The Choice We Face Read online

  White parents vehemently denounced even these minimal desegregation efforts. Thousands protested, many of them mothers of children who were “threatened” by the busing plan. Much like their counterparts in New York, parents argued that since the Brown v. Board of Education decision had ostensibly struck down all racial discrimination—that White or Black students could not be singled out by race—Redmond’s desegregation plan violated the law because it required transportation and pupil placement policies based specifically on race.21 They also took to the streets. Approximately fifteen hundred Whites rode city buses downtown to the board of education building to protest in person, creating a media spectacle that garnered citywide attention. Whites drew a firm line and attacked any plans for desegregation, no matter how moderate. When Cardinal John Cody (who was White) publicly supported the plan and framed racial integration as a moral issue, Whites burned him in effigy in front of his Chicago home.22 Across the North, tens of thousands of parents demonstrated that busing was not in their interests.

  In their attacks on busing, northern desegregation opponents acted in defense of the “White neighborhood.”23 As protesting mothers in Chicago claimed, the plans to bus and rezone their children constituted an “attack on the concept of the neighborhood school” that took their children “out of their home neighborhoods and into alien ones.”24 Connecting the desegregation issue to choice, one concerned parent petitioned the board in Chicago, noting: “Some of these people worked hard for many years to choose their neighbors and environment. Now you want the Negroes to have the right to choose their neighbors but not the whites who pay most of the tax dollars.”25

  School officials similarly downplayed or denied any charges of intentional segregation. New York school superintendent William Jansen repudiated claims that he and other administrators intentionally engaged in school segregation. As Jenson noted less than two months after the Brown decision: “We did not provide Harlem with segregation. We have natural segregation here—it’s accidental.”26 Additionally, northern school officials took lengths to avoid terms like “segregation,” opting instead for terms like “separation” and “racial imbalance.” Such rhetorical devices were deliberate attempts to distance the northern situation from southern problems. But it was not only an issue of public relations. Claims that segregation existed, but not by any legal means, sanctioned Whites to maintain the system that had been carefully constructed to their own benefit. As historian Matthew Delmont wrote, “These word choices emphasized that northern-style school segregation was innocent, natural, and lawful.”27 If segregation in the North was natural, there was nothing that could be done about it. Northern politicians agreed.

  Attempts to desegregate northern schools affected the drafting of key civil rights and education legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and later the Equal Education Opportunity Act of 1974. The volatility of the busing issue spurred northern congressional representatives to narrowly define any approach to desegregation in their home states. With the support of both liberal and moderate civil rights supporters, federal lawmakers made sure that only de jure segregation was addressed in the historic legislation, not the more hidden forms of segregation that existed in their home districts. Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 defines school desegregation as “the assignment of students to public schools and within such schools without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin” but immediately adds that “‘desegregation’ shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance.”28 While barring de jure segregation in the South, the law made remedies to segregation such as busing in the North very difficult to implement. It communicated an implicit yet clear disavowal of transferring or busing students to achieve integration. The language of the act selectively used the phrase “racial imbalance” as opposed to segregation, cultivating the ground to allow de facto distinction. Such discourse and legislation shrewdly protected the North—which could argue it had unintentional or “natural” segregation—from federal desegregation mandates and busing orders, much to the chagrin of southern segregationists.29

  The busing issue shaped influential federal elections in the North. In New York, an incumbent US senator, Republican Kenneth Keating, spoke out amid the busing protests during the fall of 1964. Acknowledging the angst of Parents and Taxpayers, Keating publicly asserted that busing constituted a “costly and burdensome drain on the school system and a hardship upon the children involved.” Just days later, his Democratic opponent, Robert Kennedy, declared his opposition to busing as well. For him, education was best left to local decision makers, not the Senate.30 With Kennedy entering the fray, the popularity and influence of antibusing rhetoric was made clear, illustrating the extent to which even the arguably most “liberal” city in the United States opposed busing. The busing debate had become a conflagration by 1964, and conservative presidential candidate Barry Goldwater fanned the flames. To a crowd of over eighteen thousand at Madison Square Garden, Goldwater decried the practice, noting that “forcibly busing your children from your chosen neighborhood school to some other one just to meet an arbitrary quota.” He said that he wanted to preserve “neighborhood” schools as opposed to seeing them “sacrificed by a futile exercise in sociology which will accomplish nothing—but lose much.”31 For this, Goldwater received a standing ovation.

  The issue went far beyond the New York senatorial race and the failed Goldwater campaign in 1964. When running for president in 1968, Richard Nixon would embrace a conservative agenda on a national platform, one that appealed to his southern constituents. Nixon drew on a distinction between de jure and de facto segregation that emerged in national discourse. As was expected by the mid-1960s, Nixon personally disavowed overt segregation. But his tepid support of desegregation ended there. Nixon did not believe in extending the reach of the federal government beyond current legislation to achieve “racial balance” in the schools. This included withholding federal funds and busing to achieve balance. Harking back to the restrictive language of the Civil Rights Act, he reminded the nation that ‘desegregation’ shall not mean the assignment of students to public school in order to overcome racial imbalance.”32 The stage was set for a national showdown over busing—and northern desegregation.

