist platforms.
Louise Day Hicks: If you ask me, you know where I stand. You know where I stand.
White man in South Boston: Shoot all the niggers. Why should they move over here and wreck this city?
Ira Jackson, Kevin White’s Chief of Staff: It was the ugliest that I’ve ever experienced human nature and the most fraught with danger and concern that we were at the precipice of anarchy, civil war, a race riot.
Thomas Atkins, NAACP: It's not a question of whether the Constitution can be enforced. It's only a question of at what cost?
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Archival: Good evening my fellow citizens
Bryant Rollins, Journalist: On June 11th, 1963, President John Kennedy calls for a national press conference and all three networks broadcast it. It rivets the attention of the country.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Archival: The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section or the state in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance, of completing a high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day.
Bryant Rollins, Journalist: I was at home watching him or TV. And to hear a president of the United States acknowledge the depth of the racial challenges was just remarkable and uplifting. In the middle of the struggles that are going on in the South to take a side like that, on our side. It was revolutionary.
Bryant Rollins, Journalist: Earlier in the day, Governor George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door and said, “In my tenure as governor here, Negroes will never attend the University of Alabama.”
Nicholas Katzenbach, US Deputy Attorney General: I am asking of you an unequivocal assurance that you will not bar entry to these students Vivian Malone and James Hood.
Bryant Rollins, Journalist: Kennedy finally saw how rigid and devastating the racism in the South had become, that it was no longer possible to stay on the sidelines.
John F Kennedy, Archival: This is not a sectional issue. Difficulties over segregation and discrimination exist in every city, in every State of the Union.
Bryant Rollins, Journalist: Part of the irony of Kennedy’s speech was that in Boston, the NAACP is appearing before the Boston School Committee, an equally dramatic moment, at the same time.
Hubie Jones, Activist: It was a very hot night. There was no air conditioning. The windows were wide open in search of air. You could hear downstairs demonstrators, chanting and singing freedom songs. Inside the school committee headquarters, Ruth Batson presented her case to the all-white school committee.
Farah Stockman, Journalist: Ruth Batson really is on a mission to get the Boston School Committee to admit that, there was de facto segregation in the schools and to do something about it.
Hubie Jones, Activist: Louise Day Hicks, South Boston lawyer, chairperson of the School Committee, said to Mrs. Batson, “Mrs. Batson, we don’t segregate the schools. We only assign students to schools closest to where they live, so we are not accepting this notion and we are not going to do anything about what you’re talking about.”
Ruth Batson: We made our presentation, and everything broke loose. We were completely rejected that night and we left battle-scarred.
John Kennedy, Archival: If an American because his skin is dark cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote, who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?
Bryant Rollins, Journalist: So here you've got President Kennedy making an impassioned speech to the nation, in this morally rich position that he's taking, juxtaposed with the Boston School Committee, which is presented with this opportunity, and it does exactly the opposite: Dug its heels in.
Hubie Jones, Activist: This meeting is a turning point. It ignited a movement. The civil rights movement came to Boston on June 11, 1963.
Jim Vrabel, Historian: In the 1960s, Boston was a rundown has-been of a city. The middle class was on its way out. It was left as a place for the poor and working class. It was a city of Waldorf and Hayes-Bickford cafeterias and bookie joints and newspapers blowing down the streets.
Rev. William Joy: Boston is sort of like the palm of your hand. You have little peninsulas going out into the harbor, whether it’s Dorchester, South Boston, East Boston, North End, Charlestown. They go out into the harbor. And the downtown area is sort of the back of your hand. So you don’t go through the neighborhoods. The neighborhoods are their own little sort of worlds.
Bryant Rollins, Journalist: East Boston was the Italian neighborhood. Mattapan was the Jewish neighborhood. South Boston was the Irish neighborhood. The South End was Hispanic, by and large. Right adjacent to the downtown Boston was the Chinese community. Roxbury, Lower Roxbury, and Upper Roxbury were Black communities.
Farah Stockman, Journalist: Ten years earlier Boston, had been a very white city. In the 1950s, you’re seeing people come up from the Deep South.
Farah Stockman, Journalist: They're crowding into these neighborhoods where blacks are allowed to live, The South End and Roxbury. They can't move because of racial covenants written into the deeds. And outside of those black neighborhoods, they faced tremendous discrimination.
Bryant Rollins, Journalist: The conditions were pretty bad and they were deteriorating as more folks came and moved in.
Hubie Jones, Activist: Boston was like up South. There were patterns of racial discrimination everywhere. Black folks were invisible. It was like they didn’t live in the city.
Leon Rock, Roxbury Resident: People from South Boston didn’t come into Roxbury. People from Roxbury didn’t go into South Boston.
Al Holland, Roxbury Resident: We used to try to go to the St. Patrick Day parade. Once we got to the South Boston side, we realized that, “Hey, we’d better get out of here because people started yelling at us, calling us all kinds of names. People started chasing us.
Joe Burnieika, Dorchester Resident: The only time I ever saw a black person when I was growing up was when the black Jehovah Witnesses would come down the street. My grandmother, who was from County Cork in Ireland, when she would see them coming down, she would say, “Close the blinds! Don’t answer the door!” And I could never understand what she was so upset about. But that was the environment that I grew up in.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: Boston’s tradition of education is long and lustrous. It had the first school in America, in Boston Latin. Up until the Depression, it was probably one of the best public school systems in the country. But then it kind of hit a downturn and became more of a political place. It was all about getting constituents jobs.
Joe Burnieika, Teacher: Everybody knew that if you wanted to have a promotion, if you wanted to become an assistant principal or God forbid you wanted to be a principal, you had to contribute to the campaigns of the elected school committee. It was never based on merit.
Rev. WILLIAM JOY: Boston had literally a two-tiered system of high schools. There were the district high schools, like, East Boston, South Boston High School, Charlestown High School. Charlestown High School, you might only have two or three kids that graduated and went to a four-year college. Then there were the exam schools, there was Boston Latin for boys, there was Girls Latin and Boston Tech. And those schools were elite, and mostly white.
Henry Allen, Teacher: As a student in training to be a teacher and visiting Boston schools and then visiting as well schools in the suburbs, the differences were extreme. So, in the suburban schools, I would see these beautiful new school buildings, modern science labs, modern auditoriums. And I’d go back to visiting a school in Boston and I’d say like, “Are we in the same world, the same planet, the same state? Why are schools in Boston underfunded and disgraceful looking?”
Jim Vrabel, Writer: The schools in the African American community were even less well-off. The schools buildings were older. The resources less.
Zebulon Miletsky, Historian: Black schools were located in some of the oldest school buildings in Boston. They were missing basic resources like paper, pencils, pens, but they also didn’t have lunchrooms, and they didn’t have libraries in some cases, or gymnasiums.
Jonathan Kozol, Teacher: The school building which I taught in Boston, was something out of a Charles Dickens novel. We taught two, three, four classes in the same non-partitioned, noisy auditorium, day after day. Kids there were loaded with substitute teachers, and walls were peeling paint. Blackboards were collapsing.
Al Holland, Roxbury Resident: My elementary teachers were all white. There was nothing about Black history or the contributions of other minorities to this country. I knew all the Irish songs. The basketball coach, he had us saying, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord be with…” and we are all Black kids, most of us Baptist.
Bryant Rollins, Journalist: I remember we read Little Black Sambo out loud—tremendously stereotypical African kid, the object of fun and laughter. And I saw myself in that kid and I knew other people saw me in that kid. Later on, I was very angry about it, but when I was in the middle of it, I had to learn how to live in that environment without knowing what was wrong, only knowing that I don’t feel right about this.
Farah Stockman, Journalist: The fight for racial equity in Boston started more than a decade before that school committee meeting in 1963. It began with Ruth Batson.
Hubie Jones, Activist: Ruth Batson was a Roxbury resident, a mother of three children. She was fed up with what her children were not getting from the Boston Public Schools.
Ruth Batson: I was living in the Orchard Park Housing Project and two of my children were attending the Dearborn School. And I was very concerned with their education because I had the feeling from talking with other parents in other parts of the city that the education was different.
Lyda Peters, Teacher: Ruth talked to the teachers of her children and asks why is there a difference between what her child is assigned, and what children from predominantly white districts are assigned, such as science. She gets ridiculed and she is demeaned, so that fires her up.
Ruth Batson: I became chairperson of the NAACP public school committee. I gathered a group of people around me. When we would go to white schools we'd see these lovely classrooms, a small number of children in each class. The teachers were permanent. We would see wonderful materials. When we'd go to our schools we would see overcrowded classrooms, children sitting out in the corridors and so forth.
Ruth Batson: We felt if we moved our students to where they were spending the money, we would benefit. We certainly didn't think that just putting black and white kids together meant that black kids would improve.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: She ran for school committee in the 1950s and lost, but, as an activist said, “She gave people spine.”
Hubie Jones, Activist: She had a tough core of steel. You mess with Ruth Batson, you better be ready.
