What we got wrong about busing in Boston
By: Leigh Steinberg
Tags: Boston, Joe Biden, Busing, Kamala Harris, Desegregation

In the past two weeks since the second Democratic debate, hundreds of reporters across the country-and dozens in Boston-have written on the issue of busing. They claim that Kamala Harris struck a chord with liberal America by dredging up old battles in her attack on Joe Biden. We have all collectively debated where we are as a country and as a Democratic party today; some have even looked back into the 1970s to reconsider the merits of busing students to school to achieve integration (a seemingly settled issue — it worked).

All of them have missed the larger point. Especially for the city of Boston.

By beginning stories about the school desegregation saga in Boston with the 1974 court-order to bus students to integrate schools, we obscure and ignore the decade of black activism that preceded this moment. How many times have the names of Ruth Batson, Thomas Atkins, and Paul Parks been mentioned in our rehashing of the busing issue? Batson, Atkins, and Parks were NAACP activists-Batson a Boston Public School mother of three, Atkins and Parks determined and accomplished lawyers-who took on the Boston School Committee (BSC) for over ten years on the issue of de facto segregation in Boston.

Their demands in June 1963 did not include busing. While the country was enveloped in crises abroad and at home, Ruth Batson and her NAACP colleagues focused their efforts locally on the academic and mental effects of de facto segregation on African-American children’s education. They asked for equal funding for black schools, the inclusion of black history in textbooks, adequate training for black teachers and principals, and the acknowledgement that the de facto segregation in Boston contributed to inequities in the school system. Nowhere did they mention busing as a solution. During an August 1963 negotiation between the NAACP and the BSC, Batson concluded her statement with the following, “It is impossible for this committee to come before you to discuss the educational problems pertaining to Negro pupils in Boston without first attacking the source of these problems, de facto segregation.” De facto segregation was the foundation of their claims — the original sin from which all other inequities flowed.

The School Committee refuted the NAACP’s claims and refused to give in. How many times have we mentioned Louise Day Hicks and the political career she built on racial fears? Hicks was a central figure in the Boston school desegregation debate long before Judge Arthur Garrity handed down the busing order in 1974. As the chairwoman of the Boston School Committee, she led the white opposition to racial reforms for over ten years. She championed the crusade against the Racial Imbalance Act of 1965, a Massachusetts law that mandated desegregation of schools with over fifty percent black students. Boston housed 45 of the 55 racially imbalanced schools statewide, but the School Committee avoided compliance for years by perpetually submitting integration plans that did not meet the criteria of the law. Hicks’ staunch opposition to school integration and her denial to even discuss the possibility that de facto segregation existed set her on a path to political stardom in among white Bostonians.

She crafted her political career around what she was against, rather than what she was for — a familiar figure in today’s politics — and what she was against was the liberal establishment. She built her persona as an anti-establishment crusader on her opposition to the NAACP’s advocacy against school segregation, framing the issue as a battle over local control, neighborhood schools, and white rights. Hicks’ path took her to the City Council and eventually to run for mayor against Kevin White in 1967. With endorsements from Senator Edward Kennedy and Governor John Volpe of Massachusetts, Kevin White was the next target for Hicks in her crusade against the liberal establishment. She would lose the race, but her anti-establishment rhetoric from the 1960s laid the groundwork for the manipulation of the busing dispute in the 1970s.

Hicks and her colleagues masked their racist opposition to school integration under the guise of neighborhood schools and local control, a point made very well by Nikole Hannah-Jones in her piece, “It Wasn’t About Busing.” In response to the busing decision of 1974, Hicks wrote, “If it is true that ninth grade teachers now have to teach ‘addition and subtraction’ to integrated classed because some of the newer pupils in the system have not been taught basic arithmetic, that is not ‘quality education;’ and such children belong in special classes where they will not impede the learning process for the more advanced students.” Hicks’ argument hinged on the psychological inferiority of black students and their inability to learn the same way as their white peers without ever explicitly mentioning race.

Northern communities across America repeated this tactic time and time again. But the historiographical disconnect between northern and southern desegregation movements is false. A national examination of the 1960s shows that whites opposing integration in the North purposefully deployed tactics from the southern-focused Civil Rights Movement. Boston residents surely understood this dynamic. Martin Luther King, Jr. visited marked in Boston in 1965 in support of the NAACP’s desegregation efforts. Louise Day Hicks had to refute connections between herself and Governor George Wallace of Alabama. Hicks’ defense, “This is not Alabama, this is Boston. I shall not yield.”

Not only has recent reporting on this topic glossed over the more complex and nuanced arguments for school integration that black activists posed during the 1960s in Boston, it has also ignored the concrete steps that black activists took during this period to improve their condition. They staged multiple “Freedom Days” in 1964, when children were encouraged to stay home from school and attend local “Freedom Schools” organized by the black community. They organized Operation Exodus, a self-funded busing program that brought black students to open seats across Boston that white administrators refused to assign black students to. The longest legacy of this era is METCO, the organization that Ruth Batson founded to voluntarily bus black students out to suburban school districts. METCO is still in operation today.

Many people know Judge Arthur Garrity. People can argue whether he was a champion of integration or an uneducated suburban outsider who never should’ve gotten involved in the first place. Most people recognize “The Soiling of Old Glory” and remember the infamous stoning of buses carrying black children to white schools in 1974. But what we need to be talking about is the way that white actors systematically erased race from this debate by disguising their opposition to school integration as a fight against the liberal establishment, a fight we are still enduring today. They warped a debate that began as an effort to improve black schools and the entire African-American community of Boston into a politically weaponized debate over white rights, federal overreach, and the liberal establishment. Beginning the story of Boston’s school integration fight in 1974 is a disservice to people like Ruth Batson, Thomas Atkins, and Paul Parks who fought so hard throughout the 1960s for what every parent wants for their children — an equal opportunity to advance economically and socially through education.