History, Bachelor of Science Abstract ID# 640
Undergraduate/Graduate Category: Social Sciences, Business, and Law Degree Level: History, Bachelor of Science Abstract ID# 640
Boston Before Busing: A Multimedia Exhibition Exploring Education Civil Rights in Boston from 1960-1974 Abstract
Author: Martha E. Pearson
“Boston before Busing” is a two-fold project that examines the Boston civil rights movement in education, 1960-1974, and takes a non-traditional approach to display research results in an online museum exhibit. The historic Busing Crisis in Boston is often cited as an indicator of U.S. civil rights issues that extend north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Judge Arthur Garrity’s controversial decision in Spring 1974 ignited a series of events, with results still reverberating in Boston Public Schools and the Boston metro area. However, the community had struggled with racial equality issues for many years before the Garrity decision. “Boston before Busing” looks at the struggle to end de facto segregation in Boston Public Schools, including strategies to fight this injustice by activists such as Ruth Batson, Byron Rushing, Mel King, and Noel Day as well as groups like METCO, Freedom House, and the Education Committee of the NAACP. Freedom schools, boycotts, alternative education, community control, and legal recourse were all used in the struggle to bring equity to the Boston public education system. The core research into historical records was conducted at archives throughout Boston. The second phase focused on developing best practices and methods for cataloguing, coding, design, and scriptwriting to create an interesting, educational online exhibit.
Background Boston was the first U.S. state to codify integration in schools. Because of boycotts, lawsuits, and state legislation, the state Supreme Court ruled against segregation in Boston v. Roberts in 1855, a decision stated in Brown v. Board in 1954, a federal Supreme Court decision against de jure, or by law, desegregation. The Abiel Smith School opened in Boston 20 years earlier as the first public primary school for black children in the U.S. Leading up to the U.S. Civil War, Boston was a center of the northern and national Abolition movement, important thinkers such as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Lucy Stone lived in Boston, advancing the historical foundation for civil rights in the U.S. Boston, with its dense university population, also led progressive educational reform. Horace Mann and other educational reformers helped Boston Public Schools become some of the best in the nation.
"It does not mean that we are neglecting our children’s education. On the contrary. We are trying to give our children more of the education we think they should have"
Results "Boston stands alone in the state and the nation as a city that refuses to recognize the de facto segregation problem“ – James Farmer
After World War II, education quality and funding decreased in Boston, and the first victim was any commitment to equality. The city’s demographics changed, affected by both “white flight” in response to the Northern migration of blacks from the South and the general move to the suburbs in the 1950s. Although many people had suspected that black neighborhood schools were shortchanging students and had inferior conditions, the problems had not been formally studied. It was found that of the 13 schools in predominantly black neighborhoods, only one school had been built since 1933, two more built after 1913, ten built before 1913, two of which were almost 100 years old. There was a 2-20% lag in instructional expenses and 11-27% lag in health services One of the biggest obstacles parents faced was the Boston School Committee, many of whose members outright refused to recognize desegregation and often were vehemently against any measures seeking to offset de facto segregation. On June 11, 1963, the Boston NCAAP Education Committee attended a Boston School Committees (BCS) meeting and staged a sit-in. Chaired by Ruth Batson, and other concerned members of the community, the Education Committee presented 14 demands that included eliminating inequality and “an immediate public acknowledgment of the existence of de facto segregation in the Boston Public School system.” The BSC brushed off these demands as demonstrating the feelings of only a small group. However, this sit-in became a turning point. Pictured: Members of the NAACP, parents, and other community leaders attending the first School Committee sit in in June 1963. Courtesy of the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections.
