WGBH News, in partnership with the Schuster Institute, launched on September 8, 2014, a yearlong multimedia news series that chronicles the impact of busing and desegregation on Boston over the past 40 years. The series kicks off with historical documents newly discovered in Mayor Kevin White's papers, and will include new reporting across radio, TV, and digital.

 

Research assistance has been provided by the Boston Busing and Desegregation Project. Original content was produced in conjunction with Brandeis Sociology Professor David Cunningham and Brandeis students in the Civil Rights and Educational Equity in the U.S. Justice Brandeis Semester.  

 

The Battle over Desegregating Schools

 

What was it like to go to school during desegregation in two cities that were prominent in that fight: Boston, Massachusetts and Jackson, Mississippi, one in the north, one in the south? Both cities violently resisted one of the most important Supreme Court decisions of the 20th century: Brown v. Board of Education,* which declared that keeping the races separated in school violated the Constitution’s promise of equal protection under the law.

 

Both gave us painfully iconic images: from Boston, a 1976 photograph by Stanley Forman of a white man nearly spearing a black lawyer with an American flag on City Hall Plaza; from Jackson, a 1965 photograph by Matt Heron of a white police officer wresting an American flag from a five-year-old African American boy’s hands. In Boston, white adults rioted and threw rocks at schoolbuses bearing black children. In Jackson, four years earlier, white adults had pulled their children from the public schools and enrolled them in new “private” all-white academies that hijacked public land, school materials, and funds.  

 

All that is public record. But what was happening inside the schools, away from the news cameras?

 

What was the more intimate, more daily experience of students, teachers, principals, guidance counselors, and others who lived through desegregation?

 

Schuster Institute Senior Fellow and WGBH Senior Investigative Reporter Phillip Martin interviews Dorchester students for some of the answers, here in three parts:

• In "Dorchester Students' Essays Echo Boston's Busing Crisis, 40 Years Later," Senior Fellow Phillip Martin interviews former students from the Oliver Wendell Holmes School in Dorchester, who in 1975 wrote class essays about their experiences with desegregation. Listen here>   

• "What Happened To The Sixth Graders Who Wrote Essays About Busing?" Listen here>

• Echoes of Boston's Busing Crisis

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why desegregate?

 

Civil rights activists and academic researchers remind us that mixing the races was never the goal; rather, equal funding and equal opportunity were. As long as black and white students were in separate schools, black schools were starved for funds, materials, teachers, and building repairs. By putting white and black students in the same classrooms, activists hoped to make that that funding discrepancy impossible.

 

In the end, in both cities, segregation triumphed -- in practice, if not in law. In Boston, “white flight” accelerated: many families moved to the suburbs (with black families denied mortgages at a much higher rate than white families). Others moved their children into parochial schools, leaving Boston’s schools overwhelmingly black, Hispanic and poor. In Jackson, Mississippi, public schools today are overwhelmingly black.

 

 

Boston, Massachusetts

 

Boston’s busing riots shocked the nation. On national television, Americans watched adults in two of Boston’s poor white neighborhoods throwing stones at buses full of terrified black children as they were bused into previously all-white schools under federal court order. "Liberal" Boston was exposed as a hotbed of racial hatred as virulent as what had been seen in the South.

 

But the sixth graders at the Oliver Wendell Holmes school--based in a black section of Dorchester and integrated without violence--wrote essays about their year inside this social experiment. These essays have never before been publicly seen in their entirerity. We post them in full here:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   Essays 1-17 | Essays 18-31 (PDFs)