February 4, 2025 • 49 mins
In 1974, a federal judge ruled that Boston’s public schools were unconstitutionally segregated. The solution? A controversial experiment in desegregation known as “busing,” which would take children from majority-white schools and bus them to predominantly Black schools, and vice versa. What followed was a year of upheaval, violence, and fierce protests, as Boston became a battleground for the heated national debate over school integration and racism in the North.
In this dramatic audiobook, journalist Leon Neyfakh (co-creator of the podcasts Slow Burn and Fiasco) unpacks the history of busing in Boston and brings to life the human stories behind the headlines. Listen on Pushkin.fm, Audible, Spotify or wherever you get audiobooks.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Almost exactly fifty years ago, a federal judge ruled that
Boston's public school system was unconstitutionally segregated by race. The
judge declared that, due to actions taken by Boston school officials,
racial segregation quote permeates schools in all areas of the city,
all grade levels, and all types of schools. The only
(00:41):
possible remedy, the judge wrote, was to affirmatively mix the
city's student population by taking kids from majority white schools
and reassigning them to majority black schools, and vice versa.
This experiment in desegregation would come to be known as bussing,
a shorthand premised on the idea that the yellow school
(01:03):
buses used to enact desegregation were the most important thing
about it. The start of bussing in nineteen seventy four
set off a school year marked by angry parents, anxious kids,
and brutal violence. Newspapers across the country called the situation
in Boston a disaster, a mess, a tragedy, and yes,
(01:24):
a fiasco. Boston became a metonym for the whole idea
of school desegregation, and more specifically, for its failures. My
name is Leonnavok. I'm a journalist and producer best known
as the host of audio documentaries like Slowburn, Watergate, Think Twice,
Michael Jackson, and Backfired the Vaping Wars. My production company,
(01:46):
Prolog Projects, makes long form audio, typically in the form
of multipart narrative podcasts. The audiobook You're About to Hear
was adapted from the third season of our flagship history
series Fiasco. It's a show in which we excavate canonical
events from the recent past, like the two thousand election
and the Iran Kantra affair, and bring them back to
life from a modern perspective. I'll admit I wasn't too
(02:14):
familiar with the story of bussing when it was pitched
to me by Sam Graham Felsen, a novelist who grew
up in Boston and who ended up serving as a
producer on our project. But the more I learned about
the so called bussing Crisis, and the more I spoke
to the people who lived through it, the more it
became clear that it was exactly the kind of story
that Fiasco was made to cover, and not just because
(02:37):
it's a dramatic narrative full of surprising twists, and fascinating characters.
Although it is definitely that it's also the story of
an idea. Desegregation by way of bussing was an idea
that got tested in Boston, and everything that happened as
a result, the chain of events you'll hear about in
this audiobook, caused that idea to pretty much die. The
(02:59):
crazy thing is that the number of American kids who
attend racially segregated schools has actually gone up over the
last thirty years. And yet when we started researching the
history of Boston's public schools back in twenty nineteen, school
desegregation was in no way a policy priority in America,
and the idea of mandatory bussing was way outside the
(03:20):
Overton window of anything a serious political candidate might ever endorse.
Bussing was an artifact of the nineteen seventies, a stand
in for every impractical liberal idea that has ever been
forced down the throats of an unwilling public. I'll say
(03:45):
one more thing by way of introduction. We approached the
story of school desegregation in Boston the same way we
approach all of our journalism about the past. We talked
to people who saw what happened with their own eyes.
We tried to capture what it was like to live
through it before it became history. For this particular story,
that meant diving into the history of Boston itself, It's
(04:07):
enclaves and neighborhoods, politics, and the marks left on it
by urban renewal and white flight. Probably the hardest decision
to make when telling any story is where to start.
As you'll hear momentarily, we chose to start this one
a full decade before that federal judge brought bussing to Boston,
because the plan to desegregate Boston schools didn't just appear
(04:29):
out of nowhere. It was merely a milestone and a
turning point in a long struggle to make Boston schools
more equal, a struggle that was initiated not by a
judge but by the parents of black children. The writer
Nicole Hannah Jones has argued that opposition to bussing should
be understood as opposition to the whole project of school integration.
(04:50):
We should question, she wrote in twenty nineteen, why in
the narrative of bussing we remember Boston rather than cities
where desegregation went more smoothly. This audiobook is an attempt
to interrogate that particular historical conundrum. Why do we remember
what happened in Boston? How should we remember it? Chapter one,
(05:25):
Stay Out. In September of nineteen seventy four, the city
of Boston faced a test. What would happen if thousands
of white and black children living in segregated neighborhoods were
forced to go to school together?
Speaker 3 (05:41):
When we go up there, we're going to be stoned.
It is not fair to me, because why is the
other way around? When they come up here, and they
come up here, we won't mess with Jim, So why
when we come up there, then mess with us?
Speaker 2 (05:58):
All I know about the girl whose voicetery hearing is
that her name was Joanne and that she grew up
in one of Boston's black neighborhoods. Joanne was interviewed by
a reporter from NBC News for broadcast that aired just
before the start of the school year. In the video,
she's wearing a jacket over a striped shirt, and her
hairs and braids. She's looking down at the ground and
(06:19):
nervously smiling.
Speaker 4 (06:20):
What do you think about the people of South Boston?
Speaker 5 (06:23):
Joy? If you were the message you'd like to tell them.
Speaker 4 (06:28):
What would it be?
Speaker 3 (06:31):
Yeah, oh, thank you. Fear it is not fear me.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
The desegregation of Boston's public schools was ordered in nineteen
seventy four by a federal judge who had hurt evidence
in a lawsuit filed by a group of black parents
and their kids. After the ruling came down, the city
was consumed by more than two years of racial violence.
White parents and politicians, and even gangsters like Whitey Bulger
(07:01):
mounted a campaign to oppose and then sabotage integration.
Speaker 5 (07:06):
Violence was blared again in the Boston School Buste.
Speaker 6 (07:09):
The local NAACP office was.
Speaker 7 (07:12):
Firebomb They had made a sign saying we don't want
eat niggers in a school.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
By the time the worst of the violence was over,
it looked like the death knell of the Civil rights movement,
proof that America was doomed to remain segregated forever. All
this happened twenty years after the Supreme Court ruled in
Brown v. Board of Education that separate was inherently unequal
(07:39):
in the South, where there were laws explicitly calling for
white and black people to be kept apart. The ruling
triggered in immediate reckoning. But in the North, where state
laws were race neutral on their face, the prevailing belief
was that brown v. Board simply didn't apply.
Speaker 6 (07:56):
It may come as a surprise to most Americans to
hear that Boston, the cradle of liberty, could be accused
of prejudice.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
The truth was that schools were segregated in the North,
including in Boston, and when black activists finally succeeded it
compelling the city to address the problem, the backlash they
inspired created a jarring new reality for Boston's children and teenagers.
It came to be known in the press, in political circles,
and later in history books as the bussing crisis. Bussing
(08:24):
because the students who were transferred into new schools had
to take buses to get there.
Speaker 6 (08:28):
Whites were in turmoil over court ordered school bussing.
Speaker 8 (08:31):
Ever since the bussing ordered, Boston has been filled with
racial tension.
Speaker 9 (08:35):
Bostonians, by and ledge, don't like bussing.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
When I started this audiobook, that's what I thought it
was going to be about, the Boston bussing crisis, and
that's what I told people when I asked to interview them.
Until some of them started hanging up on me as
I quickly learned there are those who think bussing is
the wrong shorthand for this story. In particular, many black
activists who lived in Boston at the time never recognized
(09:01):
the term bussing crisis. To them, it obscured what the
conflict was really about and where its history began. Tom
Atkins was president of the NAACP's Boston branch when desegregation started.
He died in two thousand and eight, but was interviewed
for the classic civil rights documentary Eyes and the Prize.
Speaker 10 (09:20):
Blessing was a nationwide code word for keep the niggas
in their place, so people could run racist campaigns without
making racist statements. They all I had to do was
to say, whatever else you want, a gast blessing.
Speaker 11 (09:36):
They had to tell us what it meant.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
We knew what it meant.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Okay, fiasco. The Battle for Boston will take you through
the full story of Boston's struggle to end segregation in
its schools and what happened when black people tried to
bring racial justice to a place where many believed it
already existed.
Speaker 12 (10:09):
Nobody who would have ever wished this on a city.
It was horrendous.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
This is Huby Jones. He was in Boston during the
busing years when the city began to remedy the intolerable
problem of school segregation.
Speaker 12 (10:25):
It felt like the city was coming apart, was falling
apart at the seams, but the fact that it had
to be done was incontrovertible.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Jones grew up in the Bronx with the civil rights
movement all around him. His father was an important figure
in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, one of the
country's first all black labor unions. In nineteen fifty one,
the year before Brown v. Board reached the Supreme Court,
Jones enrolled at the City College of New York, where
he took a psychology course taught by professor named Kenneth Clark.
Speaker 12 (10:58):
And at that time, doctor Clark was heading a social
science team that was putting together a brief to go
with the Brown Versus bordevge Vcasion brief that was being
taken by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to the United
States Supreme Court.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
The brief for Brown v. Board referenced to study conducted
by Clark and his wife Mamy. In it, black children
were given four dolls to play with. Two of the
dolls looked white and had yellow hair, and the other
two were brown and had black hair. The Clarks asked
the children to identify the doll they'd like to play
with and the nice doll. Here's Kenneth Clark describing what
(11:39):
happened in a TV interview.
Speaker 13 (11:41):
We found that black children knew that they were different,
that they had lower status. Two out of three of
the children it rejected the brown dolls as being negative
and etc.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
The study ended up being a key factor in the
Supreme Court's decision in Brown v.
Speaker 14 (12:02):
Board.
Speaker 8 (12:03):
Shortly afternoon, Earl war On, the Chief Justice of the
United States, began to read a unanimous opinion of the
Supreme Court.
