Boston's Busing Crisis
Busing’s Boston Massacre
A Boston judge’s experiment in social engineering has unraveled neighborhoods and frustrated black achievement
A federal judge’s experiment in social engineering has unraveled neighborhoods and frustrated black achievement
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
A Boston judge’s experiment in social engineering has unraveled neighborhoods and frustrated black achievement
A federal judge’s experiment in social engineering has unraveled neighborhoods and frustrated black achievement
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