Boston desegregation busing crisis

The desegregation of Boston public schools (1974–1988) was a period in which the Boston Public Schools were under court control to desegregate through a system of busing students. The call for desegregation and the first years of its implementation led to a series of racial protests and riots that brought national attention, particularly from 1974 to 1976. In response to the Massachusetts legislature's enactment of the 1965 Racial Imbalance Act, which ordered the state's public schools to desegregate, W. Arthur Garrity Jr. of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts laid out a plan for compulsory busing of students between predominantly white and black areas of the city. The hard control of the desegregation plan lasted for over a decade. It influenced Boston politics and contributed to demographic shifts of Boston's school-age population, leading to an unprecedented level of violence and turmoil in the city's streets and classrooms, national headlines, a decline of public-school enrollment, and white flight to the suburbs. Full control of the desegregation plan was transferred to the Boston School Committee in 1988; in 2013 the busing system was replaced by one with dramatically reduced busing.

In the 1850 case Roberts v. City of Boston, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled there was no constitutional basis for declaring segregated schools illegal. In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution added the Equal Protection Clause. Despite this, the United States Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson decided in 1896 that separate but equal schools were an acceptable arrangement. This was overruled in the 1954 federal case Brown v. Board of Education, which found having separate facilities to be inherently unequal. Implementation of the Brown decision required enforcement of federal law over the objection of some local officials, especially in the Jim Crow South. The Brown decision clearly ended de jure discrimination - laws that required segregation - but residential settlement patterns and redlining meant that even in Boston, assigning students to their geographically closest school resulted in de facto segregation.

From its creation under the National Housing Act of 1934 signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Federal Housing Administration used its official mortgage insurance underwriting policy explicitly to prevent school integration. The Boston Housing Authority actively segregated the city's public housing developments since at least 1941 and continued to do so despite the passage of legislation by the 156th Massachusetts General Court prohibiting racial discrimination or segregation in housing in 1950 and the issuance of Executive Order 11063 by President John F. Kennedy in 1962 that required all federal agencies to prevent racial discrimination in federally-funded subsidized housing in the United States.

In 1963 and 1964, education activists staged boycotts to highlight the Boston School Committee's failure to address the de facto racial segregation of the city's public schools.

Black children's achievement levels were consistently lower than those of white children. Their dropout rates were higher, their schools were dilapidated, their textbooks were out-of-date, and their often demoralized teachers were more concerned with maintaining order than with teaching. In cities as large as Chicago, New York, Detroit, and Denver, and as small as Plainfield, New Jersey, and Stamford, Connecticut, black mothers mobilized to improve the quality of their children's education. They fought for integration via busing, mostly because they believed it was the best way to address the problem quickly. White children went to well-funded, well-equipped schools that were often underpopulated. Black mothers, such as those who organized Chicago's Truth Squad or Englewood, New Jersey's Englewood Movement, sought to place these “neighborhood schools” within the reach of black children. NAACP lawyers supported them, arguing that there was no difference between school segregation that occurred as a result of a legal mandate (de jure segregation) and that which occurred as a result of state-sanctioned real estate discrimination (de facto segregation). Both resulted in black deprivation. 32 Black education advocates met with stiff resistance from whites, also mostly mothers, who greeted black children with racial epithets. In a nationally televised address on June 6, 1963, President John F. Kennedy urged the nation to take action toward guaranteeing equal treatment of every American regardless of race. Soon after, Kennedy proposed that Congress consider civil rights legislation that would address voting rights, public accommodations, school desegregation, nondiscrimination in federally assisted programs, and more. Despite Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, his proposal culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson just a few hours after House approval on July 2, 1964. The act outlawed segregation in businesses such as theaters, restaurants, and hotels. It banned discriminatory practices in employment and ended segregation in public places such as swimming pools, libraries, and public schools. In Plainfield, after a 1964 state order to desegregate schools, black students found the words nigger steps and nigger entrance painted on parts of Plainfield High School.

On April 1, 1965, a special committee appointed by Massachusetts Education Commissioner Owen Kiernan released its final report finding that more than half of black students enrolled in Boston Public Schools (BPS) attended institutions with enrollments that were at least 80 percent black and that housing segregation in the city had caused the racial imbalance.

In response to the report, on April 20, 1965, the Boston NAACP filed a lawsuit in federal district court against the city seeking the desegregation of the city's public schools. Massachusetts Governor John Volpe (1961–1963 & 1965–1969) filed a request for legislation from the state legislature that defined schools with nonwhite enrollments greater than 50 percent to be imbalanced and granted the State Board of Education the power to withhold state funds from any school district in the state that was found to have racial imbalance, which Volpe would sign into law the following August. Also in August 1965, Governor Volpe, Boston Mayor John F. Collins (1960–1968), and BPS Superintendent William H. Ohrenberger warned the Boston School Committee that a vote that they held that month to abandon a proposal to bus several hundred blacks students from Roxbury and North Dorchester from three overcrowded schools to nearby schools in Dorchester and Brighton, and purchase an abandoned Hebrew school in Dorchester to relieve the overcrowding instead, could now be held by a court to be deliberate acts of segregation. Pursuant to the Racial Imbalance Act, the state conducted a racial census and found 55 imbalanced schools in the state with 46 in Boston, and in October 1965, the State Board required the School Committee to submit a desegregation plan, which the School Committee did the following December.

The Racial Imbalance Act of 1965 is the legislation passed by the Massachusetts General Court which made the segregation of public schools illegal in Massachusetts. The law, the first of its kind in the United States, stated that "racial imbalance shall be deemed to exist when the percent of nonwhite students in any public school is in excess of fifty per cent of the total number of students in such school." These racially imbalanced schools were required to desegregate according to the law or risk losing their state educational funding. An initial report released in March 1965, "Because it is Right-Educationally," revealed that 55 schools in Massachusetts were racially imbalanced, 44 of which were in the City of Boston. The Boston School Committee was told that the complete integration of the Boston Public Schools needed to occur before September 1966 without the assurance of either significant financial aid or suburban cooperation in accepting African American students from Boston or the schools would lose funding.