Speaker 12 (12:11):
And of course, I remember on May seventeenth, nineteen fifty four,
being in the cafeteria at City College, and a student
was holding up the front page of the New York Times,
which said the United States Supreme Court outlaws segregation in public.
Speaker 8 (12:29):
Schools, ruling in five cases in which five Negro children
sought the right to go to the same schools as
white children. The Court said segregation in schools is a
denial of the equal protection of the law.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
Brown v.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Board overturned plus E v. Ferguson the infamous eighteen ninety
six decision that found separate public accommodations for black and
white people were legal so long as they were equal
in brown. The court founded schools that were segregated by
race were inherently unequal and were therefore unconstitutional.
Speaker 8 (13:02):
Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
After college, Hube Jones went to Boston University for graduate
school and social work. He just barely missed overlapping with
another BU grad student, Martin Luther King, who had completed
his PhD a few months earlier. Inspired by King's work
in the South, Jones and other black activists in Boston
began to confront the white power structure in their city.
Speaker 12 (13:33):
They were all kinds of discrimination going on in the
Boston area in every facet, whether it's housing, employment, schooling, etc.
It exists and ought to be dealt with.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Education had long been a key battlefield in the fight
for equality, and it's easy to see why. School is
this elemental component of society. It's where we're supposed to
train children to be productive and well adjusted adults. It's
supposed to be a stepping stone to the middle class.
It's personal, and so improving education for black Boston became
(14:10):
a focus for people like hub Jones. They pointed out
that majority black schools were often housed in old, dilapidated buildings.
They were overcrowded and often staffed by teachers who were
inexperienced or temporary, even some who drank on the job.
Speaker 15 (14:26):
Thirty six screwed down seats and forty three kids. Old
paper so old that it was brown at the edges,
and if you hit it too hard it crackled up.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Jean McGuire taught at the Louisa may Alcott School in
the South End, a diverse neighborhood with a large black population.
The South End is not to be confused with South Boston,
the Irish Catholic enclave better known as Southey. McGuire was
horrified by what her students, almost all of whom were black,
had to put.
Speaker 15 (14:53):
Up with nubs of crayons, broken crayons, no nice boxes
of new crayons, which I later found was in all
the yellow white schools in Boston. I would have these
boxes of old, beat up pencils. We had a pencil shop,
a screwed to the corner of my desk, and the
kids would shop them down to like two inches. We
(15:14):
just didn't have enough pencils. I said, see if your
parents can buy your pencils with an eraser on the end.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
During her first week as a teacher at the Alcot,
maguire went through the textbooks in her classroom and found
a flagrantly racist songbook.
Speaker 15 (15:26):
Every negative word you could say about black people was
in that music book, and it was approved. Ten little niggas,
nine little coons, eight little jigaboos, And that's what we
were given to teach our children. That was a Boston
school From nineteen sixty one.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Motivated in part by the experiences of teachers like McGuire,
black activists in Boston started gathering evidence of a separate
and unequal public school system in their city. The effort
was led by Ruth Batson, a mother of three from Roxbury,
the center of black life in Boston. Batson had found
her way to activism when she realized that her daughters
(16:09):
were not getting the same education as white kids.
Speaker 16 (16:12):
And I read in the paper that an organization called
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had
opened an office on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue in
Tremont Street.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Patson died in two thousand and three. This is a
recording of her speaking to a producer for the documentary
Eyes and the Prize.
Speaker 16 (16:30):
So one day I went up there and I saw
the President and I told him that I felt that
something was wrong with the school and particularly in the
schools where black kids were.
Speaker 15 (16:41):
And about three.
Speaker 16 (16:42):
Days later, the President called me and said, missus Batson,
we've decided to set up a subcommittee which we will
called the Public School Committee, and we'd like to ask
you if you would be the chairperson of that committee. Well,
I was so excited, you know, I thought this was
one but that determined my life. My whole life has
(17:02):
been pointed in that direction and the improvement of education
for black kids.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Batson's first move was to meet with the white principals
who ran the predominantly black schools in Roxbury.
Speaker 16 (17:15):
And we did what we called a survey because we
didn't even know that we were doing a survey. We
just thought that we'd go around and ask these principles
these questions about education of black students.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Batson was struck by what the principles were willing to
say to her face.
Speaker 16 (17:29):
In one school, one principal said, well, the question we
would ask, well, do you think that Nigro students learn
in the same way that white students learn? Oh no,
oh no, she said, they don't learn as well at all,
she said. And then in addition, she says, do you
know they all have different names? They come in in
a family, and one family you can find three different names.
(17:51):
She says, it's in morally moral. So of course we
left that school knowing what was happening to black students today.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Batson and her colleagues at the NAACP heard variations on
that theme from many of the principles they met with.
They also found hard quantitative evidence of unequal treatment. They
discovered that per pupil spending averaged three hundred and forty
dollars for white students and only two hundred and forty
dollars for black students. Eventually, Batson's group requested a meeting
(18:21):
with the Boston School Committee, a five member board that
oversaw public education in the city. The only member of
the School Committee who agreed to meet with Batson in
the NAACP was the newly elected chairwoman, an Irish Catholic
from South Boston named Louise Day Hicks.
Speaker 17 (18:37):
Missus Louise Day Hicks, chairman of the Boston School Committee.
Speaker 18 (18:41):
I feel at this time that the School Committee should
set its policy.
Speaker 19 (18:46):
This pamphlet was a sixth Louise Day Hicks was kind
of an unknown quantity when she was elected to the
Boston School Committee in nineteen sixty one.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
This is Jim Vrabel, a historian and housing activist who
moved to Boston in the sixties. He's the author of
a People's History of the New Boston.
Speaker 19 (19:03):
She'd been one of the few women to graduate from
Boston University Law School. At the same time, people did
not know what her politics were. It was assumed that
she was probably liberal, and there were high hopes among
school reformers that she would be more willing to listen
to them and more supportive than the School Committee members
(19:26):
had been in the past.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
Contrary to those expectations, Hicks would turn out to be
the standard bearer of the white backlash to school integration
in Boston. She had become famous for it all over
the country.
Speaker 20 (19:39):
Mister Hicks, there is in cities outside of Boston image
of you as kind of a symbol of racial bigoty.
Speaker 4 (19:46):
How did all this.
Speaker 21 (19:47):
Happen in Boston in nineteen sixty three?
Speaker 18 (19:51):
We had civil rights leaders here who requested and demanded.
Speaker 12 (19:56):
Louise de Hicks was a large.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Woman civil rights activist hub Jones again.
Speaker 12 (20:01):
And she had this hairdo which was behive hairdoo. She
had a squeaky, high pitch voice, and it was this
squeaky voice of hers that sort of defined her.
Speaker 22 (20:16):
What do you think this is doing to our children?
They keep them there for a few hours during the
day and then they returned them to the ghettouse. A
they helping out children? I say no.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
By the mid seventies, when bussing started, Hicks was running
an organization called ROAR, an acronym for Restore Our Alienated Rights.
Its logo was the drawing of a lion clutching a
school bus in its claws. Back in the early sixties,
few could have predicted that Louise Day Hicks would turn
herself into a champion of Boston's working class whites. Hicks's
(20:49):
father was a wealthy judge in South Boston, and there
was a term for people like her lace curtain irish.
It aligned her more closely with the Kennedy clan than
with the poor residence of Southee. Regardless, Hicks fit right
in on the Boston School Committee. For decades, the city's
school system had essentially been a giant employment agency for
Irishman Americans. In the words of one journalist, it was
(21:12):
easily the biggest employer of Sullivan's and Murphy's in the city.
Here's Ruth Batson again.
Speaker 16 (21:18):
The Boston School Committee was a unique political body. Well
one thing, it had always been used as a stepping
stone to a higher office. I used to attend the
number of School Committee meetings and the only things I
would here discussed would be promotions and assignments, things like that.
Very seldom did you hear real educational issues discussed.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
The committee members controlled the hiring and firing of everyone
in the school system, from teachers to janitors. It was
a patronage system built around fundraising, dinners, favors, and family connections.
The arrangement had benefited generations of Irish Bostonians and few
had dared to disturb it. Meanwhile, as Jim Rabel says,
the schools themselves were deteriorating.
Speaker 19 (22:07):
So by the nineteen sixties, the public schools in Boston
were almost uniformly bad.
Speaker 14 (22:15):
The school committee was.
Speaker 11 (22:16):
Not very progressive, not very education.
Speaker 19 (22:19):
Minded, and the public was kind of acceptant of this
situation and didn't make waves.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Even so, black activists hoped at first that Louise Day
Hicks would be an ally and their attempted to shake
up the school system. When they presented her with a
report on the woeful status of majority black schools, she
seemed genuinely concerned. After the meeting, one of the local
NAACP leaders, Paul Parks, drove Hicks home to South Boston.
(22:49):
She told Parks how awful it sounded, that she understood
and sympathized with their grievances.
Speaker 14 (22:54):
Driving her back to her home in his car, Louise
promised Paul that she would look into it and try
and make changes and try and address these kind of
what we call equity issues now.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
But then just two days later, Hicks called Paul Parks
with bad news.
Speaker 11 (23:12):
She told Paul Parks that she had talked to Frederick Gillis,
the school superintendent at the time, and said that she
decided she was not going to get involved because Gillis
said that if she did get involved, she'd never win reelection.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
In other words, if Louise Day Hicks was seen as
catering to black parents, her political career in Boston would
be finished. In the summer of nineteen sixty three, Ruth
Batson and the NAACP's Boston branch called on the School
Committee to hold a special public hearing to discuss segregation.
(23:50):
At the meeting, they would lay out their evidence before
the five member committee, as well as the media and
the Superintendent of Schools. The committee agreed, and the meeting
was set for June eleventh, nineteen sixty three. By sheer coincidence,
it was a date that would turn out to be
a turning point in the history of civil rights, and
not because of anything that happened in Boston that day.
