6 4 week 6 short responses

Before reading the text, take a look at the title, the author, and any other descriptive information that is provided. Then ask yourself questions like: “What will be the subject of this reading?” “Have I read anything else on this topic?” “Have I read anything else written by this author?” “What do I hope to learn from this reading?” “What will I be expected to do or know after I finish this reading?”

While you read the text, use a highlighter or a pen to mark up the page. (If you are unable to print a hard copy of the text, you may be able to cut-and-paste the text into a Word document and use the “Comments” tool.) Highlight or underline key terms and ideas. Jot down questions and observations in the margins. Here is a guide to five of the most widely used note-taking systems.

Make text-to-self connections as you read. Can you personally relate to the subject of this reading? Are there any characters in the reading that remind you of yourself or people you know? Also make text-to-text connections. Does this reading remind you of another text that you have encountered? Finally, make text-to-world connections. Does this text relate to any real-world people, places, or events from the past or present?

After reading the text, take some time to digest what you have read. Consider the overall meaning of the reading. Reread any sections that may have been confusing. Summarize larger sections of the text and then summarize the entire reading in one or two sentences.

Tell another person about this reading and what you learned from it. Consider how you would explain this reading to different audiences.

Critical Analysis

As you engage in active reading, you should also be critically analyzing the texts. This approach will ensure that you are not a passive reader. As you read your sources, you should consider questions like:

• What is the author’s main argument?
• Is the author’s argument supported with evidence?
• Can you find evidence from the text itself to support your argument?
• What connections can you make to this text and others you have read on this topic? What differences do you see?
• Do you agree or disagree with the author?

Keep these strategies in mind in this course and your future classes, and you will become a more active and critical reader.

Desegregating Boston’s Schools

In school busing plan to end segregation of the Boston schools—that the process of integration finally began.

That process did not go smoothly. Fierce resistance in several of the city’s predominantly white neighborhoods forced state police and National Guard troops to escort African-American students into the schools, and the ensuing “Boston busing crisis” roiled the schools, and the city, for years. (Lukas, 1985) The Boston public schools were not declared fully desegregated until 1987.

This learning block uses the events of the Boston busing crisis as a prism for looking once again at the concepts of cause and consequence, and as a way to illustrate how you can use historical evidence to make an argument that supports your thesis.

Boston, Busing, and Backlash

The struggle for voting rights, which we looked at in Theme: Analyzing History, Learning Block 3, was a struggle against school busing plans, which would send African-American students to largely white schools and send white students to largely African-American schools, as a means of achieving greater racial balance.

In Boston, the city’s small but growing African-American community began protesting the quality of public schools in largely black neighborhoods in the early 1960s. In 1965, in response to a federal investigation of possible segregation in the Boston public schools, the Massachusetts legislature passed the Racial Imbalance Act. The new law outlawed segregation in Massachusetts schools and threatened to cut off state funding for any school district that did not comply. (Levy, 1971)

A R.O.A.R button opposing Boston’s desegregation. (Click button for citation)

Of the 55 Massachusetts schools identified as racially imbalanced, 45 were in the City of Boston. But the Boston School Committee, an all-white elected body led by Louise Day Hicks, refused to acknowledge the segregation and balked at any plan to remedy the situation. Hicks’s opposition to school desegregation boosted her popularity, particularly in the city’s working-class, heavily Irish-American neighborhoods; in 1967, she narrowly missed being elected mayor, but in 1969, she was elected to the city council, and in 1970, she was elected to Congress to represent her home neighborhood, the Irish-American enclave of South Boston. (Lukas, 1985)

The School Committee continued to stonewall demands to implement a meaningful desegregation plan. But in June 1974, federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity, deciding a lawsuit brought against the School Committee by the NAACP, ruled that Boston’s schools were unconstitutionally segregated. He ordered that any school whose enrollment was more than 50 percent nonwhite must be balanced according to race.

To achieve that balance, Garrity ordered the schools to adopt a widespread busing plan by the first day of school in September. That announcement triggered a powerful backlash among white parents and students. Hicks formed an anti-busing group called Restore Our Alienated Rights (ROAR) that spearheaded much of the opposition to Garrity’s desegregation order.

