Desegregating Boston Schools: Reports from the 1970s

Background & Theory

Boston School Desegregation in Political and Social Context

The primary goal of school desegregation opponents was maintaining the homogeneity of mainly white neighborhood schools, even before the 1974 Morgan v. Hennigan decision. The Boston School Committee endorsed METCO, the voluntary program which bused Black students from Boston to suburban schools, in the 1960s in the hopes of preventing integration in urban schools.¹ In the 1974 Morgan decision, Judge W. Arthur Garrity condemned the BSC’s many efforts to keep Boston’s neighborhood schools segregated, thus challenging the existing political geography and racial hierarchies of the city.² Over the next two years, students and adults opposed to integration in these neighborhoods frequently staged protests and walk-outs to disrupt the school day, sometimes physically attacking Black students as well as people of color throughout white neighborhoods. This so-called “backlash” to the Garrity decision can be understood as the continuation of a long-term political movement for school segregation.

“Political Geography” Theory

This project uses the framework of “political geography” theory, which considers how the spatial boundaries delineating urban neighborhoods can create and perpetuate racial and economic inequality.³ Historically, predominantly non-white neighborhoods had less political power than mainly white neighborhoods and their neighborhood schools received less funding, worsening systemic inequality in economic mobility and political influence. This project examines three high schools located in the mostly white neighborhoods of South Boston, Hyde Park, and Charlestown. When these neighborhood high schools were racially integrated following the 1974 Morgan v. Hennigan decision, school leaders feared that the realignment of political geography would cause unrest among the white students of those neighborhoods.

Citywide Coordinating Council (CCC)

Beginning in May 1975, Phase II of the court-ordered desegregation plan created the Citywide Coordinating Council (CCC), an independent citizens’ organization to oversee the plan’s implementation in Boston Public Schools. The CCC comprised a racially-diverse coalition of parents and educational, business, and civic leaders from across Boston tasked with monitoring student and staff desegregation in schools, investigating bilingual, vocational, and special needs education, and reporting its findings to the court.⁴ CCC monitors created the monitor reports used in this project during the spring semester of 1976, when tensions were still high in the second year of desegregation.

Police Presence in Schools

CCC monitors often noted the presence of both local and state police officers in these schools, particularly during the arrival and departure of Black students on buses. Many Boston schools have maintained some sort of daily police presence in the decades since desegregation and by examining the data in CCC monitor reports, we can better understand the correlation between student behavior, disciplinary actions, and police presence in this period.

Surveillance and the CCC Monitor Reports

Both the CCC monitors and police officers can be understood as conducting surveillance within the school buildings and grounds, shaping the way that students, teachers, and administrators acted in conscious and subconscious ways. Since the 2000s, scholars and policymakers have seriously considered the long-term developmental effects that daily surveillance by police officers and other types of monitors might have on schoolchildren and the ethics of this practice.⁵ The Law & Order BPS project uses data compiled from CCC monitor reports, documents created by individuals with both conscious and unconscious biases whose presence in the schools potentially impacted student behavior. This project, therefore, does not claim to recover the lived experience of the historical subjects of these reports but rather examines these sources as part of the school disciplinary regime.