(24:11):
Alabama Governor George Wallace planted himself in front of the
auditorium doors at the University of Alabama in an attempt
to block two black students from registering for classes.
Speaker 9 (24:22):
As Governor and Chief Magistrate of the State of Alabama,
I deem it to be my solemn obligation and duty
to stand before you representing the riots and sovereignty of
this state and its peoples.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
It was a stunt in his inauguration speech, Wallace had
vowed segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. This was his
way of showing that he meant it. That night, John F.
Kennedy delivered a response to Wallace in a televised speech
about race and segregation, and for the first time in
his presidency, Kennedy spoke in bold moral terms about civil rights.
Speaker 20 (24:59):
If in America, because his skin is dark, kennot eat
lunch in a restaurant open to the public, If he
cannot send his children the best public school available, If
in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life
which all of us want, then who among us would
be content to have the color of his skin changed
(25:22):
and stand in his place?
Speaker 2 (25:25):
Kennedy told the country that the problem of racism would
not end on its own, and that it was wrong
to ask black people to just be patient. Kennedy made
a point of not singling out the South. He said
the whole country was implicated.
Speaker 20 (25:38):
This is not a sectional issue, my fellow Americans. This
is a problem which faces us all in every city
of the North as well as the South.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Kennedy's speech was a provocation to northern nurse, including the
residents of the Boston area where he grew up. It
was a reminder that the racism they saw in the
South existed everywhere. Watching the speech from Atlanta, Martin Luther
King reportedly leapt up and said, can you believe that
white man not only stepped up to the plate, he
hit it over the fence.
Speaker 20 (26:09):
Seems to me that these are matters which concern us all,
not merely presidents or congressman or governments, but every citizen
of the United States.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Hub Jones missed Kennedy's big speech. Instead, he was among
the hundreds of black activists and parents who came to
watch Ruth Batson and the NAACP confront the Boston School
Committee at their downtown headquarters.
Speaker 12 (26:33):
I was in the room. It was an old room
that had been converted into a made room, and there
were polls blocking your view, so it's really hard to
see it unless you could get them into the right position.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
The meeting quickly filled the capacity. Many were turned away,
but they refused to go home and stood outside in
the rain.
Speaker 12 (26:55):
It was a hot June night. The windows were open
to try to bring in air, but there was no
air circulating. You could hear the people in the streets
singing freedom songs, and that was wafting in as a
part of the environment that was created.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
For Jones.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
The Boston School Committee hearing marked a new beginning for
the civil rights movement in Boston. Jones watched as Ruth
Batson explained to the committee that there were two kinds
of segregation, day jurrey, which was deliberate and legally enforced,
and de facto, which stemmed from where people lived. Day
jurre segregation was the kind they had in the South.
(27:42):
The North had to grapple with de facto.
Speaker 16 (27:45):
We went before the School Committee and we said to
them that this condition that we were talking about was
called de facto segregation, and that by that we didn't
mean at all that anybody on the school committee or
any official was deliberately segregating students, but this was caused
by residential settings and so forth, but that we felt
(28:07):
that this had to be acknowledged and that something had
to be done to alleviate the situation.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
As far as Batson and her fellow activists were concerned,
there was no real difference between de facto and de jure.
The simple fact was that black students suffered either way.
Speaker 16 (28:23):
When we would go to white schools, we'd see these
lovely classrooms, small number of children in each class, the
teachers were permanent, and we would see wonderful materials. When
we'd go to our schools, we would see overcrowded classrooms,
children sitting out in the corridors and so forth. And
so then we decided that where there were a large
(28:47):
number of white students, that's where the care went, that's
where the books went, that's where the money went.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
Addressing Louise day Hicks and the other four Boston School
Committee members, Batson argued that the only practical way to
give black and white kids equal access to education was
to eliminate segregation. Black kids had to be educated alongside
white kids in order for their schools to get the
attention and resources they needed. Batson wasn't arguing that black
(29:14):
kids would do better just by being around white kids.
She was saying that their schools would be better funded
if more of their classmates were white. Louise day Hicks
would later try to flip the point on its head,
all but accusing Batson and her allies of being racist
against their own people.
Speaker 18 (29:30):
Many of the Negro parents believe that a predominantly Negro
school is in ferry of per se that we and
here in Boston do not believe that premise.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Just a few weeks earlier, Hicks had seemed willing to
work with the NAACP, but now with reporters looking on,
she simply thanked Batson for her testimony and seated the
floor to the Superintendent of Schools, who rejected the charges outright.
He was willing to concede that there were predominantly Black
schools in the city, just as there were predominantly Chinese
(30:03):
and Italian and Irish schools, but the School committee's position
was that it was not their fault.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
HUGHB.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
Jones.
Speaker 12 (30:10):
Again, they refused to acknowledge it because they had no
intention of changing the conditions that existed, So they just
said it did not exist, and you can't charge us
with segregation. It had to do with housing patterns, and
as Missus Hicks said over and over again, we have
no responsibility for where people live, so we're not deliberately
(30:34):
segregating anybody.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
To the school Committee, any accusation of segregation was a
non starter, de facto, de jurey, it didn't matter. The
very word segregation implied that the committee was guilty of something,
and they insisted that they weren't.
Speaker 23 (30:51):
You really sensed that the school Committee people in a way,
we're afraid of the black people.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
Bob Levy was an education reporter for the Boston Globe
in nineteen sixty three, and he covered the hearing at
the School Committee headquarters that June I was able to
interview Levy before he died in twenty twenty.
Speaker 23 (31:11):
These were people from an unknown country called Roxbury who
were going to somehow undermine the good of the city
by making demands that we do not intend to meet
because we don't acknowledge that the problem exists.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
For Ruth Batson, the confrontation with the school Committee felt
like a slap in the face.
Speaker 16 (31:38):
And we were really innocent.
Speaker 14 (31:39):
We were naive.
Speaker 16 (31:40):
We walked in thinking that we weren't saying anything so special,
and we made our presentation and everything broke loose. We
were insulted. We were told our kids were stupid and
this is why they didn't learn. We were completely.
Speaker 15 (31:57):
Rejected that night.
Speaker 16 (31:58):
We were there to all hours of the evening and
we left battles.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
God activists responded to the June eleventh hearing by calling
for something that had never happened before Austin a citywide
student boycott in which black students would stay out of
school for one day in protest of unequal conditions. Among
the organizers was a young episcopal priest in Roxbury named
James Breeden. Breeden didn't think of the protest as a boycott.
(32:25):
He called it a stay out for freedom. Central to
the concept was that kids were encouraged to attend makeshift
freedom schools set up at churches and community centers throughout
the city. Breeden helped recruit teachers and local civil rights
leaders to appear as lectures.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
We wanted, mainly to teach the kids about the history
of black people.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Breeden was eighty five when I interviewed him in twenty twenty,
and he died later that year. He told me about
how Louise day Hicks came to see him before the
stay out to try to get it canceled.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
And so she came to see me because she wanted
me to call it off. She was wearing a necklace
with Saint Cyprian, a black saint, her attempt to show
(33:20):
me that she was in favor of black people.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
Breeden did not cancel the stay out. Who was scheduled
for June eighteenth, one week after the confrontation at School
Committee headquarters. In the meantime, the Boston branch of the
NAACP presented the School Committee with a list of fourteen demands.
Some were about hiring black teachers and principles. Another was
about reducing class sizes. But it was the very first
(33:47):
demand on the list that created an impasse. The NAACP
wanted the School Committee to publicly acknowledge the existence of
de facto segregation in the city's schools. Louise da Hicks refused.
Speaker 16 (34:01):
At one point, she said, the word that I'm objecting
to is segregation. As long as you talk about segregation,
I won't discuss this. And so we would drop these
little sentences saying where there is a majority of black students,
these students are not being giving the education that other
(34:22):
people are given, and so forth, ofs on, and she'd say,
does that mean segregation? And so the whole thing would
be dropped.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
After a long back and forth, Hicks got the NAACP
to agree to cut the word segregation and issue a
joint statement that didn't even mention schools. Instead, its focus
was on the harmful effects of what both sides had
agreed to call ghetto living, which caused black children to
be quote separated from other racial groups. But there was
(34:50):
still a sticking point. Hicks wanted the statement to affirm
that the problem stemmed from social conditions beyond our control.
When a different version of the statement leaked to the press,
Hicks saw that it referenced social conditions we regret. Hicks
was furious and publicly disavowed the statement the Black leaders
for playing with words.
Speaker 18 (35:11):
I don't believe that the Boston public schools are segregated.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
After that, Hicks doubled down, insisting that the problem with
the city's predominantly black schools wasn't unequal distribution of resources,
it was the behavior of black students.
Speaker 18 (35:25):
I honestly feel that the problem has been focused on
a disciplinary problem in the area. I feel that we
may need the help from social service agencies. As we
have listened to each of the principles today, they all
seem to feel that they were unable to teach because
they had to perform police duties.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
Hicks went on to suggest that the people protesting the
conditions of Boston schools were outside agitators.
Speaker 24 (35:49):
Would you care to speculate on why the NAACP has
raised this.
Speaker 11 (35:53):
Issue in Boston.
Speaker 18 (35:55):
No, I do not, unless I might say that it's
a national problem and they have brought it to Boston
where it does not belong.
Speaker 8 (36:05):
We do not believe, then, that this agitation originated here
in this city.
Speaker 18 (36:09):
No, I do not.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
The idea that black activists were outsiders would become a
reliable part of Hicks's strategy in the year's come. Boston's
black population had exploded over the past decade, in part
due to the great migration of black Southerners moving north.
The premise of Hicks's accusation was the patronizing and racist
idea that longtime black Bostonians were friendly and docile, that
(36:36):
they'd had no complaints until outsiders from the South came
and riled them up. With the stay out protest imminent,
James Breeden gave an interview to Boston's WGBH about what
was in store.
