Desegregating Boston Schools: Reports from the 1970s

Conclusion

In looking at the timeline several things become noticeable. The first is that despite long stretches of seeming calm, there was always a level of tension lurking beneath the surface at each school, secondly, the lack of detail in the monitor reports suggest blind spots in the observation process, and third is the suggestion that a more nuanced understanding of the situation may prove useful in defusing and handling some of the tensions within the schools.

Nowhere are these three points more noticeable than in the contrast between the Gladys Staples’ Hyde Park High School Reports, and Marilyn Neyer’s L Street Annex reports. Staples’ “Quiet Times at Hyde Park High” segment consists of four reports paint a picture of relative calm and ease, immediately followed by three days of unrest, including a flag burning, protests, and large scale violence. That Reed was unable to sense or see the impending conflict and unrest suggests a blind spot or lack of insight into what was actually occurring within the school. Her discussion of the school is distant and impersonal, referring the students and numbers, but rarely mentioning individuals.

This is in stark contrast to Marilyn Neyer’s January 27th report on L Street Annex which discusses students and school staff by name, including noting locations which have environmental problems and issues. Her details on a student pushing headmaster McCormick mentions both the boy’s name and his ethnicity, implying a level of familiarity completely absent from Staples’ report. While this familiarity and awareness does not mean a complete end to the issues facing the school, it does assist in handling the more personal one-on-one conflicts. As Neyer explains in her report, Most of the kids seem to have some respect for Mr. McCormick, and want to avoid getting caught by him.¹ Not only is Neyer capable of giving a fuller picture of the daily workings of the school thanks to her own familiarity, but she also suggests that he faculty and staff’s familiarity with the students aids in defusing tensions and situations before they arise. This level of familiarity and comprehensiveness is common within Neyer’s reports, in her report on March 3rd she refers back to this shoving incident. While it may not seem like much, for those whose only glimpse into the situation facing the students, faculty, and staff, Neyer’s reference not only creates a sense of continuity and history for the school, but it also builds and creates a recurring figure in the form of the male Puerto Rican student offender. Altogether, Neyer’s reports allows those reading and receiving the reports to better judge the mood of the school in the lead up to the larger incidents while also isolating key figures involved in the various incidents. This information ultimately suggests that the desegregation effort requires more than just placing monitors in the schools and requiring them to write about what they observe, that a more hands on and involved approach may produce more useful information and results on the day-to-day basis and help the monitors truly grasp the situations playing out before them.

The lack of details and information in the monitor reports can also serve to obscure and hide specific information which may help us to better understand all the factors at play. This is most evident when looking at the reports during the period of Hyde Park Unrest. The non-standard reports on the three days of incidents contains a brief mention of a Mrs. Palladino and Mrs. Hicks attending a meeting between faculty and the area superintendent. With no further information or context, one might be inclined to assume they were teachers or representatives of the teacher’s union. However, a Boston Globe article on the event reveals them to be members of an anti-busing organization, with Mrs. Hicks being both the head of the Boston School Committee and the head a national anti-busing organization. This not only reveals how complex the situation at the time actually was, that not only were the students and faculty involved, but outside national groups were actively involved and occupying positions of institutional power at the time as well. The situation then grows beyond the walls of the school and allows us a glimpse at the pressures and larger forces at work, prompting questions about their role in the violence seen within the schools as well as the larger protests and clashes occurring outside as well.

At first, this might seem like something which only affects contemporary research into this period, while modern scholars may not know who Mrs. Hicks and Mrs. Palladino was, the court systems involved almost certainly knew who these individuals were. However, it also suggests limitations of the monitor reports themselves. The lack of discussion on individual figures suggest potential blind spots in their observations. Blind spots which may obscure different forces at play the monitors are not taking into consideration. Pressures from outside of the school, connected to the desegregation issue or not, influence student’s behavior within the school and a lack of awareness of discussion of the students as individuals casts them as a monolithic group acting solely based upon racial lines. What pressures are the students facing outside of the school that may cause them to act out? What is the relationship between the various students who come into conflict with one another? A few monitor reports gesture towards the issues, but such observations and insight are often missing.

This is best embodied by the L Street Annex bomb scare. When this incident is viewed solely through the monitor reports it becomes a single, minor, isolated incident with an assumed connection to the ongoing desegregation struggle. However, when media reports are included, it is instead linked to a series of bomb scares through the city’s schools which occurred in the wake of a bombing on the Suffolk County Courthouse from earlier in the month—which was apparently unrelated to the desegregation issue facing the schools at the time. As explained in a New York Times article from July 1976, the Suffolk County Courthouse bombing was linked to a radical prison reform terrorists group, which had been implicated in the bombing of an Eastern Airlines jet, two National Guard trucks, and a number of other violent incidents throughout New England in the first half of the 1976.² With this new information, the threats to various Boston schools become copycats of an unrelated event, something repurposed to aid in the push against desegregation rather than something born solely from the desegregation effort itself.

Thus, the timeline makes it clear that a better understanding of the nuances at play within the school and the lives of the students is key, not just to aid our understanding in the events, but also in understanding what could have aided in handling and deescalating the various situations as they arose.

Notes

1. Marilyn Neyer, Monitor Report, January 27, 1976, L Street Annex Monitor Reports, Citywide Coordinating Council Records, BC Digitized Collections, John J. Burns Library, Boston College. ↩
2. Jogn Kifner, "Four Are Indicted in Boston Blasts: Accused Linked to Radical Prison Reform Group," New York Times, Jul 16, 1976, Proquest. ↩