It’s
the story South Boston schoolboys love to hear. On March 4, 1776, under cover of darkness,
General George Washington ordered his men to position dozens of captured British cannon
atop Dorchester Heights. The code word that night was "Boston" and the reply was
"Saint Patrick," in honor of the many Irish volunteers who strained to haul
those cannon up the steep slopes of the Heights overlooking Boston Harbor. For days,
Washington’s men bombarded the British fleet until the ships finally withdrew from
Boston on March 17—St. Patrick’s Day.
Some two hundred years later, on that very ground, a different
kind of revolution was fought by the distant kinsmen of those cannon haulers. This is the
story Bostonians do not like to hear, for it was a battle they could not win. On June 21,
1974—a date that has lived in local infamy—U.S. District Court Judge W. Arthur
Garrity Jr. ordered massive forced busing to integrate the Boston Public Schools. It was
the shot heard ’round the city.
It is difficult to chart the stages of this urban earthquake or
distinguish its aftershocks. But the initial tremors began when the U.S. Supreme Court
released its ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education (1954). In Brown, Chief
Justice Earl Warren claimed that segregation is psychologically harmful to black children
and implied that all-black classrooms are inherently inferior. Warren’s ambiguous
opinion allowed lower courts and lawmakers to infer that stopping segregation was not
enough, but that social justice depended upon integrating the races in school, at whatever
cost to neighborhoods and to children, black and white.
By 1968, the courts were equating desegregation with massive,
forced cross-city busing. In Green vs. Board of Education, Justice William Brennan
ruled that there can no longer be black or white schools, "just schools," and
that schools must integrate "now." Judges across America soon began to order
busing to integrate urban school systems in the name of "racial equality." (In Missouri
vs. Jenkins (1995), Justice Clarence Thomas marveled at this trend: "It never
ceases to amaze me that the courts are so willing to assume that anything that is
predominantly black must be inferior.")
In 1965, the Massachusetts state legislature passed the Racial
Imbalance Act, which outlawed "racially imbalanced" schools, defined as any
school whose student body was more than 50 percent minority. Every suburban legislator
voted in favor of the Act; only those from Boston and Springfield voted against it.
For nine years, like a patient in denial about his condition, the
Boston School Committee pretended the Racial Imbalance Act did not exist. When the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) brought suit, Garrity
found the Boston School Committee guilty of "segregative intent" by establishing
a "dual school system" that deliberately separated black and white students and
underfunded black schools. Although few could disagree with the judge’s conclusion,
his remedy shook the city to its foundations.
Garrity ordered the implementation of the Massachusetts State
Board of Education’s drastic "Master Plan" to achieve racial balance in the
public schools. The Master Plan generally required students from designated white
neighborhoods to be bused to schools in designated black neighborhoods and vice versa. But
the plan’s ugliest element was the cross-town busing of children attending South
Boston and Roxbury high schools, exchanging students from Boston’s most insular Irish
Catholic neighborhood with students from the heart of the black ghetto.
The Master Plan, however, was only one of several options
available to Garrity. For example, Boston school superintendent Frederick Gillis proposed
an "open enrollment plan" that would have allowed families to send their
children to any school in the city. This option would have been much more palatable to the
public and far less costly than forced busing. But Garrity showed little interest. He gave
the city only 11 weeks to prepare for the biggest social experiment in its history. Worse,
six days after the court order, he unabashedly admitted he had not even read the Master
Plan prior to ordering its implementation.
In The Quest for Community, Robert Nisbet wrote that
the central crisis of the 20th century is the continuous assault on "natural
authority" and community through the state’s progressive invasion into our daily
lives. "The alleged disorganization of the modern family is, in fact, simply an
erosion of its natural authority, the consequence, in considerable part, of the absorption
of its functions by other bodies, chiefly the state." Busing is a perfect example of
such a state-sponsored assault on community and family.