Speaker 17 (36:47):
I would like to ask, why are you holding this
so called boycott tomorrow and how will this help the situation?
Speaker 12 (36:55):
As you see it?
Speaker 25 (36:56):
The Freedom stayout is an attempt to communicate to the
Boston School Committee and to the wider community the seriousness
of the situation.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
On Tuesday, June eighteenth, nineteen sixty three, between two and
three thousand Black students in Boston skipped school as part
of the stay out for Freedom protest.
Speaker 17 (37:21):
Today, Boston witnessed the so called boycott by Negro students
of Junior and Senior High schools of Boston.
Speaker 14 (37:28):
Good morning.
Speaker 18 (37:29):
First, I'd like to welcome you to your Freedom School.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
And I think many of the students who participated in
the stayout attended classes as the Freedom schools. WGBH broadcast
a special report on the protest, and.
Speaker 26 (37:42):
At the Freedom School we saw a steady line of
children walking orderly to the various churches and centers where
they were going to attend the Freedom School. One of
the most dramatic things I saw this morning was a
parent and her two children, one on each arm. She
bought them to the school and this is a children.
You will go in and learn of freedom, and I
(38:02):
will come to pick you up at two fifteen.
Speaker 27 (38:05):
My mother she told me that jaint Mark soldn in
A was doing a good job, and she said that
I should go around there and see because they tried
one before that they wouldn't let them have their freedom.
But she says this time, she thinks that they'll get
it this time, because they're really trying for it this time.
Speaker 8 (38:22):
I see.
Speaker 7 (38:22):
Do you believe there are segregation in the Boston schools?
Speaker 21 (38:25):
Segregation?
Speaker 27 (38:26):
Well, some teachers are prejudice and they just don't treat
you right.
Speaker 2 (38:31):
The Freedom Schools were a celebration of Black history, and
the organizers took explicit inspiration from the civil rights activism
that had swept the South.
Speaker 28 (38:39):
We're gonna sang some songs now. They are a part
of the freedom movement. The first song is a song
called Freedom.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
Geene Maguire, the teacher from the Alcott School you heard earlier,
spent the day volunteering at the Saint Mark's Social Center
in Roxbury.
Speaker 15 (39:01):
We planned a curriculum that we could use so that
when the children came, it wouldn't be math and side.
We weren't duplicating the school curriculum. We were teaching civil rights,
black history and our circumstances and our conditions and what
you could do to change it.
Speaker 23 (39:21):
You've been told today that you have a history, that
you have fraternity with the people of Africa, and what.
Speaker 15 (39:29):
We talked about was how are we going to improve
our situation here in Boston. It was about our condition
and the terrible state that black people were in in Boston.
Speaker 4 (39:39):
It's not a black and white problem. This is an
American problem.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Another freedom school teacher was Boston Celtic star Bill Russell.
He had just won his fifth straight NBA championship ring
Huby Jones remembers Russell showing his support during the stay out.
Speaker 12 (39:55):
He came to one of the freedom schools and gave
a speech. Let your blackness be a badge of honor
was one of what he said. He then talked about
his support for black people staying up to fight for
their rights and that he was willing to stand with them.
Speaker 7 (40:14):
Bill Russell, the Boston Celtics shoe, gave a very powerful
speech today at this freedom sit in. Could you tell
us what you feel is the success of this freedom stayout?
Speaker 4 (40:26):
This is just the beginning. This is a monster we're fighting.
It's a Cancerro's monster, and the fight isn't successful. It
could conceivably destroy democracy here and everywhere. Listen, this is
not a fight.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
Later that year, vandals broke into Russell's house in the
suburbs of Boston. They spray painted the N word on
his wall and defecated in his bed. Northern The Freedom
Stay Out was front page news, not just in Boston,
but across the country.
Speaker 17 (41:02):
The boycott has been hailed as successful by Negro leaders.
It is called a failure by the super of schools.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
Louise Day Hicks was enraged. Our schools, our churches, our
public officials preach obedience to the law. Yet here we
have our Negro children being encouraged to flout the law,
she said. Later, Hicks tearfully told a room of teachers,
God help them, they know not what they do. After
the June eleventh hearing and the Freedom Stay Out, school
(41:32):
desegregation became the top priority for many black activists in Boston.
This was a new development. Up to that point, people
like Ruth Batson had mostly just wanted better schools for
their kids, not necessarily more diverse ones. But the activists
saw how defensive Louise Day Hicks and the other School
Committee members had gotten with the mere mention of segregation.
(41:53):
It had touched a nerve in a way that calls
for better school buildings and classroom supplies. Never had the
cause of desegregation electrified the Black community, and it tied
them to the great moral struggle happening in the South.
Through the rest of the summer and fall of nineteen
sixty three, the black activists in their allies organized a
series of marches calling for desegregation. One drew six thousand people.
Speaker 17 (42:16):
The Boston School Committee and the Boston branch of the
NAACP dispute continues.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
They even staged a dramatic overnight sit in at the
School Committee's headquarters, during which they occupied Louise Day Hicks's office.
Speaker 24 (42:29):
And there is one person naming off School Committee members
on the rest of the pickets, answer must go. They
started with Mississix's chairman of the Boston School Committee.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
On April twenty third, nineteen sixty five. The movement to
desegregate Boston's public schools received a boost when Martin Luther
King visited the city and delivered an address on Boston Common.
Speaker 5 (43:00):
We assemble here to say to Boston and to say
to the nation, say that segregation, whether it is in Selma, Alabama,
to Boston, Massachusetts, is nothing but a new farm of
slavery covered up with certain nice it is or complexity.
Speaker 2 (43:20):
King had been organizing marches across the South for years,
but he had never once staged a demonstration above the
Mason Dixon line. Now Boston would be the site of
King's first mass protest in the North. King had decided
that Boston was where his movement would begin its expansion
from a regional uprising into a national reckoning.
Speaker 5 (43:41):
And so I'm here to John with you in reminding
the cradle of liberty that we are through with segregation now,
henceforth and forever more.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
As desegregation emerged as the galvanizing issue in Boston's black community,
it also galvanized Louise Dehees.
Speaker 21 (44:10):
I asked the NAACP and all citizens of Boston, how
can we be expected to work for more progress in
the area of the culturally deprived children with a club
over our heads?
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Suddenly, Hicks was appearing in local newspapers, and her name
recognition was skyrocketing in white, working class Boston. Her timing
was fortuitous. A week before Martin Luther King's visit to Boston,
state officials in Massachusetts had released a report on racial
imbalance in schools. The report referenced a growing body of
(44:45):
social science research that had come out since the Clark's
famous Doll study. The state said these findings were conclusive.
Racial imbalance caused quote serious educational damage to Negro children
by impairing their confidence, distorting their self image, and lowering
their motivation. The state proposed various remedies to the problem,
(45:05):
including mutual transfers of students between schools. Mutual transfers meant
transporting white students to majority black schools and black students
to majority white schools. In a residentially segregated city like Boston,
that meant requiring kids to travel outside their own neighborhoods, and,
as Louise day Hicks quickly pointed out, that meant bussing.
Speaker 6 (45:28):
Now, bussing has become so intertwined with integration it's taken
on new meaning.
Speaker 22 (45:33):
The resistance to bussing is based on race prejudice.
Speaker 2 (45:37):
Bussing was the most immediate way to create integrated schools
in a way, it was the simplest, but it was
also the most controversial. I'd keep a home Taken in isolation,
you might think it's odd for anyone to have such
strong feelings about their kids taking the bus to school.
American children have been doing it for generations. Many of
(45:57):
Boston's children, most of them white rode buses to school.
It had never been a big deal, But as education
equality became the most divisive issue in Boston, the word
bussing became a stand in for something much bigger.
Speaker 14 (46:10):
Louise D.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
Hicks called it undemocratic, Unamerican, absurdly expensive, and diametrically opposed
to the wishes of the parents of this.
Speaker 29 (46:18):
City, whereby children, our children become wards of the federal
government and they are going to be used as guinea pigs.
Speaker 2 (46:29):
Hicks was saying that bussing was a social experiment, one
that would make victims out of the children it used
as human subjects. Pretty soon, Bob Levy, the Boston Globe's
education reporter, noticed that Hicks's opposition to bussing had become
the core of her political platform.
Speaker 23 (46:45):
The majority of children in schools in America were being bussed,
and yet somehow the word was used as a perversion,
and suddenly bussing is the symbol of the attack that
white America is under.
Speaker 2 (47:04):
In bussing, Hicks had found a seemingly race neutral way
to oppose desegregation. The fight wasn't about keeping black students
out of white schools or keeping white children out of
black neighborhoods. It was simply about protecting the integrity of
the neighborhood school. The national media bought into Hicks's framing.
Newsweek put her on its cover under the headline Boston's
(47:25):
bussing Battle. Time quoted her saying, I believe that little
children should go to school in their own neighborhoods, with
the children with whom they play. It's as simple as that.
Speaker 30 (47:35):
I feel that bussing has no advantages educationally for our
little children. It will take them far from their neighborhoods,
and it will bring them into very strange neighborhoods. Democracy
in action is when children.
Speaker 29 (47:49):
Walk to school.
Speaker 2 (47:54):
The thing I always want to know about political figures
like Louise da Hicks is how do they explain it
to themselves? How do they convince themselves that they're better
than the real villains, that they are innocent, that people
like Ruth Batson and Hube Jones and Jean Maguire and
breeding are all just making it up. Hicks's entire political
identity was based on a proclamation of innocence, Innocence for
(48:17):
the Boston School Committee, innocence for Boston as a whole,
innocence for the North. How did she talk herself into it?
The more important question might be why it worked so well,
Because with Bussing, Hicks had found a winning issue, one
that went beyond education and tapped into the broader grievances
(48:38):
of Boston's largely white working class population. Soon, Hicks had
her eye on something bigger than the city's schools. She
wanted city Hall.