“You are guilty of performing educational genocide on the Negro child in the Boston Public Schools" - Paul Parks
Immediately after the June 11 sit-in, many actions were taken by groups around Boston. “Freedom Stay-Out” days where students boycotted schools and community leaders set up Freedom Schools took place throughout the next few years. Later that year, the NAACP released the “Atkins Plan.” The plan showed that minority students made up only about 15% of the school system’s 93,000 students and called for reassigning students in just 16 schools to other schools still within their neighborhoods. The plan did not require busing, which an NAACP official described at that time as the “least satisfactory way to handle the problem.” Controversially, the plan defined a segregated school as one in which minority students made up more than 50% of the enrollment, which would be a major source of contention up through court proceedings in the 1970s. In 1964, Operation Exodus began, a completely self-funded and run program in Roxbury that bused students to schools all over Boston that had room for them, under the Open Enrollment Policy, which had been used by white families to remove their children from predominantly black schools, a child could transfer anywhere in the Boston Public Schools system where there was room. This led to the creation of METCO, where students were bused to communities outside of Boston. The success of Operation Exodus prompted many community members to promote more community control of the schools, because reform within BPS seemed unlikely. Community control meant many things, including naming neighborhood schools, greater presence of black administrators, and enlarged roles for parents in school development. Pictured: Protestors outside the School Committee during a rally on a Freedom Stay-Out Day. Courtesy of the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections.
“There are small fires all over the United States and there is a fire here in Roxbury and nobody is listening, and the fire that consumes Roxbury will also consume Boston” - Bill Russell
A commission appointed by Governor Endicott Peabody in 1964 found that there were 55 “racially imbalanced” schools in Massachusetts, and 45 of them were in Boston alone. Then, in 1965, a Racial Imbalance bill was signed into law by Governor John Volpe. The bill allowed the withholding of state and federal funding from schools that failed to comply with its measures to end segregation. Ultimately, the city was unable to meet the BOE standards and funding was taken away. Between 1965 and 1968, the number of racially imbalanced schools rose from 46 to 57, despite there being no significant increase in the percentage of black students in the schools, showing the ineffectiveness of the Racial Imbalance.
My Exhibit The second half of my research project has been focused on how to display my research. Part of my job as a public historian is finding a medium to present my information to the general public, demanding different considerations than a traditional research thesis. As such, my project must meet the needs of schoolchildren and adults, Boston natives and people who have never been to Boston, historians and people who hate studying history. Thus, the tone and voice of the project is very different than an academic history monograph, which I have tried to emulate in this presentation. As well, the process of digitization alone is much more than just scanning documents. Archival research for an exhibit means using the archives to get research as well as trying to find documents, photographs, and other material to use in the exhibit to help my audiences learn and make their own decisions and thoughts based on the information provided. Once I have scanned everything, I have to edit and catalogue every object I find, for this project that was over 250 unique objects. Finally, I have to design a website, currently under construction, which is accessible and easy to use for anyone.
The Latino and Chinese narratives in pre-busing activism is unfortunately largely missing in this exhibit. Soon after the Racial Imbalance Act was passed, the Boston School Committee reclassified Chinese students as white in an attempt to offset some of the segregated schools under the RIA’s definition. Similarly, in 1972 the Spanish community believed that they were being underrepresented in census figures, possibly as an attempt to augment school demographics. Both Latino and Chinese groups felt that non-English speaking students were being turned away from public schools, with 8000 Spanish-speaking children of school age not in school in 1970. Finally, in 1972, the NAACP, Freedom House, and other black community groups filed a federal suit against the Boston School Committee, charging discrimination in school assignments, staffing, and allocation of resources, facilities, and transportation. In May 1974, nearly 20 years after Brown v. Board of Education, which had ruled de jure desegregation unconstitutional, Judge Arthur Garrity ruled in favor of the NAACP and their discrimination claim and demanded that Boston Public Schools begin a busing program in the next school year. Pictured: Poster and Program for Martin Luther King, Jr. coming to Boston in April 1965. The event focused on education as a key civil rights issue in Boston. Courtesy of the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections.
Conclusion By May 1974, the Boston black community had seemingly tried every imaginable way to correct inequality in education in Boston. Legislation, black political leadership, community control of schools, and appeals to the federal government had all been stymied by the School Committee. Despite busing being an ill-desired solution, it is what Judge Garrity ordered that May that led to 40 years of cross-city busing in Boston, starting with tumult and chaos that became infamous as a symbol of racism in the North and the more duplicitous forms of racism that survived beyond the Civil Rights movement. This struggle for equitable quality education has been lost in the Boston busing narrative, which has focused on the violence of the mid 1970s and not on the struggle to ameliorate the problem early on.
