Desegregating Boston Schools: Reports from the 1970s

Boston Desegregation in Context

About Boston School Desegregation

Although the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education declared the racial segregation of schools to be unconstitutional, public schools in Boston remained racially segregated into the 1970s, due in part to discriminatory housing policies that kept neighborhoods segregated de facto as well as efforts by the Boston School Committee to prevent the integration of the city’s schools.¹ In 1974, District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity ruled in Morgan v. Hennigan that such segregation was illegal and put forward a plan to integrate Boston Public Schools (BPS). In order to achieve a racial balance, some students would be bused to schools in other neighborhoods. This busing plan ignited long-simmering racial animosity, particularly among residents of predominantly white neighborhoods like South Boston and Charlestown. Protesters - students and adults alike - regularly disrupted the school day, harassing and sometimes physically attacking Black students bused to formerly white schools.²

Over the next several years, Boston became infamous for the racist violence perpetrated by white segregationists, assaulting ordinary Black people in the street and firebombing NAACP headquarters.³ The results of the desegregation order were mixed. Busing significantly increased racial balance in schools but the parents of many white students enrolled their children in private schools or moved out of the city altogether, a phenomenon known as white flight. By 1985, the Boston School Committee regained control of BPS and in 2013, it dramatically decreased the scope of the busing program. The desegregation of Boston schools demonstrated how de facto segregation in a northern city proves very difficult to dismantle, entrenched by centuries of systemic racism and perpetuated by the racist attitudes of many white Northerners.