Boston’s neighborhood high schools, like South Boston High
and Charlestown High, produced few college-bound graduates, but they did form the nucleus
of neighborhood pride. Young boys and girls were eager to grow up and play sports or
cheerlead for their local schools. The annual Thanksgiving Day "Southie-Eastie"
football game between South Boston and East Boston high schools was an age-old ritual,
typically thronged by crowds of more than 10,000. But these community traditions died and
the people of South Boston and Charlestown could not understand why. It was these
communities, whatever their flaws, that people were defending when fleets of buses began
rolling past their front stoops in 1974.
"The Buses Are Coming!"
One of the ironies of busing in Boston is that it was fought
during the 200th anniversary of some the most famous fights of the American Revolution,
often on the very same battlefields. "We’re right back where we began 200 years
ago" read a banner raised in Charlestown’s Monument Square, the site of both the
Battle of Bunker Hill and Charlestown High School. South Boston High School is located on
Dorchester Heights, the very soil made sacred by George Washington and his Irish infantry.
From its commanders to its foot soldiers, the anti-busing movement
was dominated by women. They were mostly stay-at-home moms who wanted to regain control
over their children’s lives. These women had long taken for granted that their
children could attend the schools in their community, that they had choices concerning
their children’s education. Busing was a gross assault on their "natural
authority." When asked why she was resisting busing, Charlestown anti-busing leader
Peg Smith declared, "I want my freedom back. They took my freedom. They tell me where
my kids have to go to school. This is like living in Russia. Next they’ll tell you
where to shop."
One day in fall 1975, about 400 Charlestown mothers marched up
Bunker Hill Street, clutching rosary beads and reciting the "Hail Mary." They
knelt in prayer for several minutes on the pavement between Charlestown High and the
Bunker Hill Monument. And then they stood up and walked toward the police line, still in
prayer, handbags held high to shield their faces. Soon a scuffle broke out between the
mothers and the police. Some women were tossed to the ground.
Although the women’s movement was on the rise, the feminist
establishment had no interest in the working-class woman’s struggle against forced
busing. They were indifferent to the wailing mothers who where throwing themselves down in
front of delivery trucks owned by the Boston Globe (the pro-busing newspaper) or
fleeing from the dogs that police used to enforce curfews. The same people who celebrated
when the Supreme Court recognized a woman’s "right to choose" to have an
abortion were unmoved when a federal court revoked a mother’s right to choose where
her children could go to school. When anti-busing mothers attended a rally for the Equal
Rights Amendment downtown, one mother addressed the gathering to ask whether the ERA would
guarantee a woman’s authority over her children’s schooling. They were all asked
to leave.
Much of the anti-busing style of civil disobedience—the
sit-ins, the picketing, the protest songs, even the riots—was inherited from the
civil rights and anti-war movements that preceded it. But unlike the anti-war movement,
these protesters never indulged in anti-Americanism. Busing opponents often sang patriotic
songs at their rallies. They waved, not burned, American flags during nearly every
demonstration. They consistently invoked the tradition of American liberty in their fight
to retain it. Unfortunately, this sometimes resulted in a perverse blend of patriotism and
racism, which culminated when a Charlestown youth literally speared a black attorney with
a flag pole adorned with the Stars and Stripes at City Hall Plaza, a moment captured in a
famous Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph.
The Battle of Busing
"Eighty percent of the people in Boston are against
busing," said Mayor Kevin White. "If Boston were a sovereign state, busing would
be cause for a revolution." On the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of
Independence, Arthur Garrity ruled over Boston like a reincarnated King George. In the
school system, his word was law and integration without representation had become the new
tyranny.
According to Common Ground, by J. Anthony Lukas, when White
was warned of impending violence at an anti-busing march, he telephoned Garrity at his
home to see if he would ban the march. But Garrity refused to speak to the mayor because
he considered a call to his personal residence "inappropriate." "That
arrogant ass!" White reportedly said. "He issues his damn order, then retires to
his suburban estate and refuses to talk with the only guy who can make it work."
After the mayor called Garrity’s home a second time, the judge made White a
co-defendant in the case.