May 17, 1954
Announcer: It’s time for the Longines Chronoscope, a television journal of the important issues of the hour.
Larry Lesueur, Journalist: The United States Supreme Court has made a unanimous decision. It has ruled that Negro and white pupils in our public schools must not be segregated. This will surely have a penetrating significance on all American life.
Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Law Professor: This was a decision that many African-Americans had hoped for for a long time. The lawyers from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund had been litigating this line of cases for several years. And finally, they had this triumphant opinion that said separate black and white schools were unlawful. The black schools were invariably inferior.
Zebulon Miletsky, Historian: Ruth Batson felt jubilation. She thought to herself, now that Brown v. Board has been decided this was going to open the doors for all Black children whether in the South or the North.
Alan Rose, Lawyer: African-American families across the country had a right to expect that their children would no longer be sent to schools that were segregated and that, instead, they would be going to schools that were integrated. That was their expectation and that was their constitutional right.
Matt Delmont, Historian: For Black activists in Boston, nothing practically changes after the Brown decision in terms of what's actually going on on the ground for Black children, and eventually increases frustration, because they can see with their own eyes that segregation exists in Boston, that their children are receiving second class educations.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: Another group started in 1960, a group called the CBPS (Citizens for Boston Public Schools). It was started to try and do something about the schools. The only community that was interested in working with them was the Black community and Ruth Batson.
Bryant Rollins, Journalist: In 1961, the Boston Citizens for Public Schools put together their own slate for the school committee. One of the primary candidates was Mel King who was a leader in the African American community.
Henry Allen, Activist: They were running a campaign that was based on: We are interested in reforming and building a quality school system in Boston.
Zebulon Miletsky, Historian: Louise Day Hicks is also a candidate for the Boston School Committee. She bills herself as the only mother in the race.
Bryant Rollins, Journalist: At that time she was soliciting the Black vote and very actively doing so in the community.
Bryant Rollins, Journalist: Mel King didn’t get elected, but Louise Day Hicks did.
Farah Stockman, Journalist: So what the NAACP does is compile a bunch of statistics. They find that 13 schools were predominantly black. And in those schools there was a terrible case of overcrowding. One school was built to hold 600 kids, and there were more than a thousand enrolled. They were old buildings. Four had been condemned. The school system spends on average $275 per elementary school kid per year. But in some of these predominantly Black schools, it’s only spending $229. So they compile a very strong case that kids in these predominantly Black schools are suffering. It’s on the merits of these statistics that they demand a meeting.
June 11, 1963
Zebulon Miletsky, Historian: At the meeting, Ruth reminded them that they had been talking about these issues for years, that they had been trying to remind them of the plight of Black students in the system, and that no one had listened.
Reporter: Would you care to speculate on why the NAACP has raised this issue in Boston.
Louise Day Hicks: I might say that it is a national problem and they have brought it to Boston where it does not belong.
Reporter: You do not believe then that this agitation originated here in this city.
Louise Day Hicks: No, I do not.
Ruth Batson: We go prepared to the school system and we were really innocent. We were naive. We were insulted. We were told our kids were stupid and this was why they didn't learn. We found out that we had brought to them a wonderful political issue, and that this was an issue that was going to give their political careers stability for a long time to come.
June 18, 1963
Reporter: Today, Boston witnessed the Stay Out for Freedom Day, the so-called boycott by Negro students of junior and senior high schools of Boston.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: When the school committee refused to do anything to respond to the NAACP, the Black community decided that they had to keep the pressure on and act.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: Reverend James Breeden had witnessed a school stay-out in the South, and he suggested doing the same thing in Boston. “Let’s get the Black children to stay out of school for a day and to show that we represent a lot of people.”
Edward Crowder, Roxbury Resident: When the stay-out of school for freedom came, there was no question I was going to be there. I was coming out of a relatively poor family, but even as a child, I had aspirations to do better. I didn’t tell my parents. Dad would be scared that that could impact him.
Bryant Rollins, Journalist: We identified locations where we set up Freedom Schools, and we filled them with music, with poetry, and with lessons and with speakers who these young people would never have an opportunity to encounter. We helped to make the connection to the South. We helped them to understand that this Freedom School was part of the Civil Rights Movement.
Noel Day, Co-Director, Freedom Stay-Out Committee: Most of you came here because you understood that, here in Boston, you are deprived of your rights just as much as people in Birmingham are deprived of their rights. We've taken the first real step in Boston in beginning the struggle for our freedom here.
Reporter: Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics, you gave a very powerful speech today at this freedom sit-in. Could you tell us what you feel is the success of this freedom stay-out?
Bill Russell: The important thing is that we have taken the first step and we have, as they say, thrown the gauntlet down. We're into the fight now, and I think we'll win.
Matthew Delmont, Historian: In November of 1963, there’s a Boston School Committee election.
Farah Stockman, Journalist: Louise Day Hicks is reelected to the School Committee. She wins in a landslide. She sees that she's been rewarded for fighting against integration of schools.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: Louise, early on, saw that a way of getting more votes and raising her political profile was to oppose these efforts at ending de facto segregation.
Farah Stockman, Journalist: People in the black community were frustrated that nothing was happening. They didn't win at the ballot box. They didn't get anywhere with the school committee. So three black state legislators filed racial imbalance bills to say that if a town or city had racially imbalanced schools, they would have to address it. Those bills went nowhere.
February 26, 1964
Matt Delmont, Historian: In February 1964, there’s a second school stay out, and this one is much larger than the first one. This time you have a number of students from suburban schools outside of Boston who participate as well.
Hubie Jones, Activist: I was asked to organize students living in the suburbs to come join the stay-out and to attend freedom schools and get to know kids from Boston and kids who were different from them in race and culture and the response was amazing.
Ruth Batson: We have these three musicians and they integrated this room in two minutes. They merely said, “You come down here and sit here and you come there and sit there.” And we were integrated weren't we? I don't feel that this plan needs all that brains, I think it just needs some goodwill and some common sense.
Crowd Sings: “This little light of mine, I’m going make it shine…”
Roy Wilkins, N.A.A.C.P.: Boston seems to be unique in the United States cities in that its school board, as far as we're able to learn, has refused to admit that de facto segregation exists in Boston. They won't even talk about it. This is the oddest position that any city has taken in the United States.
Hubie Jones, Activist: We saw in 1963 and 1964 an extraordinary amount of energy being used to try to move the Boston Public School system, like you never saw before. It was fierce energy
Bryant Rollins, Journalist: It’s like a tsunami was sitting off the coast. And these different events that were happening: Ruth Batson at the School Committee, the Stay Out for Freedom, picketing the school department, the sit ins, demonstrations. And so the school committee, every time something like this happened, they dug their heels in even more so. They acted in ways that provoked more action on our part because they would benefit from it.
Roxbury
April 22, 1965
Martin Luther King Jr.: What we must have is quality integrated education across the board and we must have it in Boston. I want you to know that I'm with you. I come here because you have come to us so often
Bryant Rollins, Journalist: Martin Luther King was invited to come in April of 1965, by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SCLC, which was his main organization.
Zebulon Miletsky, Historian: Martin Luther King’s visit is kind of packed with meaning because he had been a student at Boston University. He had preached and given sermons at Twelfth Baptist Church. He met Coretta Scott King in Boston.
Edward Crowder, Roxbury Resident: It was announced that there was going to be a march for freedom. We’re going to meet and greet Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King was our leader. He was the one that we were following.
Bryant Rollins, Journalist: All of my friends were there. These are the people who had put their heart and soul into the activism during Boston’s emerging Civil Rights movement, at great risk to themselves. Here they were being supported by this icon from out of town. It was thrilling to feel supported in that way.
Bryant Rollins, Journalist: We walked singing freedom songs, and then at the Common, he gave one of his big speeches.
Martin Luther King, Archival: It would be demagogic and dishonest for me to say that Boston is a Birmingham or to equate Massachusetts with Mississippi, but it would be morally irresponsible were I to remain blind to the threat to liberty, the denial of opportunity and the crippling poverty that we face in some sections of this community.
Bryant Rollins, Journalist: Martin presented the city with a mirror. He made it clear that he saw racism in the North as invidious as racism in the South. When he held up that mirror, he’s showing the city and state leaders a picture that is disconcerting for them. It’s disconfirming.
Zebulon Miletsky, Historian: King with his national following and entourage and media presence embarrassed many state legislators who moved all of a sudden with great, you know, alacrity and speed toward passage of a Racial Imbalance Act.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: The Racial Imbalance bill filed originally in 1964, said that any school district that had schools with more than 50% of its students as minorities had to adopt a racial imbalance plan to address the situation. I think the impetus for passing it in 1965 was for the state to do something when the Boston School Committee and the city obviously were not doing anything.
Matt Delmont, Historian: In August 1965, Governor John Volpe signs the Racial Imbalance Act which makes Massachusetts the first state in the country to proactively pass legislation to try to address school segregation. It was a bit like a state-wide version of the Brown versus Board decision, nearly a decade earlier. On paper, it meant that Massachusetts was committing itself to take real action to address segregation.
