Boston Against Busing

Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s

Ronald P. Formisano

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780807869703
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Droits civiques en politique

Perhaps the most spectacular reaction to court-ordered busing in the 1970s occurred in Boston, where there was intense and protracted protest. Ron Formisano explores the sources of white opposition to school desegregation. Racism was a key factor, Formisano argues, but racial prejudice alone cannot explain the movement. Class resentment, ethnic rivalries, and the defense of neighborhood turf all played powerful roles in the protest. In a new epilogue, Formisano brings the story up to the present day, describing the end of desegregation orders in Boston and other cities. He also examines the nationwide trend toward the resegregation of schools, which he explains is the result of Supreme Court decisions, attacks on affirmative action, white flight, and other factors. He closes with a brief look at the few school districts that have attempted to base school assignment policies on class or economic status.

1
Not Little Rock But New Orleans

During the fall of 1974 shocking images of racial bigotry and violence emerged from Boston, that graceful, cosmopolitan city known for the excellence of its educational, cultural, and scientific institutions, a city once called “the Athens of America.” As court-ordered desegregation of the public schools began, entailing entensive crosstown busing of both black and white pupils, racial conflict that had been escalating for over a decade overflowed into streets and schools.

In 1974 the tough, mostly Irish, working-class neighborhood of South Boston became as much a symbol of white racism as Selma, Alabama had been in 1964. Wild, raging mobs of white men and women confronted armies of police, while youths in their teens and younger hurled rocks, bottles, and racial epithets at buses carrying terrified black youngsters to school. Clashes with police erupted frequently and schools in other white neighborhoods became armed camps. The violence continued, arising alternately from whites and blacks, engulfing the innocent as well as the engaged: a black man stalked and beaten with hockey sticks; a white student carried out of Hyde Park High with a knife wound, then another stabbed by a black at South Boston High; a white man dragged from his car and beaten to death; a black lawyer beaten on the steps of City Hall by young white protesters and struck with the staff of an American flag used as a spear. Some observers, recalling a dramatic outburst of Southern opposition to desegregation in 1957, now called Boston “the Little Rock of the North.”

Organized resistance to desegregation, or what its opponents called “forced busing,” ground on for three grim years. Opposition to the court orders became, in the words of the United States Civil Rights Commission, “the accepted community norm. Behavior in defiance of the constitutional process seemed to many—albeit erroneously—to be a legitimate exercise of individual rights.”¹ The intensity and duration of the antibusing resistance in Boston dwarfed that encountered in any other American city. The federal district court judge who decided the case in June 1974, W. Arthur Garrity, Jr., shepherded implementation for eleven years, issuing 415 orders and becoming more involved in the everyday school operations than any judge in the history of desegregation. For some of those who tried to keep the peace in Boston, comparisons to Belfast in Northern Ireland seemed more appropriate in conveying the sense of “hopelessness” and “protracted struggle leading to no solution.”²

Though a relative peace eventually prevailed in the schools (urban schools in the 1970s were hardly oases of tranquility), incidents of racial violence persisted at a high level and did not taper off until the 1980s. Although Boston’s racial climate has improved steadily since former antibuser Raymond Flynn’s election as mayor in 1983, many wounds fester. Remnants of the antibusing movement persisted into the 1980s, and Boston still wears the reputation, at least partly deserved, of being a racist city, a reputation which clings to it like a bad odor that all the winds of the Atlantic cannot blow away.

To label an entire city racist, however, clearly violates common sense, and to explain the antibusing movement as primarily racist also is far too simple. By antibusing movement I mean in part the organized groups, principally ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights), that were dominated mostly by antibusing’s Mother Superior, Louise Day Hicks of South Boston. I refer also to the vast number of white Bostonians who were not ROAR members but who participated in protests of some kind.³ Eighty percent of white parents thought the court orders to be bad policy, and their responses varied greatly. Many moderates throughout the city agonized over the conflicting demands of conscience, duty, and the law and what they saw as potential danger to their children’s welfare. The travail of many decent whites caught in a whipsaw of decent intention and negative experience is a story that has not been told.