Speaker 21 (48:49):
This is Louise Day Games candidate for mayor of Boston.
Speaker 8 (48:52):
It's no longer considered beyond the realm of possibility that
Louise Day Hicks.
Speaker 9 (48:56):
Will be Boston's first woman mayor.
Speaker 21 (48:59):
May the best woman Rewin
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Almost exactly fifty years ago, a federal judge ruled that
Boston's public school system was unconstitutionally segregated by race. The
judge declared that, due to actions taken by Boston school officials,
racial segregation quote permeates schools in all areas of the city,
all grade levels, and all types of schools. The only
(00:41):
possible remedy, the judge wrote, was to affirmatively mix the
city's student population by taking kids from majority white schools
and reassigning them to majority black schools, and vice versa.
This experiment in desegregation would come to be known as bussing,
a shorthand premised on the idea that the yellow school
(01:03):
buses used to enact desegregation were the most important thing
about it. The start of bussing in nineteen seventy four
set off a school year marked by angry parents, anxious kids,
and brutal violence. Newspapers across the country called the situation
in Boston a disaster, a mess, a tragedy, and yes,
(01:24):
a fiasco. Boston became a metonym for the whole idea
of school desegregation, and more specifically, for its failures. My
name is Leonnavok. I'm a journalist and producer best known
as the host of audio documentaries like Slowburn, Watergate, Think Twice,
Michael Jackson, and Backfired the Vaping Wars. My production company,
(01:46):
Prolog Projects, makes long form audio, typically in the form
of multipart narrative podcasts. The audiobook You're About to Hear
was adapted from the third season of our flagship history
series Fiasco. It's a show in which we excavate canonical
events from the recent past, like the two thousand election
and the Iran Kantra affair, and bring them back to
life from a modern perspective. I'll admit I wasn't too
(02:14):
familiar with the story of bussing when it was pitched
to me by Sam Graham Felsen, a novelist who grew
up in Boston and who ended up serving as a
producer on our project. But the more I learned about
the so called bussing Crisis, and the more I spoke
to the people who lived through it, the more it
became clear that it was exactly the kind of story
that Fiasco was made to cover, and not just because
(02:37):
it's a dramatic narrative full of surprising twists, and fascinating characters.
Although it is definitely that it's also the story of
an idea. Desegregation by way of bussing was an idea
that got tested in Boston, and everything that happened as
a result, the chain of events you'll hear about in
this audiobook, caused that idea to pretty much die. The
(02:59):
crazy thing is that the number of American kids who
attend racially segregated schools has actually gone up over the
last thirty years. And yet when we started researching the
history of Boston's public schools back in twenty nineteen, school
desegregation was in no way a policy priority in America,
and the idea of mandatory bussing was way outside the
(03:20):
Overton window of anything a serious political candidate might ever endorse.
Bussing was an artifact of the nineteen seventies, a stand
in for every impractical liberal idea that has ever been
forced down the throats of an unwilling public. I'll say
(03:45):
one more thing by way of introduction. We approached the
story of school desegregation in Boston the same way we
approach all of our journalism about the past. We talked
to people who saw what happened with their own eyes.
We tried to capture what it was like to live
through it before it became history. For this particular story,
that meant diving into the history of Boston itself, It's
(04:07):
enclaves and neighborhoods, politics, and the marks left on it
by urban renewal and white flight. Probably the hardest decision
to make when telling any story is where to start.
As you'll hear momentarily, we chose to start this one
a full decade before that federal judge brought bussing to Boston,
because the plan to desegregate Boston schools didn't just appear
(04:29):
out of nowhere. It was merely a milestone and a
turning point in a long struggle to make Boston schools
more equal, a struggle that was initiated not by a
judge but by the parents of black children. The writer
Nicole Hannah Jones has argued that opposition to bussing should
be understood as opposition to the whole project of school integration.
(04:50):
We should question, she wrote in twenty nineteen, why in
the narrative of bussing we remember Boston rather than cities
where desegregation went more smoothly. This audiobook is an attempt
to interrogate that particular historical conundrum. Why do we remember
what happened in Boston? How should we remember it? Chapter one,
(05:25):
Stay Out. In September of nineteen seventy four, the city
of Boston faced a test. What would happen if thousands
of white and black children living in segregated neighborhoods were
forced to go to school together?
Speaker 3 (05:41):
When we go up there, we're going to be stoned.
It is not fair to me, because why is the
other way around? When they come up here, and they
come up here, we won't mess with Jim, So why
when we come up there, then mess with us?
Speaker 2 (05:58):
All I know about the girl whose voicetery hearing is
that her name was Joanne and that she grew up
in one of Boston's black neighborhoods. Joanne was interviewed by
a reporter from NBC News for broadcast that aired just
before the start of the school year. In the video,
she's wearing a jacket over a striped shirt, and her
hairs and braids. She's looking down at the ground and
(06:19):
nervously smiling.
Speaker 4 (06:20):
What do you think about the people of South Boston?
Speaker 5 (06:23):
Joy? If you were the message you'd like to tell them.
Speaker 4 (06:28):
What would it be?
Speaker 3 (06:31):
Yeah, oh, thank you. Fear it is not fear me.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
The desegregation of Boston's public schools was ordered in nineteen
seventy four by a federal judge who had hurt evidence
in a lawsuit filed by a group of black parents
and their kids. After the ruling came down, the city
was consumed by more than two years of racial violence.
White parents and politicians, and even gangsters like Whitey Bulger
(07:01):
mounted a campaign to oppose and then sabotage integration.
Speaker 5 (07:06):
Violence was blared again in the Boston School Buste.
Speaker 6 (07:09):
The local NAACP office was.
Speaker 7 (07:12):
Firebomb They had made a sign saying we don't want
eat niggers in a school.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
By the time the worst of the violence was over,
it looked like the death knell of the Civil rights movement,
proof that America was doomed to remain segregated forever. All
this happened twenty years after the Supreme Court ruled in
Brown v. Board of Education that separate was inherently unequal
(07:39):
in the South, where there were laws explicitly calling for
white and black people to be kept apart. The ruling
triggered in immediate reckoning. But in the North, where state
laws were race neutral on their face, the prevailing belief
was that brown v. Board simply didn't apply.
Speaker 6 (07:56):
It may come as a surprise to most Americans to
hear that Boston, the cradle of liberty, could be accused
of prejudice.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
The truth was that schools were segregated in the North,
including in Boston, and when black activists finally succeeded it
compelling the city to address the problem, the backlash they
inspired created a jarring new reality for Boston's children and teenagers.
It came to be known in the press, in political circles,
and later in history books as the bussing crisis. Bussing
(08:24):
because the students who were transferred into new schools had
to take buses to get there.
Speaker 6 (08:28):
Whites were in turmoil over court ordered school bussing.
Speaker 8 (08:31):
Ever since the bussing ordered, Boston has been filled with
racial tension.
Speaker 9 (08:35):
Bostonians, by and ledge, don't like bussing.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
When I started this audiobook, that's what I thought it
was going to be about, the Boston bussing crisis, and
that's what I told people when I asked to interview them.
Until some of them started hanging up on me as
I quickly learned there are those who think bussing is
the wrong shorthand for this story. In particular, many black
activists who lived in Boston at the time never recognized
(09:01):
the term bussing crisis. To them, it obscured what the
conflict was really about and where its history began. Tom
Atkins was president of the NAACP's Boston branch when desegregation started.
He died in two thousand and eight, but was interviewed
for the classic civil rights documentary Eyes and the Prize.
Speaker 10 (09:20):
Blessing was a nationwide code word for keep the niggas
in their place, so people could run racist campaigns without
making racist statements. They all I had to do was
to say, whatever else you want, a gast blessing.
Speaker 11 (09:36):
They had to tell us what it meant.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
We knew what it meant.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Okay, fiasco. The Battle for Boston will take you through
the full story of Boston's struggle to end segregation in
its schools and what happened when black people tried to
bring racial justice to a place where many believed it
already existed.
Speaker 12 (10:09):
Nobody who would have ever wished this on a city.
It was horrendous.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
This is Huby Jones. He was in Boston during the
busing years when the city began to remedy the intolerable
problem of school segregation.
Speaker 12 (10:25):
It felt like the city was coming apart, was falling
apart at the seams, but the fact that it had
to be done was incontrovertible.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Jones grew up in the Bronx with the civil rights
movement all around him. His father was an important figure
in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, one of the
country's first all black labor unions. In nineteen fifty one,
the year before Brown v. Board reached the Supreme Court,
Jones enrolled at the City College of New York, where
he took a psychology course taught by professor named Kenneth Clark.
Speaker 12 (10:58):
And at that time, doctor Clark was heading a social
science team that was putting together a brief to go
with the Brown Versus bordevge Vcasion brief that was being
taken by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to the United
States Supreme Court.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
The brief for Brown v. Board referenced to study conducted
by Clark and his wife Mamy. In it, black children
were given four dolls to play with. Two of the
dolls looked white and had yellow hair, and the other
two were brown and had black hair. The Clarks asked
the children to identify the doll they'd like to play
with and the nice doll. Here's Kenneth Clark describing what
(11:39):
happened in a TV interview.
Speaker 13 (11:41):
We found that black children knew that they were different,
that they had lower status. Two out of three of
the children it rejected the brown dolls as being negative
and etc.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
The study ended up being a key factor in the
Supreme Court's decision in Brown v.
Speaker 14 (12:02):
Board.
Speaker 8 (12:03):
Shortly afternoon, Earl war On, the Chief Justice of the
United States, began to read a unanimous opinion of the
Supreme Court.
Speaker 12 (12:11):
And of course, I remember on May seventeenth, nineteen fifty four,
being in the cafeteria at City College, and a student
was holding up the front page of the New York Times,
which said the United States Supreme Court outlaws segregation in public.