An exhausted White later appeared in Garrity’s courtroom and
implored him to deploy federal marshals to help safeguard public order. But Garrity
dismissed the mayor’s plea and insisted that "integration in the schools can be
achieved by community efforts." The judge was apparently less confident in community
efforts to safeguard his own home in Wellesley, however, as two deputy federal marshals
stood guard there around the clock. Nor did Garrity’s faith in local government
extend to South Boston High, where he micromanaged everything from student transfers to
ordering the purchase of 12 MacGregor basketballs.
"Sometimes when I look out this window," White
reportedly said to an aide during one hellish day at the office, "I see Belfast out
there." Police had to escort and unload buses at several Boston high schools every
morning and afternoon while snipers stood guard on the surrounding rooftops. Metal
detectors were installed and troopers patrolled the cafeterias, hallways, and stairwells,
and still racial brawls broke out daily. Garrity also ordered equal numbers of black and
white police officers to guard the schools, provoking racial hostility even within the
police force. "It’ll be lucky if the Boston police don’t kill each other
before the day is out," said one state trooper at the time. For three years, as many
as 300 state police officers a day patrolled South Boston High. One teacher compared the
school to a prison: "We can’t leave school, we can’t come early or on the
weekends to do preparatory work. We are like prisoners. Everyday when I get up, it’s
like getting up to go to prison."
In some 400 orders, Garrity meddled in every aspect of the Boston
Public Schools. He placed South Boston High into federal receivership and fired its
popular principal. He decreed rigid racial quotas in faculty and administrative hiring.
When one elementary school was converted to a middle school, Garrity issued an order
requiring the urinals to be raised.
Although the temperature of local race relations had been rising
in recent years, busing pushed it above the boiling point. What was once a generally idle
racial animus between blacks and whites swelled into seething bigotry. When the buses
pulled up to high schools in white neighborhoods, police had to escort black teenagers
through a gauntlet of thrown rocks and bottles; the students heard shouts of "Die,
niggers, die!" and saw signs that read "Bus Them Back to Africa!" If
segregation was psychologically harmful to black students, as the Supreme Court had it,
how much more harmful was busing?
Yet Adrienne Weston, a black West Indies native who had enjoyed
teaching at South Boston High School prior to busing, told a journalist that white rioters
outside South Boston High were motivated by much more than racism. "Those people out
there are crazy," she said, "because they don’t like this being
shoved down their throats."
Indeed, whites were not the only Bostonians choking on it. Polls
taken during the early days of busing show that only bare majorities of blacks favored the
policy. In 1971, when the district tried to redraw attendance zones to encourage
integration, a group of black parents protested that it would force their kids out of a
good neighborhood school. Leo Conway, the principal of an all-black elementary school in
Roxbury popular with parents and students, wrote to Garrity to save his school from being
closed under the Master Plan and to complain "that the burden of desegregation has
been too long placed on the back of the Roxbury and Jamaica Plain community." In the
South End, parents at the Bancroft Elementary School, which had integrated voluntarily,
also wrote to Garrity to keep their kids in their neighborhood school. In fact, only days
before Garrity’s decision, black legislators had been pushing for more community
control over the schools, not busing.
In 1985, Boston school superintendent Robert Spillane resigned in
frustration because Garrity was always peering over his shoulder. The eighth
superintendent in 10 years, Spillane complained to the Globe that the judge
"had a paternalistic mentality that all goodness and all knowledge flows from the
federal court." On September 3, 1985, Garrity finally turned authority over the
Boston Public Schools to the Massachusetts Board of Education. He had ruled for more than
11 years. "I’ll miss it," he said, describing the experience as
"rewarding and inspiring." Garrity still serves on the U.S. District Court,
where he retains "standby jurisdiction" over the school system.
Busing’s Bitter Fruits
During Garrity’s tenure as de facto school
superintendent, public-school enrollment dropped from 93,000 to 57,000 and the proportion
of white students shrank from 65 percent of total enrollment to 28 percent. Seventy-eight
school buildings closed their doors, including Roxbury High. Now whites make up 17 percent
of public-school students; most of them attend one of the three selective "exam
schools" like the Boston Latin School. Boston has been forced to lower its official
threshold for the acceptable racial balance of each school from a minimum of 50 percent
white in 1965 to a minimum of 9 percent white today.