  Legal and political posturing in the North framed segregation as an issue confined to Dixie. This meant that federal desegregation orders would apply only in instances of de jure segregation, which could only be found in the South. Southerners were quick to point out the inherent hypocrisy behind this. The contradiction even prompted Mississippi governor John Bell Williams to propose a $1 million campaign to file desegregation suits in the North. It was part of a larger strategy among southern senators to focus desegregation plans north of the Mason-Dixon Line, exposing the hypocrisy of their fellow senators who denounced segregation in the South but tolerated it in the North. As historian Joseph Crespino highlights, it was just one strategy of ardent segregationists who wanted to force desegregation outside the South to inspire national White backlash.33 While the façade of “natural” segregation, or segregation without blame, defined the North, the concept did not go uncontested.

  As unpopular as busing was, it was a remedy the courts were willing to uphold. In Swann v. Mecklenburg (1971), the Supreme Court approved of busing in a case from North Carolina in which school officials who governed a district of over eighty-three thousand students were ordered to eliminate all racially identifiable schools. The justices reasoned that county-wide desegregation was an appropriate remedy to remediate past wrongdoing.34 Their ruling was based on the precedent of Green v. County School Board of Kent County (1968), which held that school boards had the authority and “the affirmative duty to take whatever steps might be necessary to convert to a unitary system in which racial discrimination would be eliminated root and branch.”35 Building upon the urgency of Green, the Swann decision was the high-water mark for desegregation. In addition to approving bu
sing as a remedy to racial imbalance, the decision also ruled that a quota system was a starting point for desegregation plans.36

  The decision merely exacerbated tensions around busing and desegregation, and Boston came to define the peak of antibusing demonstrations. Like other northern cities, racial tensions already existed in Boston. The city had experienced a growth rate of Black residents of 300 percent between 1940 and 1970, to comprise nearly 20 percent of the city or over one hundred thousand people. At the same time, suburban growth pulled over five hundred thousand Whites outside the city limits. Residential segregation, enforced through covenants as in Chicago, confined a growing Black population to overcrowded and overpriced parts of the city plagued by the highest unemployment rates. The schools, as was to be expected, lost support. By 1972, over 75 percent of public school students in Boston lived at or near the poverty line.37

  Since the early 1950s, African Americans in Boston had been organizing for higher-quality education through the NAACP. Civil rights activists boycotted schools and established temporary Freedom Schools during the winter of 1963 and the summer of 1964. They organized Operation Exodus, which bused Black students to participating White suburbs, with over two thousand Black students involved in the herculean effort.38 Under pressure from civil rights activists and a Black legislative caucus, in 1965 the Massachusetts legislature passed the Racial Imbalance Act, which defined schools in which over half the student population was non-White as “racially imbalanced.” But these efforts yielded little relief from systemic racism, hardly achieving anything beyond token desegregation by 1968.39

  With their backs against a wall, African Americans argued in a federal case that the City of Boston violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Judge Arthur Garrity found in Morgan v. Hennigan (1974) that the Boston School Committee “took many actions in their official capacities with the purpose and intent to segregate the Boston public schools.” Drawing upon the Swann decision, Garrity ordered the city to adopt an aggressive desegregation strategy in 1974. The subsequently infamous plan, created by the state board of education and ultimately enforced by Garrity, called for reassigning forty-seven thousand students—nearly one-half of all students in the district—and busing as many as seventeen thousand.40

  The desegregation plan attracted fierce opposition from Louise Day Hicks—Boston city council member and antibusing stalwart—and the Boston School Committee. The committee sought to protect the White “ethnic” neighborhoods that emerged as the center of resistance to busing—primarily South Boston and Charlestown. These two neighborhoods identified as White, working-class, and Irish Catholic.41 When Hicks—the central figure in White resistance—left the Boston School Committee to take a seat on the city council, she and likeminded parents formed an association called Restore Our Alienated Rights (ROAR).42 As historian Elizabeth Gillespie McRae writes, Hicks was one of numerous White American women using a form of maternal politics to claim moral authority in defending individual rights from perceived federal encroachment.43

  The two-way busing plan included segregated Black schools in proximity to South Boston and Charlestown, primarily Roxbury High School.44 Whites lambasted Judge Garrity and politicians who spoke in favor of busing. Senator Ted Kennedy, one of these politicians, was jeered and publicly vilified at a gathering at City Hall Plaza on September 9, 1974, with one incensed bystander shouting: “Why don’t you let them shoot you like they shot your brothers?”45 Anticipating violence, less than 10 percent of students attended school in South Boston that day. Angry mobs stole headlines, however, when the first Black students arrived at South Boston High School. Signs like “No N*****s in South Boston” and “Bus ’Em Back to Africa” greeted the yellow buses. White rioters threw rocks, cans, wood, and bottles. Fights between Black and White students broke out. A special force of city police trained for antiwar protests was used to quell antibusing riots and marches. Eventually federal marshals were employed to keep the peace.46 For the next three years, sporadic violence and mass demonstrations against busing rocked the city. The young Joseph Rakes, wielding a flag as a weapon, encapsulated this violent history.