References
Acknowledgments
Center for Law and Education: Morgan V. Hennigan Case Records, 1964-1994. SC-0084. Archives and Special Collections, University of Massachusetts, Boston. Frank J. Miranda papers. M112. Archives and Special Collections, Northeastern University. Freedom House, Inc. records. M16. Archives and Special Collections, Northeastern University. Garrity, W Arthur, Jr.: Papers on the Boston Schools Desegregation Case, 1972-1997. SC-0090. Archives and Special Collections, University of Massachusetts, Boston. James W. Fraser (collector) photograph collection. M66. Archives and Special Collections, Northeastern University. John Joseph Moakley Papers, 1926-2001. MS100. Moakley Archive and Institute, Suffolk University. Lower Roxbury Black History Project records. M165. Archives and Special Collections, Northeastern University. Melnea A. Cass papers. M79. Archives and Special Collections, Northeastern University. Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, Inc. records. M101. Archives and Special Collections, Northeastern University. Papers of Ruth Batson, 1919-2003 (inclusive), 1951-2003. MC590. Schlesinger Library, Harvard University. Phyllis M. Ryan papers. M94. Archives and Special Collections, Northeastern University. Ronald W. Bailey oral history collection. M153. Archives and Special Collections, Northeastern University. Vrabel, Jim. A People’s History of the New Boston. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014.
Thank you to everyone at the Suffolk University, University of Massachusetts, Boston, and Schlesinger Library at Harvard University for all of their help in finding collections in their repositories that would support my research. Thank you especially to everyone at the Northeastern Archives, especially Michelle Romero and Giordana Mecagni for supporting my research and providing guidance and instruction as I learned how to catalogue. Thank you to Sarah and Dan for helping me set up the metadata and Karl for helping set up my Wordpress exhibit. Thank you to my advisor, Professor Fowler, for helping me over the last seven months.
Boston Before Busing: A Multimedia Exhibition Exploring Education Civil Rights in Boston from 1960-1974 Abstract
Author: Martha E. Pearson
“Boston before Busing” is a two-fold project that examines the Boston civil rights movement in education, 1960-1974, and takes a non-traditional approach to display research results in an online museum exhibit. The historic Busing Crisis in Boston is often cited as an indicator of U.S. civil rights issues that extend north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Judge Arthur Garrity’s controversial decision in Spring 1974 ignited a series of events, with results still reverberating in Boston Public Schools and the Boston metro area. However, the community had struggled with racial equality issues for many years before the Garrity decision. “Boston before Busing” looks at the struggle to end de facto segregation in Boston Public Schools, including strategies to fight this injustice by activists such as Ruth Batson, Byron Rushing, Mel King, and Noel Day as well as groups like METCO, Freedom House, and the Education Committee of the NAACP. Freedom schools, boycotts, alternative education, community control, and legal recourse were all used in the struggle to bring equity to the Boston public education system. The core research into historical records was conducted at archives throughout Boston. The second phase focused on developing best practices and methods for cataloguing, coding, design, and scriptwriting to create an interesting, educational online exhibit.
Background Boston was the first U.S. state to codify integration in schools. Because of boycotts, lawsuits, and state legislation, the state Supreme Court ruled against segregation in Boston v. Roberts in 1855, a decision stated in Brown v. Board in 1954, a federal Supreme Court decision against de jure, or by law, desegregation. The Abiel Smith School opened in Boston 20 years earlier as the first public primary school for black children in the U.S. Leading up to the U.S. Civil War, Boston was a center of the northern and national Abolition movement, important thinkers such as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Lucy Stone lived in Boston, advancing the historical foundation for civil rights in the U.S. Boston, with its dense university population, also led progressive educational reform. Horace Mann and other educational reformers helped Boston Public Schools become some of the best in the nation.
