Desegregating Boston Schools: Reports from the 1970s

Introduction

The history of racial segregation in the United States is a long and ongoing one which persists to this day. Writing in “Whiteness as Property” (1993), an essay exploring the way American law has worked to enshrine and protect whiteness, Cheryl Harris notes the origins of segregation back to the 17th century when the first slave codes appeared, and laws began to emerge which parceled out differential treatment based on racial categories.¹ These included laws forbidding the education of Blacks. In the wake of the Federal Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling on Brown v Board of Education, this long history of segregation within the education system was challenged. However, change rarely comes easily or without struggle. One example of this struggle could be seen in the city of Boston, where the fight to desegregate the public school system dragged on for decades after the Supreme Court’s initial ruling.

This timeline project seeks a better understanding of the obstacles and issues facing schools, students, and society during this tumultuous era. To this end, the project examines official documentation from school monitors, and news reports from 1976 for two Boston area high schools—Hyde Park High School and the L Street Annex.

Reading the Timeline

This timeline displays the information gathered from the monitor reports in the Boston College archive, as well as drawing upon contemporaneous media accounts gathered during research. Individual events are marked on the timeline with details for each event appearing in the cards above the timeline itself. Each card contains a brief summary of the monitor reports or news reports with accompanying images when possible, along with links to digital copies of the original report and the archive or repository it was drawn from.

In three instances there are small colored tabs beneath the timeline, these colored tabs are intended to highlight periods of time that tie certain clusters of incidents together. The first of these indicates a period of unrest at Hyde Park High School which saw the school faced with a series of incidents that went beyond the typical protests or isolated acts of violence Boston area schools faced. The second highlights a period of time where L Street Annex went through a similar situation, with protests and acts of violence that went beyond the norm, resulting in the school's temporary shutdown. The third and final tab indicates an extended period where the Boston School System was rocked by a series of bomb scares, affecting both Hyde Park High School and the L Street Annex, in addition to other Boston area schools not included on the timeline. Contemporary media reports are present for each cluster and are intended to highlight the severity of the situation as well as to expand upon information gleaned from the original monitor reports.

Notes

1. Cheryl I. Harris, "Whiteness as Property," Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1718, JSTOR.↩