Alan Rose, Lawyer: It became clear immediately after the passage by the Mass. Legislature of the Racial Imbalance Act that the Boston School Committee had no intention of integrating the school system. They resisted at every turn.
Journalist Peter Berns: Mrs. Hicks, is there a racial imbalance in Boston schools?
Louise Day Hicks: If you mean predominantly ethnic groupings in our schools. Yes, there is racial imbalance, which merely reflects the geographic content of the neighborhood. But if you mean by racial imbalance, inferior schools, we do not have racial imbalance in the Boston Public Schools.
Matt Delmont, Historian: The Boston School Committee saw it as a threat to their control and their power over how schools function in Boston. While the Racial Imbalance Act had recommendations and policies for how the School Committee should address issues of racial imbalance in cities, the Boston School Committee didn’t want to hear it. It is only the idea of using buses to transport students that really gets the attention of the Boston School Committee. They latch onto the idea of busing.
Louise Day Hicks: I feel that busing has no advantages educationally for our little children. It will take them far from their neighborhoods and it will bring them into very strange neighborhoods.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: The School Committee goes through the motions of filing plans to desegregate the schools that it knows will be rejected. Some of them are silly and farcical.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: The school committee didn’t accept the necessity to file the plans. And the penalty, the withdrawal of aid, wasn’t something that was enough to get them to move.
Charles Glenn, Massachusetts Dept. Of Education: Often, politicians created the impression that, in fact, somehow the obligation to racially integrate the schools would go away.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: Year after year, Mrs. Hicks would get a legislator to file a repeal bill.
John Henning, Reporter: So, you want the complete repeal of the 1965 Racial Imbalance Law?
Louise Day Hicks: Yes, I do because it is acting to a detriment to the schoolchildren of Boston and it is very costly to the taxpayers.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: Year after year, support for repealing the Racial Imbalance Law actually grew. So, they were being rewarded for their intransigence.
Matt Delmont, Historian: There are a lot of factors at play for those white Bostonians who oppose school desegregation.
Farah Stockman, Journalist: Some people really didn't want to put their kids on a bus to another neighborhood. They were terrified. They didn't own a car. If something happened, they would have a hard time getting there. Others were, quite frankly, very racist, and they did not want their child to go to school with someone from another ethnic group. That was real. That was real, too.
Moe Gillen, Charlestown Resident: In Charlestown, it was mostly Irish. Everybody knew everybody. It was mostly townie marrying townie.
Lisa McGoff, Charlestown Resident: We grew up in the projects. A lot of divorced parents, a lot of alcoholic parents. When my dad died and my mother had to get a real job, she said, she worked for the telephone company. She wasn’t on welfare. She worked hard and these are her children and no one is going to tell her what to do with them. She thought it was wrong that they could take a whole bunch of poor kids from one community and stick them into another school, not giving them anything else.
White South Boston Mother: if I had to bus my child, I’d keep her home. As I said before, I’ll go to court. I’ll fight it. I will not let her be bused anywhere.
Rev. William Joy: The whole sense of the integration was a challenge to people. “I don’t think it’s going to be better for my kids to go across the city to Dorchester or Roxbury or wherever. I know if they stay here in Charlestown that they’re going to have an education, they’re going to have a job and they’re going to have friends around them for life.”
Michael Patrick Macdonald, Author: The people behind the racial imbalance law were people from wealthier leafy suburbs communities with schools that were 100% white. Therefore, the racial imbalance law wouldn't apply to them
Hubie Jones, Activist: In 1965, a white school committee man from suburban Brookline, Leon Trilling, comes up the idea of, why don’t we have a program that buses black young people from Roxbury to suburban schools. He brings this idea to Ruth Batson who embraced the idea.
Hubie Jones, Activist: In September 1966, 220 Black students from Boston go to seven suburban school districts and that is the start of the METCO program.
Farah Stockman, Journalist: Ruth Batson was a huge force behind the creation of METCO and ended up working for it, recruiting the kids, working with the schools. She said: “I want the best the white people have to offer. I don't want the worst.” The suburbs had all kinds of equipment that schools in the city didn't have. And she wanted that for black children.
September 1966
NBC Reporter: Seven transportation companies were hired to pick up 220 Negro children in the METCO program. Most of the stops are in Roxbury. Some are in neighboring North Dorchester, another Negro community in Boston. The ride on a METCO bus takes up to an hour and five minutes. The integration program is hardly massive this year. At Braintree's East Junior High School, for example, there were ten Negro students to about 1,200 whites.
Matt Delmont, Historian: The METCO program was quite limited. The other issue is, that these suburban communities, they’re doing everything they can to oppose affordable housing that would actually have meaningful integration in their suburbs.
September 1967
Jim Vrabel, Writer: Louise Day Hicks had always been politically ambitious. She had always wanted to be mayor of Boston. 1967 seemed to be a perfect time for it.
Louise Day Hicks: Let me give you a stick. Now when you use it, you have to say, “Stick with Hicks on the 26th, okay.”
Jim Vrabel, Writer: She ran against Kevin White who was Massachusetts Secretary of State.
Kevin White: That’s right. Chivalry isn’t dead. That means men are still polite. What’s your name?
Jim Vrabel, Writer: He was the candidate that liberals would vote for.
Ira Jackson, Kevin White, Chief of Staff: Kevin White had a big vision that Boston could be a world class city. He ran against Louise Day Hicks in a very racially charged election.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: The motto of her campaign was “You know where I stand.”
Hubie Jones, Activist: And that meant: “I stand with you, the white community, in opposition to the interest and demands of the black community.”
Louise Day Hicks: You know, it doesn't matter what the color of her mother’s skin is. She wants her little child in the neighborhood school. If you ask me, you know where I stand. You know where I stand. I stand on behalf of all the people of Boston.
Black citizen: As a very serious citizen of Roxbury, I’d like to know exactly what are you going to do…
Louise Hicks [to white passerby]: Good Morning.
Black citizen: If you intend to be the mayor of Boston, I think you should talk to everybody.
Louise Day Hicks: I’d be very happy to.
Black citizen: Right now, here, just like you talked to everybody else at the station. Why ignore me?
Ruth Batson: I feel that the people of Boston have found their leader. As history records her, she'll be only recorded as a person that created bigotry, created division, created hate..
Hubie Jones, Activist: Mrs. Hicks scared the hell out of Kevin White because she was doing pretty well. And then Kevin White went to the Black community to get the Black vote. So they rallied and they voted.
Campaign official: White has won the election with 100, 820 votes.
Ira Jackson, Kevin White’s Chief of Staff: White prevailed because people were disgusted with Boston’s parochialism. They knew that there needed to be a spark or Boston was going to be a historical footnote. So, people were desperate for change. It was a narrow fight and I think it was for the soul of the city.
Kevin White: Are you happy? Tonight is a night of celebration for all of us.
April 4, 1968
Announcer: This is a CBS News special report.
Walter Cronkite, Archival: Dr. Martin Luther King, the apostle of nonviolence in the Civil Rights movement, has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee. Police have issued an all-points bulletin for a well-dressed young white man seen running from the scene.
Bryant Rollins, Journalist: I remember somebody came in and said that they killed King, Dr. King. You could feel the floor drop out from under people.
Bryant Rollins, Journalist: Martin was more than a preacher and a leader. We were all ennobled by him. We were all raised up by him. He said, “The moral act of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Have faith. We’ll get there.” And suddenly that’s gone. When he died as a leader in the way that he died, it was devastating. I felt devastated by it. [Cries] And, so, I’m still mourning.
Bryant Rollins, Journalist: After Dr. King was assassinated, it was very personal for all of us. We were saying to ourselves, “If this country can’t take care of us, we need to figure out how to take care of ourselves.”
Bryant Rollins, Journalist: Well, it’s my feeling that the main problem is there is irrelevant and racist education in the schools. And that young people are fed up with it.
Reporter: Excuse me, but what do you mean by racist education?
Bryant Rollins, Journalist: They have no instruction in Afro-American history. The orientation is all around European and Western cultures. The music is called or referred to as classical or important music. It’s Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. It’s not James Brown and Otis Redding. And that’s kind of that institutional kind of racism. In addition to that, we have a history of problems with individual teachers, who are prejudiced, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s something that needs to be dealt with.
Bryant Rollins, Journalist: The movement towards more community control of the schools resulted in getting a Black principal in the King School, ultimately. It was a big victory. Then community momentum shifted to the Gibson School.
Sandie Fenton, Teacher: The Gibson School was an old building in an African-American community primarily. It was under-resourced, very few materials. There was a certain fear of children really in the school, but also locked doors. They were a symbol of keeping parents out.
Day 1 September 4, 1968
Sandie Fenton, Teacher: As the first day of school neared, we were aware of this building tension in the community. We really didn’t know what was going to happen the first day of school, but we knew something was going to happen.
