The 1970s, when the city began to bus Black children white neighborhoods in an effort to integrate schools.
"The educational system was totally segregated. Something had to be done," said Prof. Orlando Patterson, a sociology professor at Harvard University. "It was going to take a pretty radical busing position and reorganization of the system, and all hell broke loose."
There were angry mobs and violent attacks.
“One of the, the most iconic, horribly iconic moments was when right there in the center of the city, this guy came and tried to spear a Black guy with an American flag. I mean, that, that was a low point. So, and it was just all over the national news and that's where in a sense, Boston lost its innocence," said Patterson.
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 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.
#blackhistory
#civilrightsmovement
#boston