While the plan involved the busing of thousands of students from different neighborhoods across the city, the greatest attention was focused on the high schools in South Boston—a heavily working-class and overwhelmingly Irish-American part of town—and Roxbury, an overwhelmingly African-American neighborhood. Garrity’s order effectively paired the two schools, by requiring that they essentially swap hundreds of students.

Decades after the fact, Garrity’s busing order is still hotly debated in Boston. Supporters say that his unyielding approach was the only way to overcome white resistance and achieve racial balance in Boston’s schools. Critics say Garrity focused too much on the goal of achieving mathematical balance, rather than focusing on a plan to improve school quality for both African-American and white children. (Gellerman, 2014)

Robert J. Allison, professor of History at Suffolk University in Boston and author of A Short History of Boston, describes the causes and consequences of the Boston busing crisis in this video:

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Boston Busing Crisis

Robert Allison

Before World War II, most people did not go to college. Before World War I, most people did not go to high school. High schools were created in the early 20th century as an idea of extending an education. People ordinarily would have finished school in the 8th grade, gone to work…now we go to high school to learn some academic skills but also some industrial skills. For example, at South Boston High School, which opened in about 1900, the primary major was sheet metal work. At Charlestown High School, the primary major was auto mechanics. If you went to Brighton High School in Boston, you would learn to be an electrician. Boston’s schools were not segregated by race. They were, however, very much organized by class. The blue collar students went on to blue collar careers through the educational trajectory, the children of stockbrokers or of accountants or of ministers, lawyers, doctors, would go to the exam schools.

The second World War changes much of this with the GI Bill of Rights, which opens college education to all. Now through much of the 20th century, Boston’s population was declining as it’s blue collar industrial base was fading. In fact, as the industrial base of all of New England was disappearing, with the disappearance of the textile mills and the shoe factories. You no longer could earn a good living in one of these blue collar jobs. GI Bill opens up college to everyone.

Now at the same time that this is happening, as Boston’s population is in a period of decline, we have a migration of African Americans into Boston, and expanding the black population, primarily in the South End and in Roxbury. And the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s draws attention to the disparities between services and schools for African Americans and for white students. The truth in Boston was, the schools really weren’t very good for anyone. The school system really operated to provide jobs for the people who voted for members of the school committee: five member, unpaid, elected board, elected city-wide. And members of the school committee were in a great position to help award patronage jobs to custodians, teachers, others who would work in this very large enterprise, the Boston Public School System.

And this collides in the 1950s and 60s with a number of other unanticipated things. One is the demise of Boston’s blue collar economy. There’s no longer a need for the sheet metal jobs you could have gotten out of Southie High, and the electricians work you would get at Brighton High. There is a need instead for people to go into managerial jobs, to get a white collar education. Also the state of the schools, the school, there’d been a spade of building of schools in the 1850s and in the 1890s and in the early 1900s. Not much since then. So the schools themselves are quite old. And another part of this is the African American population of Boston is growing as other parts of the population are shrinking. Boston’s black community wants to know why the schools in their neighborhoods are not very good. Students throughout the city could have asked the same question. At the same time, you have an energized Civil Rights Movement raising questions of racial disparity throughout the country. And in the late 1950s and early 1960s groups of reformers, African American and white, are trying to change the makeup of the Boston school committee, to bring the school system generally in line with prevailing educational trends and provide a quality education for all of the students.

And this runs into resistance from the existing school committee, which does pretty well, awarding patronage jobs to its friends and not rewarding those who are its…not its friends. So you have these changes going on in Boston, and the black community in the early 1960s is really protesting the nature of the schools. Martin Luther King visits Boston in 1965, and there’s an attempt to have him meet with the school committee which falls through. There’s a recognition that the schools aren’t very good, and the school committee isn’t doing anything about it.