Sandie Fenton, Teacher: There was an announcement that a number of parents had entered the school and were in the principal’s office. The community had installed an alternative principal, Ben Scott. He was a nuclear chemist. He had been working with the community activists to try to improve schools.
Bill Owens, Gibson Parent: We went to the office and told the principal that she would no longer operate that school, that we were, as parents, going to take over the school. We went to the teachers and said that they could stay if they chose to do so.
Connie Egan, Teacher: Mel King came to my room and taught a lesson to my fourth graders. He just radiated positive energy. He was a community leader who I had seen on television, so, wow when he walked into my room that day, I was so excited, and the kids got it. They were quiet and listening.
Sandie Fenton, Teacher: The next day, there are a number of policemen at the school door.
Connie Egan, Teacher: They would let the teachers in, but nobody else.
Bill Owen, Parent: If we cannot go into the school, we will not allow our children to go in. So, we left that school and, honestly, I didn’t know where we were going, but I knew we were not going in there, our children were not going to go.
Lyda Peters, Activist: Bill Owens walks out, and grabs the parents and they follow him. He looks behind him, he finds there’s a bunch of teachers, white teachers, that come with him.
Sandie Fenton, Teacher: We were doing what they felt was right for the kids in the moment. We were trying to make things better in a desperate situation. And, so, we chose to support the parents.
Sandie Fenton, Teacher: Everybody goes inside to the Robert Gould Shaw House and the teachers begin trying to organize little classrooms.
Black Activist: The primary purpose for keeping the children out of the Gibson school is that we want community controls school. We want a principal in the school who is approved by the parents of the Gibson School.
Sandie Fenton, Teacher: Our firing by the head of the Boston School committee was pretty immediate. No hearing. No anything.
Male Reporter: What do you plan to do now?
Sandie Fenton, Teacher: We don’t really know.
Teacher: We’ll still be teaching, of course, any children from the school district who will be available to us.
Female reporter: You will be teaching Monday morning then?
Teacher: We will be with the Gibson children wherever they are Monday morning.
Sandie Fenton, Teacher: The decision was made by the parents and others to set up the Gibson Liberation School. And, so, a lot of people descended immediately to help us. There were people who brought materials, books about Black kids and Black families that were relevant to the kids.
Reporter: Upon inspecting the school tomorrow morning, if you do, in fact, find that there are no police there, will you then be ready to negotiate with the school committee without any other preconditions?
Ben Scott, Parent-Appointed Principal: Yes, we would be. We would be ready. Yes.
William G. Tobin, Deputy Superintendent: You have no right to enter this building.
Ben Scott: I've been authorized to enter this building by the parents.
William G. Tobin, Deputy Superintendent: The parents have no right to give you any authorization to enter this building. If you enter this building, I am telling you you are trespassing. I'm warning you now. You are on school property right now and you have to remove yourself from school property or we will have you removed.
Connie Egan, Teacher: People called the parents on the phone and said they were going to cut off their welfare. They were going to be evicted if they didn’t send their kids back to school. The parents were afraid.
November 5, 1968
Sandie Fenton, Teacher: On election day, the parents decided to close the Liberation School, go back to continue the fight at the Gibson School. The kids all lined up, and they sang at the top of their voices “Lift every voice,” right from Robert Gould Shaw all the way, right back to the Gibson School and went inside and the doors closed.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: After Louise Day Hicks ran for mayor and lost, she was no longer a member of the School Committee. The School Committee finally agreed to use desegregation money to build new schools.
Charles Glenn, Massachusetts Dept of Education: The Lee School was one of a number of new schools built between black and white neighborhoods. The School Department had a plan to assign students from neighboring white schools and neighboring Black schools into this beautiful new facility with everything you can imagine, but began to encounter a great deal of resistance from parents whose children attended the Fifield or the O’Hearn school, which were both predominantly white.
September 8, 1971
Reporter, Mike Leavitt: Approximately 200 children continue to come to the Fifield School today, even though they were assigned to the Lee, and the same held true at the Patrick O'Hearn a few blocks away.
Text on Screen: September 21, 1971
Jim Vrabel, Writer: A turning point in the whole desegregation saga took place after school had started. There was a meeting at the O’Hearn School, and the School Committee was deciding whether to reconsider its vote to open the school as a racially-balanced school or not.
John Craven: I am making the motion that parents of the children in the former O’Hearn and Fifield schools districts be allowed to make their own decisions.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: John Craven decided to reverse his vote, to vote not to open the school as a racially balanced school and to kind of acquiesce to the demands of the parents to not bus their children there.
Farah Stockman, Journalist: So at this point, the black community in Boston has tried everything. They've tried the ballot box, they've tried direct action, they've tried the state house. And really it hasn’t worked. None of it has worked. And so some of them felt it was time to do the last option, which was the court system.
Hubie Jones, Activist: In March 1972, lawyers for the NAACP on behalf of plaintiffs, 14 parents and 44 children, file suit charging the Boston Public Schools with de jure segregation, that you have intentionally segregated the schools.
Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Professor Of Constitutional Law: After the NAACP achieves its monumental victory in Brown versus Board of Education, it's clear that the principle should apply in the North. The reality was that schools were segregated by race nationwide. So those lawyers litigate a series of cases in Northern cities that seek to establish that schools that are in fact segregated by race in Northern cities should be desegregated just the same as those in Southern cities.
Eric Van Loon, Plaintiffs’ Attorney: The judge in the Boston School desegregation case was W. Arthur Garrity. He was very different from the typical personality of a federal judge as sort of bang the gavel, take charge, forceful. He was a thoughtful, reflective person.
Alan Rose, Garrity Law Clerk: Plaintiffs had to prove that the segregation of the Boston Public Schools, which was basically an undisputed fact, was the result of deliberate policies by the Boston School Committee.
Alan Rose, Lawyer: It was very easy after Brown versus the Board of Education for plaintiffs in Southern cities to prove their case.
Eric Van Loon, Plaintiffs’ Attorney: Across the Southern states, there were laws that said officially Black kids will go to this school, white kids would go to that school. In the North there were not statutes of that nature.
Eric Van Loon, Plaintiffs’ Attorney: A lot of the proof for the trial ended up being easier than we had anticipated.
Eric Van Loon, Plaintiffs’ Attorney: One of the most amazing things about the Boston School Committee was that they literally had a stenographer that would take down every single word that was said in their public meetings, so we had verbatim transcripts of exactly the thoughts that they were thinking.
Alan Rose, Lawyer: Those transcripts became very, very important evidence during the trial. There were numerous comments made by individual school committee members, which revealed their true intentions.
Eric Van Loon, Plaintiffs’ Attorney: What was probably the most surprising was all of the fiendishly clever different kinds of arrangements that they made to create and to promote segregation. One was the feeder pattern for schools. You had this literal dual school system where Black kids would go elementary to middle school and a four-year high school; whites would go elementary to junior high and a three-year high school. A Black student would be finished with middle school, but there’d be no white school high school with a ninth grade for him to go to.
Alan Rose, Lawyer: There were many instances where the black population in a particular area increased dramatically. And what did the school committee do? They would build some fairly small schools adjacent to these African American areas, which virtually ensured that those schools would quickly become filled up with African American students.
Eric Van Loon, Plaintiffs’ Attorney: Another major device that the school department used was called open enrollment. The right of any student to go to any other school “so long as there was space available.
Eric Van Loon, Plaintiffs’ Attorney: Very frequently white students in an overcrowded school, would be bused past a nearby predominantly Black school that had space available in order to go further away to an overcrowded white school where they would add portable classrooms. Thirty thousand students every day were bused or used other transportation for segregation.
Alan Rose, Lawyer: There were decisions that were constantly being made, which only made sense from a racial standpoint. And when you added into that mix pejorative comments, it just became very clear that the Boston School Committee had deliberately maintained a dual school system.
Reporter Lem Tucker: The question of racial imbalance in Boston schools is now before a federal court. If you had to guess at this point, what do you think that court will say?
Ruth Batson: Well, I would hope and I would believe that the court would uphold the feelings of many of us that schools should be desegregated in Boston.
Eric Van Loon, Plaintiffs’ Attorney: There was a long period of time between the trial and Judge Garrity’s ultimate ruling. It was over a year.
Alan Rose, Lawyer: He was under a tremendous amount of pressure, including from Mayor White, to come out with his decision.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: On June 21st 1974, Judge Garrity ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, and he found that the School Committee was guilty of maintaining a dual school system, one for Black students and one for whites, that was unconstitutionally segregated.
Alan Rose, Lawyer: The opinion was extraordinary in its detail. Garrity wanted to make sure that anybody who took the time to read the opinion would agree with the result.
Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Professor Of Constitutional Law: The facts that the judge points to as unlawful, the using of feeder schools, transfer policies, school assignment policies to segregate the schools are observable in many school systems in the country. That would mean that many school systems are segregated following the logic of Morgan.