Speaker 8 (12:29):
Schools, ruling in five cases in which five Negro children
sought the right to go to the same schools as
white children. The Court said segregation in schools is a
denial of the equal protection of the law.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
Brown v.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
Board overturned plus E v. Ferguson the infamous eighteen ninety
six decision that found separate public accommodations for black and
white people were legal so long as they were equal
in brown. The court founded schools that were segregated by
race were inherently unequal and were therefore unconstitutional.
Speaker 8 (13:02):
Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
After college, Hube Jones went to Boston University for graduate
school and social work. He just barely missed overlapping with
another BU grad student, Martin Luther King, who had completed
his PhD a few months earlier. Inspired by King's work
in the South, Jones and other black activists in Boston
began to confront the white power structure in their city.
Speaker 12 (13:33):
They were all kinds of discrimination going on in the
Boston area in every facet, whether it's housing, employment, schooling, etc.
It exists and ought to be dealt with.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Education had long been a key battlefield in the fight
for equality, and it's easy to see why. School is
this elemental component of society. It's where we're supposed to
train children to be productive and well adjusted adults. It's
supposed to be a stepping stone to the middle class.
It's personal, and so improving education for black Boston became
(14:10):
a focus for people like hub Jones. They pointed out
that majority black schools were often housed in old, dilapidated buildings.
They were overcrowded and often staffed by teachers who were
inexperienced or temporary, even some who drank on the job.
Speaker 15 (14:26):
Thirty six screwed down seats and forty three kids. Old
paper so old that it was brown at the edges,
and if you hit it too hard it crackled up.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Jean McGuire taught at the Louisa may Alcott School in
the South End, a diverse neighborhood with a large black population.
The South End is not to be confused with South Boston,
the Irish Catholic enclave better known as Southey. McGuire was
horrified by what her students, almost all of whom were black,
had to put.
Speaker 15 (14:53):
Up with nubs of crayons, broken crayons, no nice boxes
of new crayons, which I later found was in all
the yellow white schools in Boston. I would have these
boxes of old, beat up pencils. We had a pencil shop,
a screwed to the corner of my desk, and the
kids would shop them down to like two inches. We
(15:14):
just didn't have enough pencils. I said, see if your
parents can buy your pencils with an eraser on the end.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
During her first week as a teacher at the Alcot,
maguire went through the textbooks in her classroom and found
a flagrantly racist songbook.
Speaker 15 (15:26):
Every negative word you could say about black people was
in that music book, and it was approved. Ten little niggas,
nine little coons, eight little jigaboos, And that's what we
were given to teach our children. That was a Boston
school From nineteen sixty one.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Motivated in part by the experiences of teachers like McGuire,
black activists in Boston started gathering evidence of a separate
and unequal public school system in their city. The effort
was led by Ruth Batson, a mother of three from Roxbury,
the center of black life in Boston. Batson had found
her way to activism when she realized that her daughters
(16:09):
were not getting the same education as white kids.
Speaker 16 (16:12):
And I read in the paper that an organization called
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had
opened an office on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue in
Tremont Street.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Patson died in two thousand and three. This is a
recording of her speaking to a producer for the documentary
Eyes and the Prize.
Speaker 16 (16:30):
So one day I went up there and I saw
the President and I told him that I felt that
something was wrong with the school and particularly in the
schools where black kids were.
Speaker 15 (16:41):
And about three.
Speaker 16 (16:42):
Days later, the President called me and said, missus Batson,
we've decided to set up a subcommittee which we will
called the Public School Committee, and we'd like to ask
you if you would be the chairperson of that committee. Well,
I was so excited, you know, I thought this was
one but that determined my life. My whole life has
(17:02):
been pointed in that direction and the improvement of education
for black kids.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Batson's first move was to meet with the white principals
who ran the predominantly black schools in Roxbury.
Speaker 16 (17:15):
And we did what we called a survey because we
didn't even know that we were doing a survey. We
just thought that we'd go around and ask these principles
these questions about education of black students.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
Batson was struck by what the principles were willing to
say to her face.
Speaker 16 (17:29):
In one school, one principal said, well, the question we
would ask, well, do you think that Nigro students learn
in the same way that white students learn? Oh no,
oh no, she said, they don't learn as well at all,
she said. And then in addition, she says, do you
know they all have different names? They come in in
a family, and one family you can find three different names.
(17:51):
She says, it's in morally moral. So of course we
left that school knowing what was happening to black students today.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Batson and her colleagues at the NAACP heard variations on
that theme from many of the principles they met with.
They also found hard quantitative evidence of unequal treatment. They
discovered that per pupil spending averaged three hundred and forty
dollars for white students and only two hundred and forty
dollars for black students. Eventually, Batson's group requested a meeting
(18:21):
with the Boston School Committee, a five member board that
oversaw public education in the city. The only member of
the School Committee who agreed to meet with Batson in
the NAACP was the newly elected chairwoman, an Irish Catholic
from South Boston named Louise Day Hicks.
Speaker 17 (18:37):
Missus Louise Day Hicks, chairman of the Boston School Committee.
Speaker 18 (18:41):
I feel at this time that the School Committee should
set its policy.
Speaker 19 (18:46):
This pamphlet was a sixth Louise Day Hicks was kind
of an unknown quantity when she was elected to the
Boston School Committee in nineteen sixty one.
Speaker 2 (18:56):
This is Jim Vrabel, a historian and housing activist who
moved to Boston in the sixties. He's the author of
a People's History of the New Boston.
Speaker 19 (19:03):
She'd been one of the few women to graduate from
Boston University Law School. At the same time, people did
not know what her politics were. It was assumed that
she was probably liberal, and there were high hopes among
school reformers that she would be more willing to listen
to them and more supportive than the School Committee members
(19:26):
had been in the past.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
Contrary to those expectations, Hicks would turn out to be
the standard bearer of the white backlash to school integration
in Boston. She had become famous for it all over
the country.
Speaker 20 (19:39):
Mister Hicks, there is in cities outside of Boston image
of you as kind of a symbol of racial bigoty.
Speaker 4 (19:46):
How did all this.
Speaker 21 (19:47):
Happen in Boston in nineteen sixty three?
Speaker 18 (19:51):
We had civil rights leaders here who requested and demanded.
Speaker 12 (19:56):
Louise de Hicks was a large.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Woman civil rights activist hub Jones again.
Speaker 12 (20:01):
And she had this hairdo which was behive hairdoo. She
had a squeaky, high pitch voice, and it was this
squeaky voice of hers that sort of defined her.
Speaker 22 (20:16):
What do you think this is doing to our children?
They keep them there for a few hours during the
day and then they returned them to the ghettouse. A
they helping out children? I say no.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
By the mid seventies, when bussing started, Hicks was running
an organization called ROAR, an acronym for Restore Our Alienated Rights.
Its logo was the drawing of a lion clutching a
school bus in its claws. Back in the early sixties,
few could have predicted that Louise Day Hicks would turn
herself into a champion of Boston's working class whites. Hicks's
(20:49):
father was a wealthy judge in South Boston, and there
was a term for people like her lace curtain irish.
It aligned her more closely with the Kennedy clan than
with the poor residence of Southee. Regardless, Hicks fit right
in on the Boston School Committee. For decades, the city's
school system had essentially been a giant employment agency for
Irishman Americans. In the words of one journalist, it was
(21:12):
easily the biggest employer of Sullivan's and Murphy's in the city.
Here's Ruth Batson again.
Speaker 16 (21:18):
The Boston School Committee was a unique political body. Well
one thing, it had always been used as a stepping
stone to a higher office. I used to attend the
number of School Committee meetings and the only things I
would here discussed would be promotions and assignments, things like that.
Very seldom did you hear real educational issues discussed.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
The committee members controlled the hiring and firing of everyone
in the school system, from teachers to janitors. It was
a patronage system built around fundraising, dinners, favors, and family connections.
The arrangement had benefited generations of Irish Bostonians and few
had dared to disturb it. Meanwhile, as Jim Rabel says,
the schools themselves were deteriorating.
Speaker 19 (22:07):
So by the nineteen sixties, the public schools in Boston
were almost uniformly bad.
Speaker 14 (22:15):
The school committee was.
Speaker 11 (22:16):
Not very progressive, not very education.
Speaker 19 (22:19):
Minded, and the public was kind of acceptant of this
situation and didn't make waves.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Even so, black activists hoped at first that Louise Day
Hicks would be an ally and their attempted to shake
up the school system. When they presented her with a
report on the woeful status of majority black schools, she
seemed genuinely concerned. After the meeting, one of the local
NAACP leaders, Paul Parks, drove Hicks home to South Boston.
(22:49):
She told Parks how awful it sounded, that she understood
and sympathized with their grievances.
Speaker 14 (22:54):
Driving her back to her home in his car, Louise
promised Paul that she would look into it and try
and make changes and try and address these kind of
what we call equity issues now.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
But then just two days later, Hicks called Paul Parks
with bad news.
Speaker 11 (23:12):
She told Paul Parks that she had talked to Frederick Gillis,
the school superintendent at the time, and said that she
decided she was not going to get involved because Gillis
said that if she did get involved, she'd never win reelection.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
In other words, if Louise Day Hicks was seen as
catering to black parents, her political career in Boston would
be finished. In the summer of nineteen sixty three, Ruth
Batson and the NAACP's Boston branch called on the School
Committee to hold a special public hearing to discuss segregation.
(23:50):
At the meeting, they would lay out their evidence before
the five member committee, as well as the media and
the Superintendent of Schools. The committee agreed, and the meeting
was set for June eleventh, nineteen sixty three. By sheer coincidence,
it was a date that would turn out to be
a turning point in the history of civil rights, and
not because of anything that happened in Boston that day.
(24:11):
Alabama Governor George Wallace planted himself in front of the
auditorium doors at the University of Alabama in an attempt
to block two black students from registering for classes.