"It does not mean that we are neglecting our children’s education. On the contrary. We are trying to give our children more of the education we think they should have"
Results "Boston stands alone in the state and the nation as a city that refuses to recognize the de facto segregation problem“ – James Farmer
After World War II, education quality and funding decreased in Boston, and the first victim was any commitment to equality. The city’s demographics changed, affected by both “white flight” in response to the Northern migration of blacks from the South and the general move to the suburbs in the 1950s. Although many people had suspected that black neighborhood schools were shortchanging students and had inferior conditions, the problems had not been formally studied. It was found that of the 13 schools in predominantly black neighborhoods, only one school had been built since 1933, two more built after 1913, ten built before 1913, two of which were almost 100 years old. There was a 2-20% lag in instructional expenses and 11-27% lag in health services One of the biggest obstacles parents faced was the Boston School Committee, many of whose members outright refused to recognize desegregation and often were vehemently against any measures seeking to offset de facto segregation. On June 11, 1963, the Boston NCAAP Education Committee attended a Boston School Committees (BCS) meeting and staged a sit-in. Chaired by Ruth Batson, and other concerned members of the community, the Education Committee presented 14 demands that included eliminating inequality and “an immediate public acknowledgment of the existence of de facto segregation in the Boston Public School system.” The BSC brushed off these demands as demonstrating the feelings of only a small group. However, this sit-in became a turning point. Pictured: Members of the NAACP, parents, and other community leaders attending the first School Committee sit in in June 1963. Courtesy of the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections.
“You are guilty of performing educational genocide on the Negro child in the Boston Public Schools" - Paul Parks
Immediately after the June 11 sit-in, many actions were taken by groups around Boston. “Freedom Stay-Out” days where students boycotted schools and community leaders set up Freedom Schools took place throughout the next few years. Later that year, the NAACP released the “Atkins Plan.” The plan showed that minority students made up only about 15% of the school system’s 93,000 students and called for reassigning students in just 16 schools to other schools still within their neighborhoods. The plan did not require busing, which an NAACP official described at that time as the “least satisfactory way to handle the problem.” Controversially, the plan defined a segregated school as one in which minority students made up more than 50% of the enrollment, which would be a major source of contention up through court proceedings in the 1970s. In 1964, Operation Exodus began, a completely self-funded and run program in Roxbury that bused students to schools all over Boston that had room for them, under the Open Enrollment Policy, which had been used by white families to remove their children from predominantly black schools, a child could transfer anywhere in the Boston Public Schools system where there was room. This led to the creation of METCO, where students were bused to communities outside of Boston. The success of Operation Exodus prompted many community members to promote more community control of the schools, because reform within BPS seemed unlikely. Community control meant many things, including naming neighborhood schools, greater presence of black administrators, and enlarged roles for parents in school development. Pictured: Protestors outside the School Committee during a rally on a Freedom Stay-Out Day. Courtesy of the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections.
“There are small fires all over the United States and there is a fire here in Roxbury and nobody is listening, and the fire that consumes Roxbury will also consume Boston” - Bill Russell
A commission appointed by Governor Endicott Peabody in 1964 found that there were 55 “racially imbalanced” schools in Massachusetts, and 45 of them were in Boston alone. Then, in 1965, a Racial Imbalance bill was signed into law by Governor John Volpe. The bill allowed the withholding of state and federal funding from schools that failed to comply with its measures to end segregation. Ultimately, the city was unable to meet the BOE standards and funding was taken away. Between 1965 and 1968, the number of racially imbalanced schools rose from 46 to 57, despite there being no significant increase in the percentage of black students in the schools, showing the ineffectiveness of the Racial Imbalance.