And then the African American community raises this very good point, that many of the schools in this city are racially segregated. Children in Roxbury and the South End are going to primarily black schools, students in the rest of the city going to primarily white schools, and this was one of the pieces of a reform movement emanating in the 1960s. And in the early 1970s the black parents in Boston bring a law suit against the school system charging that the school system in Boston is racially segregated. And after a series of Supreme Court ruling in the 1950s and 60s, the court had said that having schools which are segregated by fact because this is a white neighborhood / this is a black neighborhood, is as discriminatory as having a school system that is segregated by law, saying white students can only go to white schools, black students can only go to black schools. That is, the Supreme Court has said: defacto segregation is just as much a violation of the civil rights of students as is de jure segregation.

And in the early 1970s black parents brought suit against the Boston public schools and Judge Arthur Garrity ruled that Boston, in fact, was running a segregated school system, and it had… Judge Garrity, in June of 1974, said that Boston is in fact running a segregated school system and by September of 1974 Boston’s schools will have to be desegregated. Now, the plan that Judge Garrity sponsored or created is one that said, okay, what we’ll do is we’ll take the 11th grade from South Boston High School and the 11th grade from Roxbury High School, and switch them. Instead of having Roxbury High School / South Boston High School, we will have the Roxbury/South Boston Educational Complex. In other parts of the city, and in other parts of the country, having desegregation plans that worked more organically and combining students in elementary schools worked better than taking 11th graders, who sometimes can be a contentious group, and simply switching them. One of the political leaders from South Boston said that Judge Garrity had the foresight of a mackerel and the subtlety of a chainsaw. And the plan that he creates is one that is almost guaranteed to provoke violence, which it does.

There was rioting here in South Boston High School. Many white students, as the black students are bused in from Roxbury, white students tended not to want to opt in to going to Roxbury, which was perceived as being an area with crime and with other problems. And despite the valiant efforts of teachers, administrators, parents, to inculcate peace, places like this become a center for violence, for protest. As angry people who feel they’re cut off from any source of power. The political system to which they have been part has abandoned them. The churches to which they have been a part has abandoned them. And they feel powerless. So we see here in front of South Boston High School are ugly riots as the children being bused in from Roxbury are the targets. I should say that buses carrying white children to Roxbury also were subject to attack.

The news media, of course, focuses on this, looking at the racial violence here in South Boston and in Charlestown as part of this larger narrative about racial unrest in the country. In the 1960s, there had been a heroic civil rights movement, and there had also been urban riots in places like Detroit, Newark, Washington DC, Los Angeles. And so this is something very much on the nation’s mind, and with the death of people like Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders, moderate voices for social justice, we see a nation in deep trouble in the 1970s. And what happens here in Boston is very much emblematic of this bigger story.

So what does all of this mean? For Boston, for the nation. The nation is part of a broader story about race relations, the quality of education. Unfortunately, the educational piece of this is often subsumed by political considerations of one group or another. That’s how political systems work, or our political system works. For Boston, the school system doesn’t really become desegregated as the plan had been. Today, 90% of the students are minority students. The city’s population is probably about 50% minority, 50% non-minority. Well, however we determine that. Racial minority is the term we generally use, so Asian, African American, Latino. Those are the primary groups of students in the Boston Public Schools as opposed to white students.

Now, for Boston itself and Massachusetts, it’s still an ugly mark on the city’s history. And one thing that this agitation does is the protestors are not able to implement change in the school department, and the change that is implemented is not one to the benefit of the black parents who wanted a better education for their students. As one of them said, we wanted better schools and what we got was busing. And for 30 years, these school departments simply looked at the numbers of students in classrooms, the racial balance on day 1 to determine whether they were meeting the mandate of the federal court. In the 1990s, the federal court said it no longer needed to supervise this, and by that time there really wasn’t much to supervise. The school population, also, had fallen from about 90,000 in the 1970s to somewhere in the 50,000s today. So there’s an exodus of families from this city, from white neighborhoods, also from black neighborhoods as black families can move into Randolph or other surrounding towns, something they would not have been able to do in the 1960s or 1970s. So we have those changes, and those who are here protesting saw themselves as disempowered from a political system, but they actually wind up having a great deal of power in other areas. So the protests here also energize a number of political groups. Here in South Boston, the primary group was Restore Our Alienated Rights. In East Boston and Charlestown, it was the Powder Keg, with the implications you can see of that. These two groups didn’t really get along. In the African American community there were also different groups competing for attention or competing for power. And the real tragedy in all of this is that these groups don’t see, too often don’t see what they have in common.

