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In 1970 a U.S. judge in North Carolina ordered that black students be bused to white schools and that white students be bused to black schools. This crosstown "school busing," it was hoped, would end the de facto segregation of public schools caused by white students living in predominantly white neighborhoods and black students living in predominantly black neighborhoods. One year later this use of busing to achieve school integration was upheld unanimously by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark case Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg.
Other U.S. judges turned to busing as a way to end de facto school segregation, in the North as well as in the South. Although the North was thought to be much more favorable to civil rights than the South, there were a number of heated protests from white parents who opposed their children being bused long distances across the city to attend black schools. Some parents also opposed black students being bused into white schools. Among the most violent and well-publicized of these protests was the white opposition to school busing in the cradle of the American Revolution- Boston, Massachusetts.
In June of 1974 U.S. Judge Arthur Garrity ruled that the Boston School Committee was intentionally keeping the city's schools segregated and was forcing blacks to attend the oldest, most crowded, and most poorly staffed schools. He ordered that 17,000 Boston school children be bused in a manner that would reduce the unacceptably high racial concentrations in the schools. White families responded by organizing resistance, both legal and illegal, to the concept of mandatory school busing.
The first trouble point was South Boston High, a previously all-white school in a mainly working class, Irish Catholic neighborhood. Whites expressed their disapproval of busing on opening day in 1974 by urging their children to boycott classes. The boycott was 90 percent effective. When black students walked out of the school to get on the buses and ride back to their homes in Roxbury, a black ghetto, they were pelted with stones. Once on the buses, the students were hit by shattered glass as hostile crowds of whites threw heavier stones through the bus windows.
The newspaper photographs and television reports from South Boston looked a great deal like the ones from Birmingham and Selma a decade earlier. Once again crowds of hostile whites were attacking blacks fighting for their civil rights. There was one important difference in Boston and other Northern cities attempting school busing, however. The local and state police were trying to protect the children being bused rather than staying neutral or joining the attack, as had happened in so many southern civil rights protests.
In mid-October of 1974 a white student was stabbed during a racial confrontation at Boston's Hyde Park High School. Some 450 national guardsmen had to be sent in to restore order. Two months later, after a white student at South Boston High was stabbed by a black student, a white mob surrounded the school and kept 135 black students trapped inside the building for four hours. Shortly thereafter, a 500-person police guard was required to keep order at South Boston High, which had only 400 students.
White parents organized an anti-busing lobby group named ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights). In early October of 1974 over 5,000 Bostonians marched through the streets of South Boston to publicly demonstrate their opposition to "forced busing." Significant numbers of state legislators, city councilpersons, and members of the Boston School Committee, the group specifically charged by the U.S. Court to implement busing, walked prominently in the parade.
The racial turmoil in Boston over school busing eventually began to drive white families out of the city and into the de facto segregated Boston suburban schools. By 1976 it was estimated that more than 20,000 white students had transferred to parochial schools, private schools, or had moved out-of-town with their families. As a result, by the late 1970s black students constituted a clear majority of Boston's school population. People began to talk about "resegregation," the concentration of blacks in central cities and the fleeing of large numbers of whites to the surrounding suburbs.
In 1987, thirteen years after Judge Garrity first ordered school busing in Boston, that city's school system was released from supervision by the U.S. Courts. Two years later Boston school officials tried a new strategy to achieve racial integration. The city was divided into three zones for elementary and middle schools. Parents were allowed to send their child to any school they pleased in their particular zone, but school officials monitored and sometimes overruled parent choices in order to facilitate racial balance. School officials reported that, in the first year of the new program's operation, 80 percent of elementary school children were able to go to the school their parents chose for them. |
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