Eric Van Loon, Plaintiffs’ Attorney: After a judge has found that a school system is unconstitutionally segregated, that situation has to be remedied. Many people felt that the city schools should be integrated along with suburban schools.
Kathleen Sullivan, School Committee Member: We prefer a metropolitan solution for the problem, and in terms of every kind of social fairness, a metropolitan solution would be, would be much, much better.
Eric Van Loon, Plaintiffs’ Attorney: That’s what had happened in Detroit. The black parents had said, we’ve been discriminated against, but the Detroit schools are nearly a 100% black already so that the only effective way to have desegregation is to bring in the suburbs. That case, Milliken against Bradley, was at the United States Supreme Court and being argued at, essentially, the exact same time.
Alan Rose, Lawyer: Early in July of 1974, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that, in the absence of involvement by surrounding towns in a constitutional violation, there was simply no legal basis for including them in the remedy phase of the case.
Ira Jackson, Kevin White’s Chief of Staff: Tragically Milliken went down to defeat 5-4. If Milliken had been affirmed, Detroit and Boston would have ended up with a suburban metropolitan solution. We would have had a pooling of resources. If we want to do something fundamentally about educational opportunity and integration, we have to involve more than just the inner city.
Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Professor of Constitutional Law: In his dissent, Justice Thurgood Marshall—who had been the chief lawyer who represented the black plaintiffs in Brown versus Board of Education—makes the point that the court had taken a giant step backwards from Brown. It was deciding a constitutional law case based not on logic and legal precedent, but based on white resistance.
Eric Van Loon, Plaintiffs’ Attorney: There was a state desegregation plan, which was already ordered by the state court to be put into effect that year.
Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Professor of Constitutional Law: As an interim measure, Judge Garrity commanded that the Boston School Committee comply with the order that had been issued by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. It really was an effort by him to have the city of Boston comply with an order that it already should have been complying with.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: The plan, which would affect 40% of the city, called for the busing of 19,000 junior high school and high school students. It was just what all these busing opponents who had been fighting all these years were afraid of.
Farah Stockman, Journalist: Many people were very hopeful that something would actually change now. Others were scared about what was going to happen because there was going to be resistance.
Henry Allen, Activist: I think there was a sense of euphoria, relief, excitement, vindication, jubilation, combined with a sense of, now what do we do?
Ira Jackson, Kevin White’s Chief of Staff: We mobilized the A-team. We had a boiler room. We hired hundreds of new employees as school crossing guards, as bus monitors, as school room aides. Kevin White had a hundred coffee klatches. He knew that, at a minimum, white parents needed to be listened to.
White Woman: I love raising my children here, but, yet I feel that we should be able to solve our own problems and not have outsiders come and do it.
Kevin White: I agree with you.
Lyda Peters, Friend of Ruth Batson: Mayor White would have these parent meetings, and he would say things like, this is going to be hard. It’s going to be like the South, but we can get through this.
Kevin White: Secondly, it will be a painful process going through it because the South didn’t just slide through it. It tore them apart as it will help to tear us apart
Lyda Peters, Friend of Ruth Batson: That was his message. Ruth Batson always said, not one politician including the mayor of this city ever said this is the right thing to do.
Ira Jackson, Kevin Whites Chief Of Staff: Kevin White was contemptuous of the scheme that Judge Garrity imposed, but did Kevin White ever once say, “I won’t enforce it”? No. Now, was he a profile in courage? No. And I don’t recall any other elected officials being profiles in courage during busing. They all headed for the hills.
Bryant Rollins, Journalist: One of the great ironies in this entire busing situation was that it’s likely that most African American parents would have preferred not to bus their kids. They would have preferred to have their kids in schools in the neighborhoods that were high quality.
Leon Rock, Roxbury Resident: There was not a unified African American community as it relates to school desegregation. Many Black parents were saying, “What are you thinking about, NAACP? This is crazy. No, we can’t send our kids into the lions’ den.”
Lyda Peters, Friend Of Ruth Batson: People were generally afraid for their children. The fear going to South Boston, the fear going to Charlestown, the fear going to all white schools where Black people actually didn’t live, made most parents very cautious.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: Garrity’s decision deepened the opposition to busing. They were going to oppose it with every fiber of their being.
Woman: I will not
Crowd: I will not
Woman: Pledge allegiance
Crowd: Pledge allegiance
Woman: To the order
Crowd: To the order
Woman: Of the United States Court.
Crowd: Of the United States Court.
Woman: Nor to the dictatorship
Crowd: Nor to the dictatorship
Woman: For which it stands
Crowd: For which it stands
Rev. William Joy: As the busing order became more and more real, people tried to enroll their children into parish schools that weren’t part of their parish. And the Archbishop of Boston, Humberto Cardinal Medeiros says, “No, you can’t do that.” The church’s position was, you know, this is a court order, not only are we going to obey it, but it’s the right thing to do.
Lisa Mcgoff Collins, Charlestown Resident: A lot of people had so much to say to tell us what we had to do here in this community, but nothing was happening to them. They weren’t being forced. It bothered me that people would have a lot to say about us, but they don’t live here.
Rev. William Joy: Charlestown was a nitty-gritty place. There was the largest housing project in the city, more than a thousand units. It was grimy, it was old. The people in Charlestown felt betrayal that after negotiations there were a lot of urban renewal projects, as part of the quid pro quo, as you call it, they had been promised two new schools, the Warren-Prescott School and the Kent School. They felt as though they were taken away from them. These new schools were no longer their schools. They were someone else’s schools.
Moe Gillen, Charlestown Resident: We were told, “No, no, no, no, no. Your kid cannot go to that school.” Wouldn’t you be upset? Wouldn’t anybody be upset? Of course, we’re upset. We’re upset about our rights. Our kids could have gone from pre-kindergarten to community college and never leave the town, and we were very happy with that.
Michael Patrick Macdonald, Writer: In phase one of the busing plan, South Boston High School and Roxbury were paired. South Boston's lower end, which is where I'm from, held one of the highest concentrations of white poverty in America. We were not working class. We were poor. To focus on a school that had so many students on welfare, that's not really the place to get equity.
Ira Jackson, Kevin White’s Chief of Staff: Black parents were smart enough to know that the education their kids were going to get at South Boston High School was not what they aspired to. And the white community knew that their kids were being bused into inferior schools in the black community.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: The group was formed, ROAR—Restore Our Alienated Rights—by Louise Day Hicks and others in South Boston. Its meetings were held in the Boston City Council Chambers in City Hall that by this time Louise Day Hicks was on. She posted big letters in the windows that spelled out ROAR, and anyone passing by in City Hall Plaza could look up and see what seemed to be the official endorsement of ROAR by City Hall.
Singer: His name is Garrity. You know darn well, he can go to hell. We’ll do it ROAR’s way.
Bob Monahan, South Boston Resident: We had motorcades to draw attention and noise through the whole town that we’re against this. We drove by Garrity’s house in Wellesley. It was exciting. How can that be exciting? You know, but as a teenager, with all that activity, that is one way I would describe the experience.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: It all culminated that fall just before school opened with a 10,000-person demonstration in Government Center.
September 9, 1974
TV Reporter: Today, the people who gathered on City Hall Plaza were angry. Their battle against busing has been lost. They said they were coming to tell Senators Kennedy and Brooke exactly how the city feels about their consistent support for busing.
Lisa McGoff Collins, Charlestown Resident: I can remember it was an angry, angry time. No matter what we said, all these people that we looked up to at one time in our lives were turning against us.
Ira Jackson, Kevin White’s Chief of Staff: Our senior senator, Ted Kennedy, is walking through City Hall Plaza surrounded by a crowd of angry anti-busing activists who confronted him, jostled him. Kennedy took a punch in the gut. I was there. I saw it. His aides were helping him evade the crowd which was getting angrier and angrier.
Bob Monahan, South Boston Resident: Security got the senator into the building safely and a number of folks just started pounding on the glass, and it broke.
Ira Jackson, Kevin White’s Chief of Staff: If that glass had shattered on Ted Kennedy, he could have been killed. Thirty-foot high plate glass shattering is something to behold. It was a very scary moment. There was no dialogue during this period. There was only historical division and hatred. This was just as polarized, just as ugly as any place on the earth.
Kevin White: Good evening. As we all know, in three days, the city of Boston will face one of her greatest challenges: busing.
Ira Jackson, Kevin White’s Chief Of Staff: That night Kevin White asked for permission from the three major networks to give a live speech. I wrote a speech and he delivered it.
Kevin White: To every mother and father, I pledge tonight that your mayor and that your police department will tolerate no threat to the well-being of your children.
Ira Jackson, Kevin White’s Chief of Staff: Right after Kevin White delivered his speech, the police commissioner informed us that Whitey Bulger, who was then a notorious gangster, was planning to shoot and kill Black children as the buses rolled on what they called opening day. We were at the precipice of anarchy, civil war. What you could feel was the palpable fear and animosity that just hung over the city like an explosion just waiting for a match to be lit.