Busing has not only failed to integrate Boston schools, it has
also failed to improve education opportunities for the city’s black children. When
Boston introduced Stanford 9 testing to the public schools in 1996, 94 percent of
seventh-graders at Woodrow Wilson Elementary School scored "poor" or
"failing" in math, as did 73 percent of fifth-graders at Brighton’s
Alexander Hamilton School. At Dorchester’s William E. Endicott School, 95 percent of
the fifth-graders scored "poor" or "failing" in reading and 100
percent scored "poor" or "failing" in math. Yet all of these students
were promoted to the next grade.
One schools chief resigned, saying that Judge
Garrity "had a paternalistic mentality that all goodness and all knowledge flow from
the federal court."
On the statewide Iowa Reading Test, the Boston Public Schools
ranked 275 out of the 279 cities and towns in Massachusetts. Even the working-class city
of Lawrence, with a large immigrant population and a high crime rate, outscored the Boston
Public Schools despite the fact that Lawrence teachers make almost $15,000 less on average
than Boston teachers.
For whatever reason, Garrity exempted a handful of schools from
the Master Plan. It is telling that four of Boston’s top five elementary schools in
1996 happen to be institutions that respect the "natural authority" of the
parents. Two are neighborhood schools in East Boston; Chinatown’s Josiah Quincy
Elementary School, with a mostly Asian enrollment, achieved the second-highest average
scores in the city. At Dorchester’s Patrick O’Hearn Elementary School, which
achieved the highest scores, children may enroll only if their parents promise to be
actively involved in the school. Most of the city’s 33,000 elementary schoolchildren,
however, are still bused among the 71 schools that scored poorly on the Stanford 9,
learning little or nothing and winning social promotion year after year.
On the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT), Boston fares even worse.
On average, SAT test takers in the city’s high schools scored 845 (out of 1600) in
1996, surpassing only those in Chelsea. If you exclude the three exam schools, Boston
would surely be last. With pathetic standardized test scores and an average promotion rate
of 94 percent, it is hard to imagine the Boston Public Schools have improved since busing
began. In fact, the evidence suggests they are probably worse.
Such poor educational outcomes hardly seem to justify the costs of
desegregation. When Martin Walsh, a Justice Department consultant to Garrity, was told
that the first four years of busing cost the city more than $77 million, he grandly
proclaimed, "You can’t put a dollar value on correcting constitutional
wrongs." Indeed, the price continues to rise every year. The 1998 busing budget
exceeds $45 million (one dollar out of every 12 in the school budget goes to
transportation). The total 25-year cost of busing runs into the hundreds of millions of
dollars. City Councilor Peggy Davis-Mullen claims that ending forced busing would save the
city $20 million annually on transportation. If families had greater choice in education,
they could opt for schools closer to home, reducing the need for school buses.
After Garrity’s departure, Boston switched to a
"controlled choice" system that Abigail Thernstrom, a Manhattan Institute
scholar and a member of the state Board of Education, describes in America in Black and
White as "long on control, short on choice." It is really a "coerced
choice": Parents are guaranteed their first or second preference, but are allowed to
choose only from among schools where their child will not upset the racial balance. And so
the kids keep riding the buses.
Voices in the Wilderness
Boston’s busing disaster demonstrates economist Thomas
Sowell’s point that "the black family—which survived slavery,
discrimination, poverty, wars, and depressions—began to come apart as the federal
government moved in with its well-financed programs to ‘help.’ " Busing was
imposed on citizens in the name of racial equality, but few public policies have harmed
Boston’s black community more. Roxbury resident Loretta Roach is the chairwoman of
the Citywide Educational Coalition, a group that supports public education. Roach bemoans
the extent to which busing impedes black parental involvement in the "often faraway
schools their children are bused to every morning." Community support for public
schools has also "evaporated since schools are no longer part of their communities.
Busing destroyed the neighborhood passion for those schools that previously existed."
Gwendolyn Collins-Stevens, a Roxbury mother of six, agrees. "Busing took away the
community feeling we had for our neighborhood schools," she says, "the feeling
of ‘It’s our school and we love it.’ "
"When schools were segregated, they were rich in other
ways," says Angela Paige Cook, founder of Paige Academy, a private school in Roxbury.