My Exhibit The second half of my research project has been focused on how to display my research. Part of my job as a public historian is finding a medium to present my information to the general public, demanding different considerations than a traditional research thesis. As such, my project must meet the needs of schoolchildren and adults, Boston natives and people who have never been to Boston, historians and people who hate studying history. Thus, the tone and voice of the project is very different than an academic history monograph, which I have tried to emulate in this presentation. As well, the process of digitization alone is much more than just scanning documents. Archival research for an exhibit means using the archives to get research as well as trying to find documents, photographs, and other material to use in the exhibit to help my audiences learn and make their own decisions and thoughts based on the information provided. Once I have scanned everything, I have to edit and catalogue every object I find, for this project that was over 250 unique objects. Finally, I have to design a website, currently under construction, which is accessible and easy to use for anyone.
The Latino and Chinese narratives in pre-busing activism is unfortunately largely missing in this exhibit. Soon after the Racial Imbalance Act was passed, the Boston School Committee reclassified Chinese students as white in an attempt to offset some of the segregated schools under the RIA’s definition. Similarly, in 1972 the Spanish community believed that they were being underrepresented in census figures, possibly as an attempt to augment school demographics. Both Latino and Chinese groups felt that non-English speaking students were being turned away from public schools, with 8000 Spanish-speaking children of school age not in school in 1970. Finally, in 1972, the NAACP, Freedom House, and other black community groups filed a federal suit against the Boston School Committee, charging discrimination in school assignments, staffing, and allocation of resources, facilities, and transportation. In May 1974, nearly 20 years after Brown v. Board of Education, which had ruled de jure desegregation unconstitutional, Judge Arthur Garrity ruled in favor of the NAACP and their discrimination claim and demanded that Boston Public Schools begin a busing program in the next school year. Pictured: Poster and Program for Martin Luther King, Jr. coming to Boston in April 1965. The event focused on education as a key civil rights issue in Boston. Courtesy of the Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections.
Conclusion By May 1974, the Boston black community had seemingly tried every imaginable way to correct inequality in education in Boston. Legislation, black political leadership, community control of schools, and appeals to the federal government had all been stymied by the School Committee. Despite busing being an ill-desired solution, it is what Judge Garrity ordered that May that led to 40 years of cross-city busing in Boston, starting with tumult and chaos that became infamous as a symbol of racism in the North and the more duplicitous forms of racism that survived beyond the Civil Rights movement. This struggle for equitable quality education has been lost in the Boston busing narrative, which has focused on the violence of the mid 1970s and not on the struggle to ameliorate the problem early on.
References
Acknowledgments
Center for Law and Education: Morgan V. Hennigan Case Records, 1964-1994. SC-0084. Archives and Special Collections, University of Massachusetts, Boston. Frank J. Miranda papers. M112. Archives and Special Collections, Northeastern University. Freedom House, Inc. records. M16. Archives and Special Collections, Northeastern University. Garrity, W Arthur, Jr.: Papers on the Boston Schools Desegregation Case, 1972-1997. SC-0090. Archives and Special Collections, University of Massachusetts, Boston. James W. Fraser (collector) photograph collection. M66. Archives and Special Collections, Northeastern University. John Joseph Moakley Papers, 1926-2001. MS100. Moakley Archive and Institute, Suffolk University. Lower Roxbury Black History Project records. M165. Archives and Special Collections, Northeastern University. Melnea A. Cass papers. M79. Archives and Special Collections, Northeastern University. Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, Inc. records. M101. Archives and Special Collections, Northeastern University. Papers of Ruth Batson, 1919-2003 (inclusive), 1951-2003. MC590. Schlesinger Library, Harvard University. Phyllis M. Ryan papers. M94. Archives and Special Collections, Northeastern University. Ronald W. Bailey oral history collection. M153. Archives and Special Collections, Northeastern University. Vrabel, Jim. A People’s History of the New Boston. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014.
Thank you to everyone at the Suffolk University, University of Massachusetts, Boston, and Schlesinger Library at Harvard University for all of their help in finding collections in their repositories that would support my research. Thank you especially to everyone at the Northeastern Archives, especially Michelle Romero and Giordana Mecagni for supporting my research and providing guidance and instruction as I learned how to catalogue. Thank you to Sarah and Dan for helping me set up the metadata and Karl for helping set up my Wordpress exhibit. Thank you to my advisor, Professor Fowler, for helping me over the last seven months.