Explanations of antibusing also err, I believe, in attaching too much importance to the role of individual leaders.⁴ Louise Hicks, for example, became synonymous with antibusing, beginning in 1963 when as chair of the school committee she contested the demands of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for better schools for blacks. But consistent majorities on the school committee, with or without Hicks, pursued essentially the same policies for a dozen years.

Antibusing in Boston, especially its organized active expressions, can be seen as a case of reactionary populism, a type of grassroots social movement that has flared frequently in American history. From “regulators” in the eighteenth century, to nativists and agrarians in the nineteenth, to urban Progressives in the twentieth, these movements have been bundles of contradictory tendencies seeking greater democracy or opportunity, perhaps, while simultaneously expressing intolerance or denying the legitimacy of certain group interests. Our modern populisms especially seem to be inhibited, to be cramped by limited horizons, and they easily go sour from a lack of faith rooted in a sense of powerlessness. Yet many antibusers shared with other protesters of the 1970s at least the attempt to regain control over their lives.

Social scientists too often homogenize such internally diverse movements by stamping them as either liberal or conservative, radical or reactionary. Sometimes the labels are justified, but grassroots insurgencies often defy ready classification. Hence this description of Boston antibusing as reactionary populism, while an oxymoron, should not be seen as unusual. Indeed, in Canarsie, New York, in the early 1970s, white reaction to desegregation, according to Jonathan Rieder, “was a disorderly affair. Backlash contained democratic, populist, conspiratorial, racist, humanistic, pragmatic, and meritocratic impulses.”⁵

Reactionary populism is used here as a term of neither blame nor praise, but descriptively. Boston’s antibusing movement was populist in that it sprang from the bottom half of the population, from working-, lower-middle- and middle-class city dwellers who felt their children, neighborhoods, and status to be threatened. Like many other citizens’ movements of the 1970s, antibusing expressed rampant citizen alienation from impersonal government, drawing on an ingrained, deeply felt sense of injustice, unfairness, and deprivation of rights.

Several neighborhoods that became strongholds of antibusing tended to see the fight against the court orders of a suburban, “out-of-town, out-of-touch” judge as a continuation of wars waged in recent years against the depredations of highway construction, urban renewal, and airport expansion promoted by social engineers, bureaucrats, and above all, outsiders. Antibusing exuded the same anti-elitism and fierce class resentments that had erupted in these earlier struggles of neighborhood defense.

Yet while populist in many ways, Boston’s antibusing movement was not reformist. It sought little more than a return to the status quo in the school system that existed before the court orders. It did not challenge established political and economic power, and militant activists too often expressed hostility, or at a minimum, insensitivity, to the just demands of black citizens for a full share of their rights. Fear of blacks, specifically of poor ghetto blacks, fed antibusers’ feelings of being trodden on, while their outrage at injustice and feelings of powerlessness often fed their hostility to blacks.

This book is not essentially about blacks but about whites, though many blacks in fact opposed the court orders and mandatory desegregation, and some resisted the implication of racial balancing of schools that black youngsters could not learn unless they were in a classroom with white youngsters. The black struggle for decent schools is recounted here in two chapters that argue that school segregation in Boston sprang largely from the democratic interaction of a school committee elected at-large and various of its constituents.

That democracy and segregation were linked was only one of the many ironies involved in Boston’s trauma. Several other “jokes of history” derived from the impact of the 1960s. The white antibusers, for example, consciously and unconsciously imitated black civil rights activists. More generally, the antibusers were in many ways children of the 1960s. The enormous cultural and social upheavals of that decade, above all the loosening of public standards of conduct and the decline of authority, powerfully shaped organized antibusing. Numerous protesters during the 1960s—blacks, students, youths, hippies, opponents of the Vietnam War, women, Native Americans—as well as the rise of a new permissiveness in popular culture, all contributed to a climate of civil disobedience and disrespect for authority. Sitting before their televisions and watching—usually with disdain—the protesters of the 1960s and 1970s, the antibusers had learned powerful lessons that they would seek to apply against school desegregation.