1983 was a pivotal mayoral race in Boston, and the two finalists were Ray Flynn, who had been a state representative from South Boston, son of a longshoreman from South Boston. He himself had worked as a longshoreman. And Mel King from the South End: community activist. One of the big differences between them, I suppose, is that Mel King’s parents insisted that he go to college. Children of West Indian immigrants. Mel King becomes probably the leading community activist in the black community in Boston, elected to the State House of Representatives. And he and Ray Flynn face off against each other in the mayoral race in 1983. And both Flynn and King recognize the similarities of their communities, that neither one has the political power that someone else does. And each one is vying for improvements in their communities.

And Ray Flynn is elected mayor and really devotes himself to heal this huge racial schism in Boston, and is successful in some ways, unsuccessful in others. In the late 1980s, Mel King is part of a group that wants the black neighborhoods to seceded, creating the neighborhood of Mandela. What they really want is to be more included in the political process in the city of Boston. And another implication or effect of this is that it does turn many of the opponents of having the court determine where children will go to school into political activists. 1980: Ronald Reagan carries Massachusetts. You’ll recall that in 1972 Massachusetts was the only state that supported the democratic nominee for president. So the Reagan democrats were born here in South Boston.

As a response to the federal court’s decree about where their children will go to school. It’s really only now when some of the explosive racial animosity, political animosity, that arose in the 70s, has cooled, that we can look back and try to interpret what exactly happened, what caused this. Why did people react in this way? So the story of busing in Boston is really ripe for political interpretation or historical interpretation as we try to understand why this happened and what were the long term implications.

When school opened in September, resistance to the busing plan was fierce. A throng of white protesters greeted the buses rolling into South Boston High School that September with jeers and epithets; some of the protesters began throwing bricks and rocks at the buses and at the state police escorting them. The incident marked the beginning of two years of angry and often violent confrontations between white and black parents, students, police, and protesters. (Wolff, 2015)

Anti-busing protesters attack attorney Theodore Landsmark as he exits Boston City Hall, 1976. (Click button for citation)

From 1974 through 1976, the process of public education in Boston was turned into an ongoing tableau of state troopers and National Guardsmen in riot gear, escorting children into schools past jeering crowds; fights both inside and outside of schools, leading to hundreds of arrests; thousands of high-school students, both white and African-American, boycotting classes on a regular basis; and angry confrontations between protesters and public officials, such as Mayor Kevin White and Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who were deemed to be “pro-busing.” (Lukas, 1985)

All of this did not leave a lot of time for actual education. In the 1974-75 school year, school officials estimated that 12,000 of the school system’s 93,000 students were chronically or permanently absent; in the following year, that figure was estimated at 14,000. (Wolff, 2015) The average rate of absenteeism during the 1974-75 school year was approximately 50 percent. (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1975)

The Boston protests, taking place in the heart of what was presumed to be one of the most “liberal” cities in America, attracted widespread media attention. They exposed sharp racial divisions in the city, and they also highlighted divisions based on class: many of the white protesters in working-class neighborhoods such as South Boston and Charlestown felt aggrieved that their neighborhoods had been singled out for busing, while schools in Boston’s more affluent suburbs were unaffected. (Lukas, 1985)

The worst of the violence and protests was over by the end of 1976, but the city and its schools were permanently changed. By the time Boston’s schools were declared desegregated in 1987, the student population had declined by almost 40 percent and the overwhelming majority of students were nonwhite. (Hoover Institution, 1998) While historians still debate whether the Boston busing crisis was a necessary cause of these sharp demographic shifts in the city’s public school system, the events of 1974-1976 clearly contributed to changing perceptions of the school system among parents and students.

The Consequences of Boston’s Busing Crisis

Forty years after the fact, it’s worth asking the obvious question: what were the effects of Boston’s tumultuous school desegregation effort? To put it another way: What were the consequences of this histor