The Pursuit of Educational Justice in Boston

"We, like any citizens, are vitally concerned with good sound educational policies. Our demands tonight have centered around de facto segregation and its evil effects because we know that this issue has not been faced by Boston school officials. This issue must be dealt with, if we are to move along with the plans and blueprints that proclaim a New Boston."
- Ruth Batson, 1963 ¹

When the story of Boston school desegregation is told, it often begins in 1974, the year that a federal judge in Morgan v. Hennigan ordered the racial integration of the city’s public schools through the use of busing. It is usually a story of violence and racial animus with often a narrow, unnuanced frame to this telling—one that pits Black Bostonians versus whites, cherry picking sensational events to justify how busing “failed,” and with it broader efforts toward educational justice.

This fall marks 50 years since the tumultuous first school year of court-ordered desegregation, and an opportunity to reframe how we understand and teach this history. To that end, Facing History & Ourselves has published The Pursuit of Educational Justice in Boston, a new resource that engages students in the question, “What can we learn from Boston’s past about what it takes to make progress toward educational justice today?”

Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Danger of a Single Story reminds us that there is power in how one tells a story. She notes this power as the “ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.” Single stories are often damaging in what they leave out. We see evidence of such damage when the choice is made to begin Boston’s desegregation story in 1974. “‘Boston’s busing crisis,’” writes Historian Jeanne Theoharis in addressing this damage, “is treated very differently from the white resistance to the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas; there is almost no recognition of the three-decades-long civil rights movement in Boston, which led to the 1974 judicial order for system-wide desegregation.” ² Likewise, historian Matthew Delmont argues that such a frame oversimplifies “the story in terms of white anger and render[s] Black Bostonians as bit players in their own civil rights struggle.” ³

If we widen our attention, a different story comes into focus. Take 1963. On the evening of June 11, Ruth Batson, then chairperson of the education committee of the Boston Chapter of the NAACP, outlined a list of demands to the Boston School Committee to ensure educational justice for the Black community of Boston. Backed by a room of 125 supporters, Batson explained that Black children in Boston attended schools that were racially segregated, overcrowded, and underfunded. She offered recommendations the school committee ought to take to achieve educational justice, including rezoning schools, diversifying curricula, and reducing class sizes.

That same evening, then President John F. Kennedy gave an impassioned televised address to the nation decrying the impacts of racism and calling on Congress to pass legislation that would ultimately become the Civil Rights Act of 1964: “If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote [...] who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?” ⁴

Back in Boston, Louisa Day Hicks, chairperson of the Boston School Committee, rejected Batson and her delegation, dismissing outright the notion that the school committee had a responsibility to address their concerns.

This juxtaposition reveals at least two fissures in the conventional telling of history. The first disrupts the more comfortable contrast of a racist South against a benevolent North, or in the words of Theoharis, opens a “much more uncomfortable set of questions on the limits of Northern liberalism and the pervasive nature of school segregation.” ⁵ The second uplifts a vibrant tradition of activism. Just a week after Batson and the NAACP were rejected, the Black community organized Boston’s first “Stay Out for Freedom,” with nearly 3,000 Black high school students staying out of public schools to attend Freedom Schools, where they learned about African American history, citizenship, and nonviolent protest. ⁶

From a wider vantage point, in the years leading up to 1974, the story is much less about busing than it is about the larger movement for civil rights and how folks sought to define and pursue educational justice. These are stories that include Black interests as well as those of the Latinx and Chinese American communities. We see, for example, in 1968 Black students at English High School protesting the lack of Black faculty and staff, the dearth of Black history courses, the absence of a Black student union, among other discriminatory issues, and igniting a boycott of Boston’s 16 high schools. We see that same year the formation of the Quincy School Community Council, a multiracial coalition made up of Chinese American, Black, Latinx, and white representatives to plan for the new Josiah Quincy School in Chinatown, previously undertaken by the Tufts-New England Medical Center without community input. ⁷ We see the efforts of the Latinx community to ensure bilingual education, eventually pushing the city to open its first bilingual school, the Rafael Hernández in 1971. ⁸ These efforts and more demonstrate community attempts at realizing educational justice in the absence of a meaningful seat at the table.