Of course the greatest irony of all was the activist antibusers’ imitation of the black civil rights movement, which had served as midwife to most 1960s movements. Antibusers frequently staged demonstrations aimed at gaining media coverage and affecting public opinion in the way that they believed civil rights protesters had done a few years earlier. The antibusers usually failed to realize that the civil rights movement had gained widest public support during its nonviolent phase, whereas antibusing in 1974 quickly became associated with violence. Still, they wanted to see themselves portrayed with the sympathy the media had bestowed on the followers of Martin Luther King, Jr.; that is, as victims. By replaying the strategy of civil rights activists, they hoped that the media would legitimize their cause.

When antibusers compared themselves to black activists, they usually ended up seething with bitterness. “They were heroes and martyrs,” they lamented, “but we are racists.” Who regarded the antibusers as racists? The liberals, suburbanites, elite politicians, outsiders, and especially the media. For antibusers these groups not only overlapped, but “the liberal establishment” and the media were virtually the same thing: a hated enemy who presumed to judge them from the safety of their “lily-white” suburbs. The media doubly frustrated the antibusers by portraying them as racists and by refusing to anoint them with victim status, much less to bestow on them a mantle of morality. But the liberal media earlier had readily legitimized black demonstrators and hairy, unruly youth. For the antibusers, the contrast was infuriating.⁶

Aside from the antibusers’ conscious imitation of civil rights and antiwar movements, the 1960s affected them in other ways just as profoundly, though perhaps not as consciously. The decline of authority, or rather, of respect for authority, spread from the young and rebellious throughout much of the population. Traditional mores and values came under scathing questioning and attack from all quarters, not just from radicals, intellectuals, or those on the margins. Irreverence burst into the mainstream, and that most powerful domestic agent of change, television, reflected and promoted the decline of confidence in public and private institutions. Television was, both in its news and entertainment programs, perhaps only the most ubiquitous of debunking agents.⁷

The antibusers of the 1970s sprang mainly from groups who in the 1950s had tended to be orderly, conformist, and self-conscious about their public demeanor. In the 1960s they were at first repelled by the outrageous behavior of black and antiwar protesters and shocked by deviant lifestyles. Richard M. Nixon had labelled them “the silent majority”: decent, hard-working, reflexively patriotic, and trusting in authority. But they too lost respect, lost faith, and when pressed themselves, many turned to modes of action that a short time before had marked those whom they scorned and resented. It is hard to imagine ethnic neighborhoods mobilized in street protest during the 1950s—but then that comfortable, seemingly secure postwar world had suddenly changed.

The civil rights movement had done most to define the new era, acting as a generative force of this axial decade leading out of postwar triumphalism and self-congratulation. The black crusade had revealed a lie and a sickness at the core of American society, and once self-doubt began it spread, especially among the young who now inhabited college campuses in record numbers. The civil rights movement went through several phases, however, changing from nonviolence and heroic suffering in the South to aggressive demands for “Black Power” in South and North. Legal victories in Congress in 1964-65 did not relieve the poverty and lack of opportunity that defined living conditions for many blacks, and a mounting sense of relative deprivation gave rise to massive urban riots in black ghettos in the mid- and late-1960s. Militant black separatists such as the Black Panthers used revolutionary rhetoric and went armed, further frightening many whites and provoking lethal responses from local police and the FBI.

Both separatist and integrationist black leaders exhorted blacks to nurture self-love, pride in their history, and a self-conscious African-American identity, and this helped to inspire similar upwellings from other inhabitants of America’s cultural salad bowl. Those European groups who had been part of the great immigration of 1890-1924 and who had been intimidated by the ideology of the “Melting Pot” now began to emerge from the shadow cast by British-American dominance of the nation’s identity. The cry of “Black is Beautiful” taught those of Irish, Polish, Italian, or Slavic background, among others, to look at their roots with new reverence. Many urban ethnics thus were caught up in a cultural chauvinism that often fed the backlash.

