Desegregating Boston Schools: Reports from the 1970s

Contextual Information

On May 17th, 1954, the Supreme Court issued their ruling on Brown v Board of Education I stating,

Segregation of white and Negro children in the public schools of a State solely on the basis of race, pursuant to state laws permitting or requiring such segregations, denies to Negro children the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment—even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors of white and Negro schools may be equal.¹

The ruling put an end to the "separate but equal" doctrine which had dominated black and white legal ruling for over half a century, forcing schools to engage in desegregation, but without a clear-cut plan on how to implement this. Harris explains how Brown I acknowledged the presence of inequality inherent in segregation, but ultimately accepted the status quo. She argues the court remained unwilling to embrace any form of substantive equality, unwilling to acknowledge any right to equality of resources.² In doing so, it effectively accepted substantial inequality as a neutral base line and failed to address the substantive inequalities in resources, power, and ultimately, educational opportunity that were the product of legislated race segregation.³ While the court acknowledge the presence of inequality and its harm in denying black schools and students access to resources, it still allowed the structural inequality to continue to persist, guaranteeing the continuation of inequalities. Essentially, while racial segregation in schooling was deemed unconstitutional, it did nothing to address the underlying inequalities within schooling and society. Blocking black children from attending a school in their area based on their race was unconstitutional but continuing to drive black families from white neighborhoods and forcing them into poorly funded districts was still acceptable.

The reason for the court’s refusal to address the underlying issue and the already existing inequalities is difficult to ascertain, though Harris suggests the court feared articulating a remedy that might too deeply involve the judiciary in the operation of public schools.⁴ In the end, the court left the method of remediation and correction up to the individual school districts, something articulated in the Brown II ruling they issued the following year, 1955, when they ordered the country’s schools to desegregate with all deliberate speed was so open-ended that it engendered increasingly protracted battles with social and political forces that defiantly resisted court-ordered integration.⁵ While the intent may have been benign, the ruling was deeply ambiguous and built on a faulty foundation. As Harris explains, the Court implicitly assumed that the problem of inequality would be eradicated by desegregation. If all students were assigned to schools on a non-racial basis, no school would be identifiable by race, and therefore neither acute discrimination in resource allocation nor gross disparities in outcomes or results would likely occur.⁶ The rulings ultimately set off decades of legal conflict and social unrest across the country as states, cities, and various other organizations contested and clashed over the implementation of the court’s ruling. Indeed, nowhere was the failure of the Supreme Court’s ruling and flawed reasoning more apparent than in the famous bastion of American liberalism, Boston, Massachusetts.

Despite Brown I and II, Massachusetts’s fought and resisted implementing desegregation for nearly a decade before state legislators [passed] the Racial Imbalance Act which required school boards to take steps to ensure that no school’s nonwhite enrollment exceeded 50 percent.⁷ This act was intended to promote not only integrated schools, but also to allow schools that had been considered "black schools" better access to much needed resources. Despite both Brown and the passing of the Racial Imbalance Act, the Boston School Committee [resisted] the law for a decade and [tried] to have it repealed.⁸ Indeed, they went to extraordinary and expensive lengths to avoid integration, including buying property and converting it to house more black students rather than simply bus students to nearby "white schools," an act which cost nearly $225,000 in the first year alone, when the busing would have only cost $40,000.⁹ The refusal to obey these rulings had led to a massive imbalance in the way predominantly white schools were treated as opposed to predominantly black schools.

In the face of the Boston School Committee’s refusal to act, the NAACP’s Public School subcommittee joined with Boston area Black parents in 1972 to file a class action lawsuit against the city’s school committee. The lawsuit argued that Black schools were riddled with problems, noting, six of the city’s nine black elementary schools were overcrowded and four of the district’s thirteen black schools had been recommended for closure for health and safety reasons, while eight needed repairs to meet city standards.¹⁰ They further argued that, per pupil spending averaged $340 for white students but only $240 for black students, and teachers at predominantly black schools were less permanent and often less experienced than those assigned to white schools.¹¹ The issues went beyond the financial and infrastructural and into the very fabric of the education black students were receiving. The curriculum was identified as being outdated and often blatantly racist and the subcommittee highlighted how the school district overwhelmingly tracked black students into manual arts and trade classes rather than college preparatory ones.¹² Two years later, in 1974, Judge Garrity found the Boston School Committee to be guilty of intentional and unconstitutional school segregation and ordered nearly seventeen thousand students [be] transferred by bus to desegregate Boston’s schools.¹³

Over the next several years the Boston schools would become a flashpoint for racial conflict, both outside by protestors against integration and by the students both black and white who found themselves caught in the political fallout of desegregation. As part of the court mandated move towards desegregation, in 1975 Judge Garrity ordered the formation of an independent, citizen run, oversight body. The Citywide Coordinating Council (CCC) was composed of volunteers who were meant to foster public awareness of the desegregation process, publicize the Council’s recommendations, develop collaboration between various organizations—including universities and businesses—while also monitoring, identifying and resolving various problems in the desegregation process.¹⁴ The below timeline tracks the events from two different Boston area schools—Hyde Park High School and the L Street Annex—for 1976 via a combination of CCC monitor reports and contemporaneous monitor reports. In doing so, it becomes possible to gain a better understanding of how these rulings were implemented, the issues they faced, and the different tactics employed to ensure desegregation was made possible.

Notes

1. Earl Warren and Supreme Court of The United States, U.S. Reports: Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 1953, Periodical.↩
2. Cheryl I. Harris, "Whiteness as Property," Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1753, JSTOR.↩
3. Harris, "Whiteness as Property,", 1753.↩
4. Harris, "Whiteness as Property,", 1753.↩
5. Harris, "Whiteness as Property,", 1754.↩
6. Harris, "Whiteness as Property,", 1754.↩
7. Matthew Delmont and Jeanne Theoharis, "Introduction," Journal of Urban History 43, no. 2 (2017): 191, Sage Journals.↩
8. Delmont and Theoharis, "Introduction,", 191.↩
9. Delmont and Theoharis, "Introduction,", 196.↩
10. Delmont and Theoharis, "Introduction,", 194.↩
11. Delmont and Theoharis, "Introduction,", 194.↩
12. Delmont and Theoharis, "Introduction,", 194.↩
13. Delmont and Theoharis, "Introduction,", 196.↩
14. Stephanie Bennett and Alexandra Bisio, Historical note, Citywide Coordinating Council Records, BC Digitized Collections, John J. Burns Library, Boston College, 6, 2012.↩