Boston Anti-Busing Riot 1976

In the Boston metropolitan area, forced busing is used to describe the ruling of Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts after finding a consistent and recurring pattern of racial discrimination in the operation of the Boston public schools in a 1974 ruling. Garrity's ruling found the schools were unconstitutionally segregated. As a remedy, he used a busing plan developed by the Massachusetts State Board of Education to implement the state's Racial Imbalance Law, that had been passed by the Massachusetts state legislature a few years earlier, requiring any school with a student enrollment that was less than 50% "non-white" to be balanced according to race. The Boston School Committee had consistently disobeyed orders from the state Board of Education to obey the law. Garrity's ruling, upheld on appeal by conservative judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and by the Supreme Court led by Warren Burger, required school children to be brought to different schools to end the pattern of segregation that had been illegally fostered by the school committee.

The conflict in Boston over busing primarily affected West Roxbury, Roslindale, Hyde Park, the North End, and the traditionally Irish-American neighborhoods of Charlestown, South Boston and Dorchester. It also affected the community of Roxbury, a formerly Jewish section of Boston that by the early 1970s had become predominantly African-American. (To a lesser extent, schools many miles away in Springfield, Massachusetts were affected by Judge Garrity's order, but the plan caused little overt controversy there as the minority population was relatively small.)

The integration plan aroused fierce criticism among some Boston residents. Opponents personally attacked Judge Garrity, claiming that because he lived in a white suburb, his own children would not have been affected by his ruling. However, Garrity's hometown of Wellesley welcomed a small number of black students under the METCO program that sought to assist in desegregating the Boston schools by offering places in suburban school districts to black students. However, most METCO students were from middle-class black families, and METCO was not available to poor white students from Boston. Another important difference in the suburbs was that white students there were not bused away from their neighborhoods, and towns were not under court order to enroll in the state-run program but did so voluntarily.

There were a number of protest incidents that turned violent. In one case, a black attorney named Theodore Landsmark was attacked by a group of white teenagers as he exited Boston City Hall.[1] One of the youths, Joseph Rakes, attacked Landsmark with an American flag, using the flagpole as a lance.[2] A photograph of the attack on Landsmark, taken by Stanley Forman for the Boston Herald American, won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography (known at that time as Spot News Photography) in 1977.[3][4]

In another instance, a white teenager was stabbed nearly to death by a black teenager at South Boston High School. The black students at the school were then forced to be evacuated by police personnel, while an increasingly hostile crowd of the community’s white residents gathered outside the school in a violent protest.

Today the Boston Public Schools are 86% African American and Hispanic. According to the 2000 census, Boston's white (non-Hispanic) population is 54.48%, whereas Boston's black and Hispanic populations together total 39.77%. Newcomer professional families in the city have comparatively fewer children, and some of those parents, both white and black, prefer to send their children to private and parochial schools rather than have their children attend public school. As a result, the Boston Public Schools have changed their mission from serving all students towards specifically targeting low-income, disadvantaged groups who cannot afford private schools and have no other choice. In South Boston, a neighborhood found by U.S. News and World Report (October 1994) to have had the highest concentration of white poverty in the country, dropout rates soared, its poorer census tracts' dropout rates superseding rates based on race and ethnicity citywide. South Boston, along with other poor and working class white census tracts of Charlestown and parts of Dorchester, saw an increase in control by organized crime and young deaths due to murder, overdose, and criminal involvement. Boston's South Boston High School (now the South Boston High complex) was declared "dysfunctional" by the State Board of Education. full article


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