Speaker 9 (24:22):
As Governor and Chief Magistrate of the State of Alabama,
I deem it to be my solemn obligation and duty
to stand before you representing the riots and sovereignty of
this state and its peoples.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
It was a stunt in his inauguration speech, Wallace had
vowed segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. This was his
way of showing that he meant it. That night, John F.
Kennedy delivered a response to Wallace in a televised speech
about race and segregation, and for the first time in
his presidency, Kennedy spoke in bold moral terms about civil rights.
Speaker 20 (24:59):
If in America, because his skin is dark, kennot eat
lunch in a restaurant open to the public, If he
cannot send his children the best public school available, If
in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life
which all of us want, then who among us would
be content to have the color of his skin changed
(25:22):
and stand in his place?
Speaker 2 (25:25):
Kennedy told the country that the problem of racism would
not end on its own, and that it was wrong
to ask black people to just be patient. Kennedy made
a point of not singling out the South. He said
the whole country was implicated.
Speaker 20 (25:38):
This is not a sectional issue, my fellow Americans. This
is a problem which faces us all in every city
of the North as well as the South.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Kennedy's speech was a provocation to northern nurse, including the
residents of the Boston area where he grew up. It
was a reminder that the racism they saw in the
South existed everywhere. Watching the speech from Atlanta, Martin Luther
King reportedly leapt up and said, can you believe that
white man not only stepped up to the plate, he
hit it over the fence.
Speaker 20 (26:09):
Seems to me that these are matters which concern us all,
not merely presidents or congressman or governments, but every citizen
of the United States.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Hub Jones missed Kennedy's big speech. Instead, he was among
the hundreds of black activists and parents who came to
watch Ruth Batson and the NAACP confront the Boston School
Committee at their downtown headquarters.
Speaker 12 (26:33):
I was in the room. It was an old room
that had been converted into a made room, and there
were polls blocking your view, so it's really hard to
see it unless you could get them into the right position.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
The meeting quickly filled the capacity. Many were turned away,
but they refused to go home and stood outside in
the rain.
Speaker 12 (26:55):
It was a hot June night. The windows were open
to try to bring in air, but there was no
air circulating. You could hear the people in the streets
singing freedom songs, and that was wafting in as a
part of the environment that was created.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
For Jones.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
The Boston School Committee hearing marked a new beginning for
the civil rights movement in Boston. Jones watched as Ruth
Batson explained to the committee that there were two kinds
of segregation, day jurrey, which was deliberate and legally enforced,
and de facto, which stemmed from where people lived. Day
jurre segregation was the kind they had in the South.
(27:42):
The North had to grapple with de facto.
Speaker 16 (27:45):
We went before the School Committee and we said to
them that this condition that we were talking about was
called de facto segregation, and that by that we didn't
mean at all that anybody on the school committee or
any official was deliberately segregating students, but this was caused
by residential settings and so forth, but that we felt
(28:07):
that this had to be acknowledged and that something had
to be done to alleviate the situation.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
As far as Batson and her fellow activists were concerned,
there was no real difference between de facto and de jure.
The simple fact was that black students suffered either way.
Speaker 16 (28:23):
When we would go to white schools, we'd see these
lovely classrooms, small number of children in each class, the
teachers were permanent, and we would see wonderful materials. When
we'd go to our schools, we would see overcrowded classrooms,
children sitting out in the corridors and so forth. And
so then we decided that where there were a large
(28:47):
number of white students, that's where the care went, that's
where the books went, that's where the money went.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
Addressing Louise day Hicks and the other four Boston School
Committee members, Batson argued that the only practical way to
give black and white kids equal access to education was
to eliminate segregation. Black kids had to be educated alongside
white kids in order for their schools to get the
attention and resources they needed. Batson wasn't arguing that black
(29:14):
kids would do better just by being around white kids.
She was saying that their schools would be better funded
if more of their classmates were white. Louise day Hicks
would later try to flip the point on its head,
all but accusing Batson and her allies of being racist
against their own people.
Speaker 18 (29:30):
Many of the Negro parents believe that a predominantly Negro
school is in ferry of per se that we and
here in Boston do not believe that premise.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Just a few weeks earlier, Hicks had seemed willing to
work with the NAACP, but now with reporters looking on,
she simply thanked Batson for her testimony and seated the
floor to the Superintendent of Schools, who rejected the charges outright.
He was willing to concede that there were predominantly Black
schools in the city, just as there were predominantly Chinese
(30:03):
and Italian and Irish schools, but the School committee's position
was that it was not their fault.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
HUGHB.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
Jones.
Speaker 12 (30:10):
Again, they refused to acknowledge it because they had no
intention of changing the conditions that existed, So they just
said it did not exist, and you can't charge us
with segregation. It had to do with housing patterns, and
as Missus Hicks said over and over again, we have
no responsibility for where people live, so we're not deliberately
(30:34):
segregating anybody.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
To the school Committee, any accusation of segregation was a
non starter, de facto, de jurey, it didn't matter. The
very word segregation implied that the committee was guilty of something,
and they insisted that they weren't.
Speaker 23 (30:51):
You really sensed that the school Committee people in a way,
we're afraid of the black people.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
Bob Levy was an education reporter for the Boston Globe
in nineteen sixty three, and he covered the hearing at
the School Committee headquarters that June I was able to
interview Levy before he died in twenty twenty.
Speaker 23 (31:11):
These were people from an unknown country called Roxbury who
were going to somehow undermine the good of the city
by making demands that we do not intend to meet
because we don't acknowledge that the problem exists.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
For Ruth Batson, the confrontation with the school Committee felt
like a slap in the face.
Speaker 16 (31:38):
And we were really innocent.
Speaker 14 (31:39):
We were naive.
Speaker 16 (31:40):
We walked in thinking that we weren't saying anything so special,
and we made our presentation and everything broke loose. We
were insulted. We were told our kids were stupid and
this is why they didn't learn. We were completely.
Speaker 15 (31:57):
Rejected that night.
Speaker 16 (31:58):
We were there to all hours of the evening and
we left battles.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
God activists responded to the June eleventh hearing by calling
for something that had never happened before Austin a citywide
student boycott in which black students would stay out of
school for one day in protest of unequal conditions. Among
the organizers was a young episcopal priest in Roxbury named
James Breeden. Breeden didn't think of the protest as a boycott.
(32:25):
He called it a stay out for freedom. Central to
the concept was that kids were encouraged to attend makeshift
freedom schools set up at churches and community centers throughout
the city. Breeden helped recruit teachers and local civil rights
leaders to appear as lectures.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
We wanted, mainly to teach the kids about the history
of black people.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Breeden was eighty five when I interviewed him in twenty twenty,
and he died later that year. He told me about
how Louise day Hicks came to see him before the
stay out to try to get it canceled.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
And so she came to see me because she wanted
me to call it off. She was wearing a necklace
with Saint Cyprian, a black saint, her attempt to show
(33:20):
me that she was in favor of black people.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
Breeden did not cancel the stay out. Who was scheduled
for June eighteenth, one week after the confrontation at School
Committee headquarters. In the meantime, the Boston branch of the
NAACP presented the School Committee with a list of fourteen demands.
Some were about hiring black teachers and principles. Another was
about reducing class sizes. But it was the very first
(33:47):
demand on the list that created an impasse. The NAACP
wanted the School Committee to publicly acknowledge the existence of
de facto segregation in the city's schools. Louise da Hicks refused.
Speaker 16 (34:01):
At one point, she said, the word that I'm objecting
to is segregation. As long as you talk about segregation,
I won't discuss this. And so we would drop these
little sentences saying where there is a majority of black students,
these students are not being giving the education that other
(34:22):
people are given, and so forth, ofs on, and she'd say,
does that mean segregation? And so the whole thing would
be dropped.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
After a long back and forth, Hicks got the NAACP
to agree to cut the word segregation and issue a
joint statement that didn't even mention schools. Instead, its focus
was on the harmful effects of what both sides had
agreed to call ghetto living, which caused black children to
be quote separated from other racial groups. But there was
(34:50):
still a sticking point. Hicks wanted the statement to affirm
that the problem stemmed from social conditions beyond our control.
When a different version of the statement leaked to the press,
Hicks saw that it referenced social conditions we regret. Hicks
was furious and publicly disavowed the statement the Black leaders
for playing with words.
Speaker 18 (35:11):
I don't believe that the Boston public schools are segregated.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
After that, Hicks doubled down, insisting that the problem with
the city's predominantly black schools wasn't unequal distribution of resources,
it was the behavior of black students.
Speaker 18 (35:25):
I honestly feel that the problem has been focused on
a disciplinary problem in the area. I feel that we
may need the help from social service agencies. As we
have listened to each of the principles today, they all
seem to feel that they were unable to teach because
they had to perform police duties.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
Hicks went on to suggest that the people protesting the
conditions of Boston schools were outside agitators.
Speaker 24 (35:49):
Would you care to speculate on why the NAACP has
raised this.
Speaker 11 (35:53):
Issue in Boston.
Speaker 18 (35:55):
No, I do not, unless I might say that it's
a national problem and they have brought it to Boston
where it does not belong.
Speaker 8 (36:05):
We do not believe, then, that this agitation originated here
in this city.
Speaker 18 (36:09):
No, I do not.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
The idea that black activists were outsiders would become a
reliable part of Hicks's strategy in the year's come. Boston's
black population had exploded over the past decade, in part
due to the great migration of black Southerners moving north.
The premise of Hicks's accusation was the patronizing and racist
idea that longtime black Bostonians were friendly and docile, that
(36:36):
they'd had no complaints until outsiders from the South came
and riled them up. With the stay out protest imminent,
James Breeden gave an interview to Boston's WGBH about what
was in store.
Speaker 17 (36:47):
I would like to ask, why are you holding this
so called boycott tomorrow and how will this help the situation?
Speaker 12 (36:55):
As you see it?
Speaker 25 (36:56):
The Freedom stayout is an attempt to communicate to the
Boston School Committee and to the wider community the seriousness
of the situation.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
On Tuesday, June eighteenth, nineteen sixty three, between two and
three thousand Black students in Boston skipped school as part
of the stay out for Freedom protest.