  Much like segregationists in the South, antibusing protestors explored privatization as a means to avoid desegregation. Antibusing protestors and mothers of children in Boston public schools established four private schools in White neighborhoods directly impacted by “forced” busing, three of which were opened within one year of Garrity’s decision in 1975. Like the first private academies that opened after desegregation orders in the South, the Boston private schools were hastily organized. The buildings that housed the schools needed new walls, lighting, and bathrooms. One school was founded in the basement of a medical building. The Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, a governmental agency, scrutinized the schools for charging tuition at higher rates to residents of other neighborhoods, which curtailed students of color from enrolling.47 Thomas Atkins, president of the Boston branch of the NAACP, observed: “I consider them to be the same segregationist academies as the ones which sprung up in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia when desegregation began there.”48

  The private schools were a point of pride for White resisters, and they enjoyed modest support. South Boston Heights Academy enrolled nearly 450 students by 1976. Hosting open houses and proudly pinning student work on the wall, the grassroots unaccredited schools evaded court busing orders and vague threats by the state courts and the state board of education that their students would be considered truant. Additionally, numerous proposals called for public financial aid to assist in the establishment of the schools, an initiative the mayor of Boston, Kevin H. White, supported.49 Though not receiving the same level of funding as they had in the South, the Boston academies did have implicit support from Judge Garrity and the state legislators, who opted not to invoke school attendance laws and did not charge the private school students as truant.50

  In June 1976, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case that appealed the busing mandate, which allowed Judge Garrity’s order to stand. By default, Garrity was left in a position to oversee Boston public schools. After eleven years and 415 orders issued, Garrity issued his last order and began to relinquish his control over city schools to the Boston School Committee in the fall of 1985.51 But the tenure of busing in Boston—and cities across the North—left a devastated system in its wake.

  As historian Matthew Delmont notes, both sides of the busing divide were painted as extremists. The media portrayed White antibusing protestors—often employing the same nonviolent protest and direct action tactics of the civil rights movement—as radical. But, at the same time, they also labeled pro-busing candidates, predominantly Black civil rights activists, as extremists too. The public by and large reduced the issue to a false binary, trivializing the work of the civil rights movement and failing to comprehend the nuances of the demands for quality education. Media coverage of the crisis largely lacked the moral clarity that footage from the southern civil rights battles had possessed, and it fell short of exposing institutional racism.52

  Additionally, desegregation through busing became cemented in American consciousness as inherently violent. Despite the sensational television and media coverage of the time, seventy-nine of the eighty schools that were involved in the Boston busing plan remained free from violence. But the enraged mob at South Boston High School would define the issue for decades to come, and newsreels depicting the scene played on TV sets across the nation in other cities experimenting with busing, including Louisville, Nashville, Dallas, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis.53

  Northern Whites took measures to explain that it was not the fact that their children would be going to school with Black students; it was that they were being forced to attend what they identified as inferior schools. After events in New York and Boston, a growing core of White liberals criticized the “social experiment” of desegregation, which in their estimation endangered their own children and neighborhoods.


  How busing was covered by the media and how it was received among northern Whites limited the extent to which people could see the deeper issues behind it and the potential solutions it offered. Media coverage by and large dismissed the fact that Black parents and civil rights activists were not all that excited about busing. Black parents did not view busing as sufficient to address the larger social, political, and economic problems that continued to plague their communities.54 Placing Black children next to White children did not have some type of mystical power that would improve education. Nor did civil rights activists or families of color make that claim. Desegregation by any means—busing or otherwise—did little to address the magnitude of White supremacy that underpinned the entire school system. Desegregation policies did not include the promotion and hiring of Black teachers, the election of Black representatives to school boards, or African American curricula. Moreover, there was demeaning logic behind the arguments that framed the Brown decision. The decision to desegregate schools and the policies implemented to achieve this largely rested on the racist reasoning that Black education and Black families were inherently inferior. Black schools, students, and teachers were then deemed lesser than their White counterparts. Such logic not only propagated an endemic racism still extant today; it also ignored generations of high-quality education delivered in the most difficult conditions under Jim Crow.55

  African American voices offered compelling alternatives to busing.56 Many civil rights coalitions and education advocates coalesced around what Elizabeth Todd-Breland calls the politics of Black achievement, or the pursuit of self-determined means for a better quality education that did not necessarily emphasize or even include desegregation.57 The movement toward desegregation in the North revealed to many parents and activists most affected by broken public schools that White supremacy had corrupted the entire system. This reality, keenly understood by generations of those who had experienced it firsthand, fostered alternatives to integration into White society, including community control of the schools. This vision held that Black teachers and administrators, families, representatives, and advocates should lead schools. Black demands for community control and the decentralization of schools began in the 1960s. As historian Russell Rickford noted, the “community control movement garnered much of its mass support from a universal impulse: the will to survive.”58