Through this historical narrative, the so-called “busing crisis” takes on new light. In fact, since the 1960s busing had been a tool to maintain segregation in Boston and other northern cities, with white students often being bussed past nearby predominantly Black schools to attend overcrowded predominantly white schools farther away. ⁹ The intransigence of the Boston School Committee to defy the Racial Imbalance Act, passed by the Massachusetts Legislature in 1965, by way of this and other intentional measures—such as constructing temporary classrooms to block integration and coding Latinx and Chinese American students as white in order to mask the extent of the problem—showcased how so-called “de-facto” segregation was in reality thinly veiled de jure segregation.

If busing “failed,” it did so because those with the responsibility and power to implement policy defined educational justice with little consideration of the city’s residents. In 1972, the NAACP filed a lawsuit against Boston Public Schools in federal court as a last resort to years of activism, progress, and backlash. In June of 1974, Judge Garrity ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and in his remedy he oversaw the implementation of a two-phased plan to desegregate the schools, though his initial order made no note of the city’s Latinx and Chinese American students. “Phase One” had students from predominantly white South Boston High School swap with those from predominantly Black Roxbury High School, schools from two of the poorest communities in the city. Michael Patrick MacDonald, a young boy at the time living in Southie, notes how where he grew up had one of the highest concentrations of white poverty in the country. “To focus on a school that had a lot of students on welfare,” MacDonald reflects, “that’s not really the place to get equity.” ¹⁰

In response, the city’s residents mobilized to preserve the progress made toward educational justice. Freedom House’s Institute on Schools and Education organized the Black community, disseminated information, and assigned bus monitors to ensure safety for their children; El Comité de Padres Pro-Defensa de la Educación Bilingüe (the Parents’ Committee for Defense of Bilingual Education) successfully advocated to represent the interests of the Latinx community in Judge Garrity’s development of Phase Two of his plan; the Boston Chinese Parents Association organized a boycott of Boston Public Schools until their demands for safety and bilingual education needs were met. Through this wider lens, we find undoubtable resiliency.

“What can we learn from Boston’s past about what it takes to make progress toward educational justice today?” This question, unanswerable from any one perspective, is open-ended and is up to us, our teachers and their students to answer. Progress and setbacks checker the years between 1974 and 2024, but with a determined throughline of folks consistently seeking their vision of educational justice. How we continue this pursuit today depends upon a sense of civic imagination, and whether collectively we can come together across constructed forms of division—whether our many stories can be heard and listened to. Adichie again, states, “Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize.”

What other stories of educational justice are needed to empower and to humanize? Perhaps the story of freedpeople during the Reconstruction Era building public schools from the ashes of the civil war; the Tape and Mendez families who fought for educational justice and paved a way for the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education; the countless others who understood that knowledge is power and knowledge is freedom. “Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.” ¹¹

What stories do you and your communities have that help us imagine educational justice? That, bolstered by generations of activists, with history in hand, a “New Boston”—a new world—is yet possible?

• 1Batson, R., Price, E., Ballantyne, E., & King, M. (1963, June 11). “Statement to the Boston School Committee.” Boston Public Schools. Retrieved September 4, 2024 from http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20202645.
• 2Theoharis, J. 2018. A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History. Boston, Beacon Press, p. 33.
• 3Delmont, M.F. (2016). Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation. Oakland, California: University of California Press, p. 18.
• 4Kennedy, J.F. (1963, June 11). “Excerpt from a Report to the American People on Civil Rights.” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. Retrieved September 6, 2024 from https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/historic-speeches/televised-address-to-the-nation-on-civil-rights.
• 5Theoharis, J. A More Beautiful and Terrible History. p. 33.
• 6Facing History & Ourselves. (2024, February 29). “Timeline: Boston Educational Justice, 1945-1973.”
• 7Liu, M. (2020). Forever Struggle: Activism, Identity, and Survival in Boston’s Chinatown, 1880-2018. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
• 8Cruz, T.M.F. (2017). “Boston’s Struggle in Black and Brown: Racial Politics, Community Development, and Grassroots Organizing, 1960–1985.” PhD dissertation, University of Michigan.
• 9Delmont, M. & Theoharis, J. (March 2017) “Introduction: Rethinking the Boston ‘Busing Crisis.” Journal of Urban History 43, issue 2: 191–203.
• 10Neuburger, J. (Editor). (2023). The Busing Battleground: The Decades-Long Road to School Desegregation. PBS.
• 11Adichie, C.N. (2009). “The Danger of a Single Story.” TED. Retrieved September 4, 2024 from https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.