Speaker 17 (37:21):
Today, Boston witnessed the so called boycott by Negro students
of Junior and Senior High schools of Boston.
Speaker 14 (37:28):
Good morning.
Speaker 18 (37:29):
First, I'd like to welcome you to your Freedom School.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
And I think many of the students who participated in
the stayout attended classes as the Freedom schools. WGBH broadcast
a special report on the protest, and.
Speaker 26 (37:42):
At the Freedom School we saw a steady line of
children walking orderly to the various churches and centers where
they were going to attend the Freedom School. One of
the most dramatic things I saw this morning was a
parent and her two children, one on each arm. She
bought them to the school and this is a children.
You will go in and learn of freedom, and I
(38:02):
will come to pick you up at two fifteen.
Speaker 27 (38:05):
My mother she told me that jaint Mark soldn in
A was doing a good job, and she said that
I should go around there and see because they tried
one before that they wouldn't let them have their freedom.
But she says this time, she thinks that they'll get
it this time, because they're really trying for it this time.
Speaker 8 (38:22):
I see.
Speaker 7 (38:22):
Do you believe there are segregation in the Boston schools?
Speaker 21 (38:25):
Segregation?
Speaker 27 (38:26):
Well, some teachers are prejudice and they just don't treat
you right.
Speaker 2 (38:31):
The Freedom Schools were a celebration of Black history, and
the organizers took explicit inspiration from the civil rights activism
that had swept the South.
Speaker 28 (38:39):
We're gonna sang some songs now. They are a part
of the freedom movement. The first song is a song
called Freedom.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
Geene Maguire, the teacher from the Alcott School you heard earlier,
spent the day volunteering at the Saint Mark's Social Center
in Roxbury.
Speaker 15 (39:01):
We planned a curriculum that we could use so that
when the children came, it wouldn't be math and side.
We weren't duplicating the school curriculum. We were teaching civil rights,
black history and our circumstances and our conditions and what
you could do to change it.
Speaker 23 (39:21):
You've been told today that you have a history, that
you have fraternity with the people of Africa, and what.
Speaker 15 (39:29):
We talked about was how are we going to improve
our situation here in Boston. It was about our condition
and the terrible state that black people were in in Boston.
Speaker 4 (39:39):
It's not a black and white problem. This is an
American problem.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
Another freedom school teacher was Boston Celtic star Bill Russell.
He had just won his fifth straight NBA championship ring
Huby Jones remembers Russell showing his support during the stay out.
Speaker 12 (39:55):
He came to one of the freedom schools and gave
a speech. Let your blackness be a badge of honor
was one of what he said. He then talked about
his support for black people staying up to fight for
their rights and that he was willing to stand with them.
Speaker 7 (40:14):
Bill Russell, the Boston Celtics shoe, gave a very powerful
speech today at this freedom sit in. Could you tell
us what you feel is the success of this freedom stayout?
Speaker 4 (40:26):
This is just the beginning. This is a monster we're fighting.
It's a Cancerro's monster, and the fight isn't successful. It
could conceivably destroy democracy here and everywhere. Listen, this is
not a fight.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
Later that year, vandals broke into Russell's house in the
suburbs of Boston. They spray painted the N word on
his wall and defecated in his bed. Northern The Freedom
Stay Out was front page news, not just in Boston,
but across the country.
Speaker 17 (41:02):
The boycott has been hailed as successful by Negro leaders.
It is called a failure by the super of schools.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
Louise Day Hicks was enraged. Our schools, our churches, our
public officials preach obedience to the law. Yet here we
have our Negro children being encouraged to flout the law,
she said. Later, Hicks tearfully told a room of teachers,
God help them, they know not what they do. After
the June eleventh hearing and the Freedom Stay Out, school
(41:32):
desegregation became the top priority for many black activists in Boston.
This was a new development. Up to that point, people
like Ruth Batson had mostly just wanted better schools for
their kids, not necessarily more diverse ones. But the activists
saw how defensive Louise Day Hicks and the other School
Committee members had gotten with the mere mention of segregation.
(41:53):
It had touched a nerve in a way that calls
for better school buildings and classroom supplies. Never had the
cause of desegregation electrified the Black community, and it tied
them to the great moral struggle happening in the South.
Through the rest of the summer and fall of nineteen
sixty three, the black activists in their allies organized a
series of marches calling for desegregation. One drew six thousand people.
Speaker 17 (42:16):
The Boston School Committee and the Boston branch of the
NAACP dispute continues.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
They even staged a dramatic overnight sit in at the
School Committee's headquarters, during which they occupied Louise Day Hicks's office.
Speaker 24 (42:29):
And there is one person naming off School Committee members
on the rest of the pickets, answer must go. They
started with Mississix's chairman of the Boston School Committee.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
On April twenty third, nineteen sixty five. The movement to
desegregate Boston's public schools received a boost when Martin Luther
King visited the city and delivered an address on Boston Common.
Speaker 5 (43:00):
We assemble here to say to Boston and to say
to the nation, say that segregation, whether it is in Selma, Alabama,
to Boston, Massachusetts, is nothing but a new farm of
slavery covered up with certain nice it is or complexity.
Speaker 2 (43:20):
King had been organizing marches across the South for years,
but he had never once staged a demonstration above the
Mason Dixon line. Now Boston would be the site of
King's first mass protest in the North. King had decided
that Boston was where his movement would begin its expansion
from a regional uprising into a national reckoning.
Speaker 5 (43:41):
And so I'm here to John with you in reminding
the cradle of liberty that we are through with segregation now,
henceforth and forever more.
Speaker 2 (44:02):
As desegregation emerged as the galvanizing issue in Boston's black community,
it also galvanized Louise Dehees.
Speaker 21 (44:10):
I asked the NAACP and all citizens of Boston, how
can we be expected to work for more progress in
the area of the culturally deprived children with a club
over our heads?
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Suddenly, Hicks was appearing in local newspapers, and her name
recognition was skyrocketing in white, working class Boston. Her timing
was fortuitous. A week before Martin Luther King's visit to Boston,
state officials in Massachusetts had released a report on racial
imbalance in schools. The report referenced a growing body of
(44:45):
social science research that had come out since the Clark's
famous Doll study. The state said these findings were conclusive.
Racial imbalance caused quote serious educational damage to Negro children
by impairing their confidence, distorting their self image, and lowering
their motivation. The state proposed various remedies to the problem,
(45:05):
including mutual transfers of students between schools. Mutual transfers meant
transporting white students to majority black schools and black students
to majority white schools. In a residentially segregated city like Boston,
that meant requiring kids to travel outside their own neighborhoods, and,
as Louise day Hicks quickly pointed out, that meant bussing.
Speaker 6 (45:28):
Now, bussing has become so intertwined with integration it's taken
on new meaning.
Speaker 22 (45:33):
The resistance to bussing is based on race prejudice.
Speaker 2 (45:37):
Bussing was the most immediate way to create integrated schools
in a way, it was the simplest, but it was
also the most controversial. I'd keep a home Taken in isolation,
you might think it's odd for anyone to have such
strong feelings about their kids taking the bus to school.
American children have been doing it for generations. Many of
(45:57):
Boston's children, most of them white rode buses to school.
It had never been a big deal, But as education
equality became the most divisive issue in Boston, the word
bussing became a stand in for something much bigger.
Speaker 14 (46:10):
Louise D.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
Hicks called it undemocratic, Unamerican, absurdly expensive, and diametrically opposed
to the wishes of the parents of this.
Speaker 29 (46:18):
City, whereby children, our children become wards of the federal
government and they are going to be used as guinea pigs.
Speaker 2 (46:29):
Hicks was saying that bussing was a social experiment, one
that would make victims out of the children it used
as human subjects. Pretty soon, Bob Levy, the Boston Globe's
education reporter, noticed that Hicks's opposition to bussing had become
the core of her political platform.
Speaker 23 (46:45):
The majority of children in schools in America were being bussed,
and yet somehow the word was used as a perversion,
and suddenly bussing is the symbol of the attack that
white America is under.
Speaker 2 (47:04):
In bussing, Hicks had found a seemingly race neutral way
to oppose desegregation. The fight wasn't about keeping black students
out of white schools or keeping white children out of
black neighborhoods. It was simply about protecting the integrity of
the neighborhood school. The national media bought into Hicks's framing.
Newsweek put her on its cover under the headline Boston's
(47:25):
bussing Battle. Time quoted her saying, I believe that little
children should go to school in their own neighborhoods, with
the children with whom they play. It's as simple as that.
Speaker 30 (47:35):
I feel that bussing has no advantages educationally for our
little children. It will take them far from their neighborhoods,
and it will bring them into very strange neighborhoods. Democracy
in action is when children.
Speaker 29 (47:49):
Walk to school.
Speaker 2 (47:54):
The thing I always want to know about political figures
like Louise da Hicks is how do they explain it
to themselves? How do they convince themselves that they're better
than the real villains, that they are innocent, that people
like Ruth Batson and Hube Jones and Jean Maguire and
breeding are all just making it up. Hicks's entire political
identity was based on a proclamation of innocence, Innocence for
(48:17):
the Boston School Committee, innocence for Boston as a whole,
innocence for the North. How did she talk herself into it?
The more important question might be why it worked so well,
Because with Bussing, Hicks had found a winning issue, one
that went beyond education and tapped into the broader grievances
(48:38):
of Boston's largely white working class population. Soon, Hicks had
her eye on something bigger than the city's schools. She
wanted city Hall.
Speaker 21 (48:49):
This is Louise Day Games candidate for mayor of Boston.
Speaker 8 (48:52):
It's no longer considered beyond the realm of possibility that
Louise Day Hicks.
Speaker 9 (48:56):
Will be Boston's first woman mayor.
Speaker 21 (48:59):
May the best woman Rewin
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