Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, racial tension and violence escalated in Boston. In anticipation of a ruling on school desegregation, anti-busing rallies and protests were held at city hall and elsewhere around the city.
Elementary and high school students, already subject to long bus rides across the city, experienced rocks thrown at their buses, verbal harassment by people as they entered school buildings, and in some cases harassment by their peers and school administrators once inside the building. The stabbing of Michael Faith, a white South Boston High School student, by a black student inside the walls of the school is just one example of the violence that broke out between students.
Busing proponents and opponents were subject to harassment on a daily basis. Pro-busing activists experienced death threats and harassment by motorcades that hurled insults and rocks at their homes. An iconic image taken by Stanley Forman depicts violence at a rally in April 1976. In the photograph it appears that Ted Landsmark is being attacked with an American flag by anti-busing activist Joseph Rakes. The accounts of what actually happened between Landsmark and Rakes vary widely; ultimately Landsmark sustained injuries at the hands of other protestors that day. This image won Foreman a Pulitzer Prize and catapulted Boston’s race problems into the national spotlight.
South Boston was a hot bed of protest and violence. Boston policemen were initially assigned to protect South Boston High School but as the crowds and tension escalated, the National Guard and State Police were called in to maintain order. In his oral history interview Congressman Moakley, a resident of South Boston, recalls his treatment: “I was against busing too, but I just couldn’t march in the streets and scream and holler like some of the people were doing it, and that cost me… On a Monday, I was picketed by six hundred whites. On a Tuesday, I was picketed by six hundred blacks. ”5 Many Boston families chose to move out of the city to the suburbs; this mass migration, commonly known as “White Flight,” began between 1950 and 1960. 6 Options for families who did not want their children to be bused and could not afford to move out of the city were slim. Families that could afford it sent their children to parochial school.
As the plan unfolded throughout the 1970s, students and parents gradually accepted forced busing and racial tensions eventually lessened. Judge Garrity continued to oversee most administrative functions of the Boston School Committee and to make decisions regarding schooling and desegregation. Although Garrity’s involvement ended in September 1985, the battle over schools and race continued in the federal courts into the 1990s.
Footnotes
5. Moakley, John Joseph, OH-001, 19-20.
6. “Between 1950 and 1960, a net of 124,668 whites moved out of the city, and a net of 187,521 whites moved into the suburbs of Boston. Between 1960 and 1970, a net of 97,668 whites moved out of the city, and a net of 206,663 whites moved into the suburbs. Hence, ‘white flight’ to the suburbs was considerably less during the decade when school desegregation efforts intensified than during the previous decade.” U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report, 36.