South Boston
September 12, 1974
Bob Monahan, South Boston Resident: The morning of, you hear the helicopters. It started at six. It just accentuated the tension that was in the community.
Carl Johnson, Teacher: The first day was anticipated to be chaotic and it was. There were lots of people who were there to watch what was going on. There were truckfuls of cameras and everything else. The kids hadn’t even come yet.
Phyllis Ellison-Feaster, Student: I was assigned to South Boston High School. I had a new outfit for the first day of school because no sophomore could wear clothes that they wore in their freshman year. I was looking forward to, you know, going to a football or a basketball game. I was looking forward to having friends and some after school activities.
Transportation Official: The first three buses, please. South Boston High School now loading.
Ira Jackson, Kevin White’s Chief of Staff: I met the police commissioner and then the superintendent. We went to South Bay which is where the buses were going to come and basically form a wagon train going up the heights to South Boston High School.
Phyllis Ellison-Feaster, Student: We get to a certain point and all you see is a sea of people with signs and yelling at the students that are on the bus. I wondered to myself, why would a person get up that early in the morning to taunt Black students?
Ira Jackson, Kevin White’s Chief of Staff: They were greeted with an angry crowd, yelling the N word and literally throwing bananas at some of the Black kids. It was the ugliest that I’ve ever experienced human nature.
Leon Rock, Activist: As the kids were getting out of the buses, thousands of residents from South Boston were screaming at the Black students, “Nigger, go home, Nigger, go home.”
Jim Vrabel, Writer: There were very few white students going to school that first day because the anti-busing side had called for a boycott of schools.
Carl Johnson, Teacher: I had 35 kids assigned to each class and less than half of those kids came to my class. One of the reasons why they boycotted was they were hoping that they would rescind the order and allow their children to go to South Boston High School. It was kind of a waiting game for them.
Ione Malloy, Teacher: The desegregation plan for the first year, the sophomores would be bused from Roxbury to South Boston High School. The junior class was supposed to go to Roxbury. And the seniors could choose either South Boston or Roxbury.
Richard Hunt, Reporter: At Roxbury High School in the heart of the Black district, most of the buses sent to bring in white students arrived empty or with only a few passengers. Only 234 pupils, 20 whites and 214 Blacks came to school. The student body is supposed to be about 900.
Black Girl: I think it's going to be alright if everybody comes and stops being scared because, shoot, I don't think there's nothing to be scared of.
Reporter: How do you think things are going to work out here at Roxbury High?
White Girl: I don’t know. I guess they’ll work out alright. If the parents stay out of it all and let the kids work it out for themselves, it'll be all right.
South Boston
Phyllis Ellison-Feaster, Student: Most of the teachers and the administrators, they tried to keep us away from the windows because of what was going on outside.
Richard Hunt, Reporter: At least twice, stones and bottles began to fly and the police charged in a column led by policemen on horseback. The police charges cleared the way for the buses to pick up the Black students at the end of the day.
Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Professor of Constitutional Law: It’s clear whites who do not want blacks in their schools are acting in just the same way as violent whites in the South.
Bob Monahan, South Boston Resident: I’m not uncomplicit in this. If you saw it on the television, I was there. There was a sense that we were going to lose our community. I had no interest in throwing bricks or a rock, and most people didn’t. We weren’t raised that way. But it happened, people throwing bricks and rocks.
Michael Patrick MacDonald, Writer: I was eight years old, but I needed to feel or pretend that I was part of this thing. Throwing a rock was part of being of the mob, of the us.
Leon Rock, Roxbury Resident: When we got to the staging area, waiting for the buses to come back, we saw that the buses had broken windows. It was painful because the kids were coming out crying. Some parents showed up. Some of the kids didn’t have their parents to support them.
Ira Jackson, Kevin White’s Chief of Staff: When I reported to Kevin White on opening day that no Black child had been killed, we thought that was a victory. It was the saddest day in Boston’s history. But if a Black children had been killed, there would have been a civil war.
Hubie Jones, Activist: That night, Black leaders were enraged because the public safety of their kids was in jeopardy. They called a meeting to which they invited Mayor White to make it quite clear to him, we expect you to make sure that our kids are safe. We are not going to accept anything but that and you are not doing that.
Ira Jackson, Kevin White’s Chief of Staff: It was a very tough night for Kevin White to face angry, frightened Black parents because he had promised them that their children would be safe and they weren’t. He had to admit that he had failed and he asked for their forgiveness, but he wasn’t able to deliver on the first and most important obligation that any leader has, which is to keep his community safe.
Hubie Jones, Activist: Black leaders had to make a tough decision to ask Black parents to stay the course. Tough decision. All along the way, Black parents have had to make very difficult decisions in order to assert their rights and to use their kids in the process.
September 13, 1974
Bus Monitor: We're so proud of you, kids. I know it, it takes courage. I know you’re scared when they throw rocks and bottles at you. But we're determined. You kids want education, you're going to get it.
Phyllis Ellison-Feaster, Student: The second day, the black students had to be escorted by Boston police officers because of what had happened on the first day.
Robert di Grazia
Boston Police Commissioner
Reporter: How long do you anticipate the need for police protection for the kids going to South Boston?
Robert di Grazia: As long as it's necessary.
Reporter: Is it possible that it would continue until next year, until school is out?
Robert di Grazia: I don't think so. Certainly not planning on it, but we'll be here if it's necessary.
Garry Armstrong, TV Reporter: We have marching orders to go out and get stories that were forceful, that ignited passion. If anyboy id yelling, make sure you get that. Now if they get angry with you, make sure you share that. These were the stories that were picked up by the networks. There were people who were more tolerant, who were not being heard from. So a nation saw a city in turmoil, a city about to explode because that’s how we were covering it.
Henry Allen, Activist: When you look at the protest against desegregation, it was mostly at the high school level. There was a very small number of schools where there was violence.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: There were three geographic enclaves that still had semblances of a neighborhood school system. They were South Boston, Charlestown, and East Boston. Because they were so geographically isolated, they were still sending their kids to neighborhood schools. Those three neighborhoods fought hardest to keep what they had, and South Boston being the only one involved the first year, fought first.
Al Holland, Roxbury Resident: I just remember, we got on the van with the Black teachers because it wasn’t safe for white teachers, but it wasn’t safe for Black teachers to drive their cars up there. We got in the caravan with the school buses, motorcycle escorts, patrol cars and I said, “Wow, this is how you start your day? It’s like you’re going to an armed encampment.” By the time kids even got off the bus, they were tense. Each day your stomach would knot up.
Reporter: You've had a chance now to watch for three weeks how this school is going to operate logistically day in and day out. Have you formed an opinion yet on whether or not education can be accomplished, if teaching can go on in this kind of circumstance?
Dr. William Reid: I have formed opinions.
Reporter: What's your opinion?
Dr. William Reid: I think it's almost self-evident.
Dr. William Reid: Come on! Go to school or go home! Come on, LaRosa.
Al Holland, Roxbury Resident: Dr. Reid, the principal, really cared about the kids, but was almost powerless to do anything because he had no control. The community outside was controlling the kids.
Phyllis Ellison-Feaster, Student: I woke up in the morning thinking about what’s going to happen inside of the building that day. White students would often call Black students a “nigger.” Sometimes they would make like a grunting sound like we were apes.
White Teenage Girl: It’s tense. It's always tense in the classroom because you never know when a fight is going to break out. I mean, you give someone a wrong look and they jump right on your back.
Al Holland, Roxbury Resident: The black kids didn’t go over there to start trouble. Black kids were scared. So the kids who were initiating a lot of the fighting was white kids. When fights occurred, black kids were being jumped, but they were being suspended.
Phyllis Ellison-Feaster, Student: My brother could not take the bullying, the harassment. He eventually stopped attending school.
Black Teenage Girl: Going over there to me is like going to a war Because that's all we do over there is fight.
Black Teenage Boy: You can't get an education and watch your back at the same time.
Al Holland, Roxbury Resident: Black kids went through a heck of a lot to go to South Boston High School, to go and get an education where they weren’t welcome. They paid a heavy price. And white kids paid a heavy price because that community used those kids like pawns and sacrificed their education as well.
December 11, 1974
Carl Johnson, Teacher: At the end of the second period, the bell rang. I went out in the corridor. I noticed there were a large bunch of white youngsters. A bookbag came hurtling out of the crowd towards these two Black boys. And as the white kids turned to flee, one of the Black youngsters came forward and stabbed one of the white boys. My God! I was just in shock.
Phyllis Ellison-Feaster, Student: I was going into the main office. I heard voices saying, “The niggers killed him. They killed him.” And then just, you know, chaos inside of the building.
Ione Malloy, Teacher: I went to the office and I told the secretary, call an ambulance. And then there was a communication: “White students leave the building. All Black students should go to their classrooms.”
Bob Monahan, South Boston Resident: When the kids were dismissed and they said, a white kid had got stabbed, of course, that goes through the whole community. And I went up to the high school.