Cook recalls the old network of neighborhood schools as the spring that made the black
community tick. "Before busing, parents, teachers, and students often lived in the
same community, attended the same churches, and shopped in the same stores. There were
more positive role models for the kids in those days. When you destroy a community
infrastructure, you no longer have those role models."
Wellington Webb, Denver’s popular black mayor, sees the end
of forced busing as a perfect opportunity to revitalize his city’s quest for
community. "Having neighborhood schools back will help rebuild the
neighborhoods," said Webb after Denver ended busing in 1996. But a return to
neighborhood schools might not be an option for Boston’s black community, since so
many of the 78 schools that closed during desegregation were in black neighborhoods. So
for the foreseeable future, the best alternative to forced busing may be open enrollment
throughout the city.
Public Be Damned
In 1982, more than 200 frustrated black parents formed the Black
Parent Committee to petition Garrity to substitute a school-choice plan for busing. As
newspapers reported at the time, these concerned parents complained about the injustice of
"asking children to get up at 6 a.m. to ride a bus to a hostile environment where
they are not going to get a good education." Plaintiff Richard Yarde insisted that
most blacks "never thought busing was the way to resolve inequality in the
schools." Like their white counterparts across town, black parents resented
government usurpation of their "natural authority." A 1982 Boston Globe
poll found that 79 percent of black parents with children in the public schools favored an
open-enrollment plan over forced busing. In fact, 42 percent of those polled said they did
not even favor busing in 1974.
The Boston chapter of the NAACP, however, moved quickly to scuttle
the Black Parent Committee’s attempt to dismantle forced busing. "Constitutional
decrees aren’t overturned by plebiscites," declared chapter president Tom Atkins
at the time. Such intransigence over integration, however, is growing less popular within
the NAACP. Although the Boston chapter and the national leadership still support forced
busing, other members have publicly broken ranks (see box, page 46).
Even Garrity eventually recognized some of the inequities of
busing. In 1976, he ordered a 35 percent minority quota at Boston’s three exam
schools. In 1995, a white father sued the school system because his daughter was denied
admission to the Boston Latin School due to her race. The case was decided in
Garrity’s courtroom. Surprisingly, he ordered the girl admitted; although he stopped
short of banning it, he described as "constitutionally suspect" the very quota
system he had conjured up 19 years earlier.
The Crack-Up
Today, the ghost of busing past continues to haunt the present.
You see it when you pass by White Stadium during the Southie-Eastie Thanksgiving Day
football game, where only a handful of onlookers sit in the stands once thronged by
thousands of faithful fans. These communities have suffered something like a death in the
family whose members, in order to go on, must maintain the pretense of living as if they
had lost no one.
Somehow the birthplace of the American
Revolution and the abolitionist movement has become perhaps the most segregated city in
America.
The aftershocks of busing are not confined to Boston’s
tight-knit neighborhoods. Here, unlike New York City or Washington, D.C., it is rare to
see any blacks downtown. Only whites patronize the restaurants and bars of Back Bay and
Beacon Hill. Somehow the birthplace of the American Revolution and of the abolitionist
movement has become perhaps the most segregated city in America. True, busing alone did
not create the cultural chasm that separates the races, but it did much to widen it.
"Before busing, we went to South Boston," says Gwendolyn Collins-Smith. "We
had white friends there—one of my foster sisters lived in the D Street public-housing
projects. But after busing came, friends were at each other’s throats. I don’t
go there anymore."
June 21, 1999, will mark the 25th anniversary of a tragedy of
unintended consequences. In the name of social engineering, one federal judge usurped the
sovereignty of an entire city and frayed bonds of community built up over generations.
In 1976, the city of Boston celebrated the Bicentennial of
American independence while stricken by civil and racial strife. It would befit the silver
anniversary of busing to observe a moment of silence, for all the children, past and
present, forced to ride the school bus, and for the people of Boston who have suffered
through an urban nightmare from which they are still trying to awake.