Several recent writers have argued that the ethnic revival of the 1960s came at a time when ethnicity was in fact fading—and was in part a product of that recession. Being “ethnic,” like being African-American, was often an act of will. Ethnicity had changed from being “a taken-for-granted part of everyday life” to being “private and voluntary,” from “the status of an irrevocable fact of birth to an ingredient of lifestyle.” Yet even the forces that submerged ethnicity also contributed to raising barriers against blacks: the black influx into central cities, by arousing consciousness of race, helped make various white groups less conscious of their ethnic differences and diverted white antagonisms to blacks.⁸

On balance, “ideological ethnicity” reinforced the backlash by providing it with a rhetoric for resistance to desegregation. The ethnics of the “urban villages” of the North often felt most vulnerable to blacks in the latter’s efforts to break out of the ghetto, and for the urban ethnics theirs was foremost a vulnerability of place. It was their schools and their blocks into which blacks would be coming.

Furthermore, not only did New England and Boston tend to be more ethnicity-aware than other parts of the country, but Boston’s neighborhoods commonly swelled with a localist pride that made their residents highly conscious of turf.⁹ Within neighborhoods, pockets of ethnicity, class, and place flourished, often identified by parish, squares, corners, hills, and the like. These small worlds often reacted with instinctive hostility to any outsiders.

Besides the militant, organized antibusers, opposition to Judge Garrity’s court orders and the plans of 1974–75 also involved many thousands of moderate whites who did not join ROAR, who disapproved of violence, and who rejected illegal activities, including school boycotts. Many moderates believed fully in integrated schools; some had been sending their children to schools that were integrated. Hundreds and thousands of individual families grappled conscientiously with the fear, anxiety, and vicissitudes of sending their children to schools and streets they saw as dangerous, and which often were. The moderates’ story has not been told.

The Boston Home and School Association (HSA) constituted one moderate group whose role has not been appreciated by earlier histories. The Boston HSA, similar to parent-teacher associations, has been viewed as militantly antibusing and as a creature of the Boston School Committee.¹⁰ But while local chapters were diverse, most citywide leaders were pragmatists.

As individual and group responses varied across the city, so did neighborhood expressions of antibusing. The sound and fury of South Boston and Charlestown captured media attention, but at the opposite end of the neighborhood spectrum from Southie was semisuburban, middle-class West Roxbury, where antibusing opinion was nearly as intense as in South Boston but where antibusing action found expression in a very different style. South Boston’s militants tolerated no dissent from their hard line. They engaged in every form of protest but were best known for their collective actions: marches, motorcades, rallies, disruptions of traffic and meetings, and violent street clashes with police. By contrast, West Roxbury’s style tended to be individualist, pragmatic, and legalist, tolerant and permissive of different views, and cool to boycotts and street demonstrations.

A small minority of antibusers deliberately practiced terrorism against blacks and especially whites for at least three years. Their targeting of white moderates—most of whom strongly disagreed with the court orders but tried to comply—probably affected the course of desegregation more than the harassment of blacks. Antibusing vigilantes, based especially in South Boston, exercised a disproportionate influence because they were tough, because the moderates lacked leadership and also perceived the court orders as unfair, and because it takes only a few incidents of violence to intimidate one’s neighbors. Of course racism added an ugly, frenetic charge of ferocity and violence to many antibusing protests. But as powerful as racism was, it formed only a part of the story.¹¹

Both the sweeping nature of the court remedy as well as the powerful resistance to it owed much to the Boston School Committee’s long resistance to even the most limited attempts to implement desegregation. From 1963 to 1974 majorities of the five-member, elected school committee engaged routinely in blatant discriminatory practices, heedlessly letting evidence accumulate on the public record that would create ironclad proof of their guilt. A series of politicians, playing upon and being tossed about by their constituents’ fears, stepped forward as pied pipers of the white backlash.

These backlash entrepreneurs, joined by neighborhood populists cast up from the grassroots, virtually created an antibusing movement before busing ever ...