Phyllis Ellison-Feaster, Student: The crowd had grown outside and it had grown and grown.
Bob Monahan, South Boston Resident: There were a number of Black students—a couple hundred maybe—they were trapped. It was an angry crowd saying pretty angry things. “Bus them back to Africa” and, you know, that stuff. Those kids could definitely hear the chants. I can’t imagine [cries]. I can’t imagine how those kids felt.
Reporter Judy Stoia: The crowd's anger spread to include not only the Black students inside the school, but the policemen outside as well. Mounted police rode into the crowd in an effort to split it, but they were met by bricks, bottles, eggs, and verbal abuse. Missiles flew from the sidewalks, the back of the crowd, and from the rooftops.
Ione Malloy, Teacher: Louise Day Hicks was on the front steps telling the crowd to let the students go back to Roxbury.
Louise Day Hicks: Now there is only one way to get them back to Roxbury, and that is to let them go back by bus. I am going to ask you. Will you please move to the other side of the street so they can go back?
Ione Malloy, Teacher: She looked frightened because she couldn’t control them.
Phyllis Ellison-Feaster, Student: We were wondering, like how are we going to get out of here? There was a sea of people, and, and it was so violent.
Bob Monahan, South Boston Resident: They came up with a brilliant plan. They sent decoy buses up to the front. At the same time they would escort the Black students to buses that were behind the school. We were waiting for the buses, never thinking the buses were already there in the back of the building.
Phyllis Ellison-Feaster, Student: The students ran out the back door to get on those buses. You could hear the crowd. All I could think of was what would happen if that crowd had caught me, so I ran as fast as I possibly could to get on the bus and I ducked and I laid on the floor.
Black student: And they ran us off the buses, and they ran us off the school.
Black Student: And parents and everything were up there trying to hurt us.
Ione Malloy, Teacher: The police dispersed the crowd and that was the end of that day. Teachers went out to the car and I remember a bird flew over. We all ducked because everything was so fearful.
January 8, 1975
Newscaster: South Boston High School reopened today for the first time in almost a month. Only about one quarter of the students showed up today and at the main building, there were more police than students.
Phyllis Ellison-Feaster, Student: When you walked into the building, there were metal detectors where the students had to go through. In the hallways, you had state troopers every ten feet or so, so it was almost as if you were in prison. As a student, it was really difficult for learning because of the tension in the building. Some of the teachers did try but there was a lot, in my opinion, they just try to get through the day.
Carl Johnson, Teacher: There were kids who came in every day, basically. There were some kids who would walk into the classroom and I’d say, “Who are you? You know.”
Judy Stoia: Many parents are balking at court ordered desegregation. In fact, they've taken it a step further and set up their own underground or alternative schools. These schools are not accredited and therefore they're not legal.
Bob Monahan, South Boston Resident: I actually was a volunteer teacher. The South Boston information center, where the rallies were planned, in the front room—the same mimeograph, where you would run off the fliers—I would run off my papers for class.
Judy Stoia: There's also an alternative school for black children in Boston set up for many of the same reasons. Parents are afraid to send their children into hostile, perhaps dangerous environments and choose instead to set up their own schools.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: Cardinal Medeiros had decreed that Catholic schools should not be a refuge for those seeking to leave the public schools and it was widely ignored.
Joe Burnieika, Dorchester Resident: If you didn’t like getting bused to Roxbury you just went to your local parish parochial school. If you work the bingo on Friday night and cleaned up afterwards, x numbers of dollars would be taken off your tuition.
Michael Patrick Macdonald, Writer: Myself, Kevin and Cathy, got into parochial school. My mother was a hustler. She started teaching tap dancing in the schools. The more volunteer work you did, the less you paid.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: By the end of 1974 school year, 10,000 children had been withdrawn from the Boston Public School system.
Thomas Atkins
President, Boston NAACP
Reporter: How do you speak to the frequent allegation that what we're doing is creating and or inciting or urging on this white flight? The argument, as you have said, is probably most often used here that you're going to destroy the city?
Thomas Atkins, President, Boston NAACP: Very simple answer. If the price of whites staying is blacks losing constitutional rights and educational benefits, let them go. Simple answer.
Eric Van Loon, Plaintiffs’ Attorney: Judge Garrity had ordered the state plan into effect in September 1974. It was not a plan that eliminated segregation root and branch, which was the phrase of the supreme court decisions. So, a more comprehensive plan needed to be developed. Judge Garrity ordered that the Boston School Committee come up with a plan and gave them a deadline in mid-December to do that.
Pam Bullard: The committee is under a court order to file a second phase desegregation plan this Monday. The question remaining is, will the school committee approve the plan and send it on to Judge Garrity?
John Kerrigan, Chairman, Boston School Committee: People are leaving the city, people are leaving the school system, and I cannot in good conscience add to that bloodshed, add to that racial hatred, and add to the further fleeing of the city from the people of Boston, and I will not vote approval of this plan.
Eric Van Loon, Plaintiffs’ Attorney: When it came time to submit it to the court, the school committee members said, we refuse. We won’t do it. We’ll do nothing to aid or abet forced busing. On behalf of the Black parents, and the Black students, we asked Judge Garrity to find the school committee in criminal and civil contempt.
Ira Jackson, Kevin White’s Chief of Staff: Why didn’t the judge hold them in contempt? I don’t understand why given how they ignored, and abused, and flaunted his orders, they were let off the hook.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: Garrity commissioned his experts, Robert Dentler and Marvin Scott, to come up with another plan called Phase Two.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: Phase Two increased the number of students to be bused. Instead of just junior high school and high school students, it was to be students from grades 1 to 12.
Eric Van Loon, Plaintiffs’ Attorney: Garrity, ordered more Black teachers to be hired, more Black administrators to be hired, and for those to be assigned schools on a desegregated basis.
Henry Allen, Activist: Garrity recognized that there was almost no parent involvement, so the Racial/Ethnic Parent Councils were established.
It was literally the first time in the history of the city where large numbers of Black and white parents and some Latino and Asian parents sat together. This would be a revolution in the city of Boston.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: We move into the summer of 1975. The scene shifts to Charlestown, which is now part of the busing plan for the first time. It was now going to lose its neighborhood school system if it adhered to the Phase Two requirements.
Rev. William Joy: There was a sense in Charlestown. It was like there was a tsunami coming. It was a foreboding. It pervaded everything. It’s one thing to read about it in the newspaper, but to walk into it and to feel it and to get a sense that, yeah, it’s not in their best interests in many ways.
Pam Bullard: What is the attitude of the parents that you have contact with? Are many students going to even return to Charlestown High this fall?
Frank Power: We've transferred as many as six to eight students each week since June 20th.
Pam Bullard: Where are these students heading?
Frank Power: Generally, they're moving into what I would call lower middle-class areas in surrounding communities on the north side of the city.
Lisa McGoff Collins, Charlestown Resident: My mother joined Powder Keg with all her friends. It was an organization of Charlestown mothers that were here to help try to fight forced busing. My mother said, “If you want to go to school you can go to school. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to.” I decided to go to school because I really wanted to go to Charlestown High. It was something I was looking forward to. If I had been assigned to Roxbury, I wouldn’t have gone. I did not want to get on a bus.
Reporter: Do you think that the project has been hit particularly hard by busing as opposed to the rest of Charlestown?
Rev. William Joy: Well, I think you'd find the project has had to bear the brunt of children who have had to leave Charlestown to go to school.
Reporter: Why is that?
Rev. William Joy: I think that my own experience is that the other sections of Charlestown, that the kids have either gone to parochial schools or have gone to private schools.
Father Bill Joy: There were several evenings in the summer, in which parents from Roxbury were bused into Charlestown High School, and I can remember parents black parents coming out, they’re saying, “I don’t want my kid going to this school. My kid is getting bused to this school? It’s a dump.”
September 8, 1975
Ira Jackson, Kevin White’s Chief Of Staff: During the first phase of busing, we wanted as light a police presence as possible. We didn’t want to antagonize the crowd, but clearly the tactics we adopted that first day were inadequate, so the second year was an entirely different approach, and it was a much more massive physical presence of police.
WCVB Report
Reporter: The implementation plan called for 997 police officers. They were in attendance. Also, state police in South Boston had a complement of 499. The MDC in South Boston, there were 82, this is at South Boston, also the MDC at Charlestown with 215.
Rev. William Joy: The first day of busing was, everybody was on eggshells. “What’s going to happen when the buses are going to come? Which way are they coming?” They went on the streets and figured, “If we’re on the streets, the buses are not going to run us over. We can stop busing by being on the streets and blocking the buses.” But the police just put up a blockade and the buses went a different route.
Moe Gillen, Charlestown Resident: I got out early and the helicopters were overhead. There were snipers on the buildings. The place was ringed with police and it was chaotic.
Lisa McGoff Collins, Charlestown Resident: I met up with my two friends. We had on our matching Coca-Cola pants and our little shirts to match. I just remember motorcycle cops up and down the street. It sounded like, you know Nazi Germany instead of, you know, your first day of school. As you got to the square, there were a sea of cameras, cameras everywhere.
