Desegregation
Table 4.7
1855 Earliest calls for school desegregation in Boston. 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education
1961 School Committee enacts Open-Enrollment policy. 1963-
1973
A white supremacist movement arises in response to calls for school desegregation.
1972 Morgan et al. v. Hennigan et al. filed by the NAACP.
1965 Racial Imbalance Act passes. It prohibits any school from being over 50% minority, but does not affect schools which are 100% white.
June 1974
A district court rules that deliberate policy and practice led to the segregation of public schools.
1974 Judge Garrity calls for the creation of a plan to integrate schools by December. May
1975
A new plan is created by a panel put in place by Judge Garrity.
Boston’s public schools were not only highly segregated; they were also highly unequal. In the 1960s and 1970s the district did not provide sufficient supplies to the African American schools and students rarely had complete textbooks (Kaufman 1991). Teachers had very low expectation of their African American students and often gave A’s simply for good behavior. This led many parents to believe their students were doing quite well, when in fact they were significantly behind grade level (Kaufman 1991).
Extensive busing was also used in Boston in an effort to maintain the segregation of neighborhood schools. In 1972, for example, the city had to charter 172 busses and give out over 30,000 mass transit tokens (Dentler 2001, 12). The scope of this effort was a major factor in a 1975 court decision that Boston’s school segregation was intentional.
A great deal of effort was put into maintaining a segregated school system. The School Committee went so far as to enact an open-enrollment policy in 1961 which allowed students to transfer to any school with available seats; provided they could secure their own transportation. On the surface, the policy appeared to encourage integration, but in reality it was intended to assist white students in transferring away from schools with a significant minority population. The African American students who tried to avail themselves of the opportunity to transfer were strongly discouraged and often told that there were no openings. As a result, very few African American students were able to take advantage of the policy; mostly those who were fortunate enough to have highly informed and persistent parents (Kaufman 1991).
Racial tensions existed in Boston before the desegregation movement, particularly around the school system. Boston’s schools had been in a state of disarray for many years, with most affluent families electing to send their children to private schools. A 1960s plan to improve the school system, which only benefited white schools, had angered the African American community.
The African American community soon became very vocal in demanding equal access to an education. A group of mothers in the Roxbury neighborhood formed a group during the 1970s known as the Concerned Higgins Parents which was instrumental in focusing media attention on the inequalities in the district.
Even the NAACP became involved in Boston, filing suit in 1972. The lawsuit,
Morgan et al. v. Hennigan et al. (1972) claimed that African American students were being denied their fourteenth amendment right to an equal education.
At the same time a white supremacist movement arose in response to the threat of desegregation including many protests and organized violence. However, the violence was in fact concentrated only in two neighborhoods. Most areas of the city were able to desegregate, although never fully, without any major incidents.
Boston’s experience with school desegregation left behind many unresolved issues. One of these problems was the lack of teacher training in how best to teach in a more diverse classroom environment. The need for a teacher education program was recognized by school administrators at the time of desegregation, but their requests were denied (Kaufman 1991).
According to Dentler, Boston’s schools remain mostly segregated; in part because over 5,000 white students fled the school system between 1974 and 1978 following the implementation of Judge Garrity’s plan (2001, 16). African American students continue to lag behind white students in Boston and often attend the city’s worst schools.
Role of Race in Education Debate
The minority community was highly supportive of the elected School Committee and felt slighted by the decision to shift over to an appointed committee. However, the appointed committee was actually more representative of the racial makeup of the city than the African American dominated elected committee had been. Racial tensions often surfaced in the political dialogue and were a factor in the election of committee members and the selection of a superintendent by the committee. Racial tensions were also present in city wide elections and city politics.
Economy
The city of Boston experienced a shift from manufacturing jobs to Information Technology (IT) sector and service jobs in the 1990s. The city also experienced significant population decline in the 1970s and 1980s, but has begun to see a slight increase in the 1990s. Boston is considered to be one of the top financial cities in the country and has a great deal of tourism and convention business.