Rev. William Joy: Charlestown was like the center of the universe. There were reporters from all over the place. We had Japanese reporters. I don’t understand. What is a Japanese reporter from Tokyo doing here covering busing?
Lisa Mcgoff Collins, Charlestown Resident: We walked up the hill. There were people who don’t want us to go to school. People yelling, you know, calling us names, “You N lover.” You know, “Stay out of the building.” Some people really believed that if everybody stayed out of school and didn’t go, then busing would not be an issue.
White Teenage boy: Why am I not going to school? I’m boycotting.
Reporter: How come?
White Teenage boy: How come? Why do you think? The cops are up there. They’re locking the schools from the outside. Busing’s busing. I don’t want nothing to do with it.
Reporter: How long are you going to stay out?
White Teenage boy: All year.
Reporter: Really?
White Teenage boy: All year.
Rev. William Joy: During the daytimes, the mothers would march and they’d take the little kids with them and maybe the baby carriages.
Moe Gillen, Charlestown Resident: They protested in the street. Sit down. Sit down in the street. They did it sometimes to aggravate as opposed to expecting any real success in anything.
September 9, 1975
Ed Baumeister: There were 14 arrests in Boston today, bringing the total since schools opening to 94. Nine policemen have been injured, mainly in nighttime disturbances.
Rev. William Joy: At night when it got dark, it was a little bit more ugly and there were objects thrown at the police. Windows were broken, molotov cocktails, or bottles like that, and it could have just exploded,
Robert di Grazia: Last night, a mob of several hundred people started stoning civilian cars and setting fires in the streets and then attacked responding firefighters. It was this mob that then attacked police attempting to protect the citizens and the firefighters. The quickest way we can get the city back to normal is to stop the troublemakers.
Rev. William Joy: But the police were very restrained. They knew these people.
Joe Burnieika, Dorchester Resident: The police department was trying to police their own people, basically. I think they were lenient to say the least on some of those issues. Some of the district court judges had an umbrage against Judge Garrity. They were more concerned about the perpetrator than the victim during those days.
Reporter: I think the cops, whatever you may else you may say, are doing a first rate job.
Thomas Atkins: Let me ask you a question. If the kind of scenes crowd scenes you've encountered in Charlestown, where the crowds were white, was to be taking place in Roxbury, where the crowds were Black, do you for one minute think that we would have a situation like we have today where the total arrests that have been made over there have been less than 20. Do you for one minute think that that would prevail? That’s the answer to your question. We’re dealing with a double standard of law enforcement. And as long as that continues, then we're going to continue to have a problem where people will think they can enforce the law on the street with their fists or with the rock or with the bottle.
Rev. William Joy: One of the difficulties in the schools was the influence of the adults inciting and plotting and planning for the kids to, you know, “10 o’clock, 10:30 you’re going to walk out. And we’ll get the press there, okay.”
Lisa McGoff Collins, Charlestown Resident: They would plan at Powder Keg the night before and we’d let the kids know, and then say, “Okay, as soon as the bell rings, everybody stay in your seat. Don’t anybody leave.”
Officer: The children have a series of demands to make. The school authorities don't want to listen to the demands while they're still seated inside the school.
Lisa McGoff Collins, Charlestown Resident: I remember being picked up physically by policemen to bring us outside the building. Some kids just did it just so that they could get out of school, you know. So, there was a lot of chaos going on and everybody was joining in on it.
Henry Allen, Activist: Of some 164 schools in Boston, there was a very small number of schools where there was violence. The vast majority of public schools in Boston were successfully desegregated. In the beginning, a lot of parents kept their kids out of school, Black and white, mostly because, “What does this mean?”
Journalist: You have a child, one child, two child, how many?
White Mother: I have two children, one going to the McKay in East Boston and one going to the Kent in Charlestown. So, I've been going in two directions, you know.
Journalist: Will you still send them in light of what you’ve heard?
White Mother: Yeah. You know, I think when I think it over, I will, but I'll be frightened and I'll be very nervous about it. But, you know, I think that we have to do it. We don't, we don't have a choice and I want Phase Two to work and I just don't think we can boycott.
Henry Allen, Activist: You could find these white parents emerging in these white working class communities and saying, “Yes, segregation is wrong. We want something better for Black children and something better for white children.”
Joe Burnieika, Dorchester Resident: Maureen and I both supported public education, but it was a huge decision. We were going to send our kid on a bus as a first grader into Roxbury. So, it took the summer for us to discuss that. All my neighbors, you know, thought we were nuts putting him on a bus, having him get stoned at Savin Hill Ave. because there were Black kids on the bus. And then when they got to Roxbury, getting stoned by Black kids because there are white kids on the bus. Unfortunately, it became almost normal. And that’s a sad indictment for a seven or eight-year-old kid.
Michael Patrick Macdonald, Writer: There were very rational voices. People who were opposed to the racism but also opposed to the busing plan and who, once it happened, wanted to make it happen without the violence, wanted their kids to be safe, and wanted other kids from across town who were black to be safe.
Bob Monanhan: Tracy Amalfitano and Jim lived literally right across the street. She actually joined, biracial council. Tracy and others were deploring the violence and just trying to get folks to calm down.
Bob Monanhan: The one incident that is still seared into my memory [cries]. My brothers and I are outside. Out of nowhere came a mob. They had bats. Tracy’s station wagon got busted up with bats. Bricks or rocks were thrown through the windows of Tracy’s three-decker. So we’re just stunned that this happened. And then it got worse in that several cars come down the street slowly and in the cars were some women. One of them had this shit-eating grin. The translation: “This is what happens if you turn traitor on our community.” [Cries] I didn’t go to any more rallies after that. For me, it wasn’t exciting anymore.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: The culmination for most people of the violence happened in April of 1976, as Boston—the birthplace of liberty, the hotbed of abolition—was celebrating the bicentennial.
Lisa Mcgoff Collins, Charlestown Resident: We were going to march on City Hall, and I remember walking with my friend and her mom, and we’re singing and you know everybody is all roiled-up. As we got onto the Plaza, there were a lot of people there.
Ted Landsmark, Attorney/Architect: I was walking across City Hall Plaza on my way to attend a meeting in City Hall. I realized that there was an anti-busing demonstration going on. Several of them started shouting, “There’s a Nigger, get him.” The first person to attack me knocked my glasses off and that caused me to fall, and then several other young men decided to start kicking me. I was able to pick myself up and I could see that someone was swinging an American flag at me, really lunging at me with the flag.
Lisa Mcgoff Collins, Charlestown Resident: I see all this happening, and I remember crying and saying, “Why is this happening?” Because when you did these peaceful marches you don’t want people to think of us as, “Here come the troublemakers.”
Ted Landsmark, Lawyer: That evening, I got a call from the Boston Police saying that a photographer had captured the incident and they wanted me to see if I could identify any of the young people. That was the first moment that I really got to see the expressions on the faces of these teenagers. It was clear that there was manifest hatred that several of the young men felt towards me.
Ira Jackson, Kevin White’s Chief of Staff: The Pulitzer-prize winning photograph became the world-famous emblem of hatred: the American flag, a Black professional architect walking through City Hall Plaza, and the violence that was inflicted upon him as a result of hatred.
Jim Vrabel, Writer: The violence continued from year to year. It was sporadic, hard to anticipate.
Lisa McGoff Collins, Charlestown Resident: People were so angry back then. The tensions carried over from the school into the streets. I don’t even think it had nothing to do with busing anymore. Anytime something bad happened to a Black person, something bad would happen to a white person.
News Anchor: At least three more incidents were reported today in the continuing racial violence in Boston.
Lisa McGoff Collins, Charlestown Resident: It was like a retaliation throughout the city for a long time. People being pulled out of cars and beaten up and you know just terrible stuff.
Joe Burnieika, Dorchester Resident: People don’t realize how very close the city came to just completely exploding. I’m talking about the whole city. It came very, very close.
Charles Glenn, Massachusetts Dept Of Education: In the middle of all this chaos, I wrote in my journal, Fiat justitia ruat caelum: Do justice, though the heavens fall. I remember reflecting then, “What good will it do to do justice if the heavens fall and what would justice look like among the ruins?”
Bryant Rollins, Journalist: If there had been a way for deep dialogue between blacks and whites, a lot of the conflict that arose during the ‘60s and ‘70s was avoidable. People were in a state of violent agreement. What we agreed about was the inefficacy of busing. White parents didn’t want it for their kids, and black parents would have preferred not to have to have busing if they had quality schools. We did not slow down, take a deep breath, take a step back and ask ourselves what’s possible together. That’s a tragedy. Everybody has lost.
Text on Screen:
Judge Arthur Garrity returned control of the Boston Public Schools to the School Committee in 1985.
By that time, 36,479 children had left the school system; 72% of students in the system were children of color.
Boston ended busing for desegregation in 1999.
