This school year marks the 50th anniversary of the hard-fought struggle for school desegregation in Boston.
“Thousands of white students boycotted classes and white mobs took to the streets in an attempt to thwart court-ordered school desegregation. Black students arriving by bus at South Boston High School, where opposition to court-ordered busing has been strongest, were greeted by a threatening mob of 400 who screamed, ‘Niggers go home!’” the Militant reported Sept. 27, 1974.
“As the buses carrying Black students left South Boston High at the end of the first day, bands of white youths heaved rocks, bottles, and pieces of pipe at the buses. Nine Black students and a bus monitor were injured by flying glass,” the paper reported.
On June 21, 1974, a ruling had been issued in a lawsuit filed by the NAACP. Federal District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity ruled for the plaintiffs, holding “the entire school system is unconstitutionally segregated.” The whole school setup had to be dismantled, and a new system, which included some busing, was to start in September.
Opponents of desegregation formed an organization called ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights), whose chief leader was Louise Day Hicks from South Boston. Hicks and other Democratic politicians had long controlled the Boston School Committee, City Council and mayor’s office.
The struggle in Boston had its roots in the massive civil rights battles of the 1950s and ’60s, which ended Jim Crow segregation in the South. Those victories transformed social relations and strengthened working-class unity ever since. They inspired struggles against de facto segregation in the North, including in Boston.
Boston’s population in the mid-1970s was 17% Black and 7% Puerto Rican. Every member of the City Council and School Committee was Caucasian. South Boston was “occupied mainly by working-class Boston Irish, many of whom depend on connections with the Democratic Party machine for petty favors and generally unskilled jobs in city departments,” veteran Socialist Workers Party leader Fred Halstead wrote in the Militant.
As the Boston desegregation fight began, working people faced the consequences of the 1974-75 worldwide recession, the deepest since the 1930s. No capitalist politician presented any solutions to unemployment or other issues facing working people in Boston. Instead, they tried to whip up a campaign of racist hysteria against the small Black community as a diversion from the real problems working people confronted.
On Oct. 7, with the violent attacks against busing underway, South Boston was also the site of the savage beating and near-lynching of Andre Yvon Jean-Louis, a maintenance worker originally from Haiti.
Two days later, at a news conference in Washington, D.C., President Gerald Ford gave a green light to the racists by speaking out against Garrity’s desegregation order, as did many other capitalist politicians.
As weeks passed and vicious attacks continued, Black students showed courage and cool-headedness. Speaking at one of the first demonstrations to defend school desegregation Oct. 13, 13-year-old South Boston student Tanya Poe told the crowd, “My cousins came home the first and second days all bloody. People don’t want us to stay, but we’re not going to run.” No Black student had ever attended South Boston High before.
Desegregation fight grows
Defenders of Black rights and the interests of the entire working class decided a response had to be organized. A group of Catholic, Protestant and Jewish clergy called a march for Nov. 30 that gathered support from the NAACP, college students and others. Led by Coretta Scott King and her children, the march drew 2,500 people, a highly visible answer to ROAR and the racists.
On Dec. 14 some 12,000 people poured into the streets of Boston behind a huge banner reading, “Racists don’t own the streets of Boston! Desegregate Boston’s schools!” The Student Committee for the Dec. 14 National March Against Racism, organized with the help of the Socialist Workers Party, mobilized hundreds of marshals to defend marchers and assure it was peaceful.
The previous day the Student Committee organized a large and successful teach-in at Harvard University. Next they called a Feb. 14, 1975, conference, which voted to set up the National Student Coalition Against Racism, NSCAR. At the gathering, Boston NAACP President Thomas Atkins called for the next mass action for desegregation and to defend the courageous Black students being bused into South Boston and other schools to be held May 17.
An overwhelming majority of the 2,000 conference participants backed the NAACP proposal and mapped out a spring campaign to build the action. Working with the NAACP, veteran civil rights fighter Ruth Batson and other Black leaders, NSCAR mushroomed in Boston and many other cities.
Fifteen thousand people turned out in Boston May 17 for the NAACP march, showing the potential for expanding the fight. It was beginning to win more supporters and shifting social attitudes in the working class.
Desegregation struggle falters
After the May 17 march, however, the struggle was pushed back. Emboldened by government inaction, predominantly led by Democrats like those who controlled the city government in Boston, the anti-busing forces carried out an attack on Black families picnicking at Carson Beach, organized racist rallies, staged walkouts by many Caucasian students at South Boston and other high schools, called boycotts, firebombed the NAACP offices and more.
To answer the ongoing campaign of anti-Black terror, NSCAR and a number of Black community leaders called a much-needed demonstration for April 24, 1976, and worked to broaden support for the action.
But the mood of fear and hostility in the city, generated by the unrelenting racist assaults, continued to grow. As tensions mounted and April 24 neared, a number of figures in the Black community withdrew their support.
Taking responsibility for the safety of the Black community and other supporters of desegregation across the city, march coordinator and NSCAR leader Maceo Dixon and 10 Black community leaders held a press conference April 21 announcing the march was postponed. Responsibility for the decision, Dixon said, “rests with Mayor Kevin H. White, City Council President Louise Day Hicks, Gov. Michael Dukakis and President Gerald Ford.”
Despite this setback, NSCAR and other desegregation fighters continued to be active in Boston, including organizing ongoing defense of the youth being bused, and urged further mass actions. But middle-class-led organizations like the NAACP, Urban League, Operation PUSH and others who looked to the Democratic Party held sway in the Black community, preventing any new mass protests from being planned.
In spite of this, the racist opponents of desegregation were fought to a standoff. On June 14, 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up a challenge to the Boston desegregation decision. Efforts by President Ford and others to get the Supreme Court or Congress to implement a national ban on school busing for desegregation also fizzled.
Working-class consciousness changes
The 1974-75 recession led employers to deepen their attacks on working people. Workers everywhere began to look to the unions to chart a road to defend their class interests. “This changing consciousness came on top of deep-going shifts in attitudes as a result of the civil rights and Black Power movements, the anti-Vietnam War protests, and the new wave of women’s rights fights in the 1960s and 1970s,” SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes said in a report to the party’s 1979 convention.
These shifts, along with the impact of the desegregation fight, were reflected in changes for the better at South Boston High and other schools in Boston.
Ten years after Garrity’s 1974 order, South Boston High was 40% Black, 30% Caucasian, 16% Hispanic and 13% Asian, overwhelmingly children of the city’s working class.
The absentee rate had fallen to one of the lowest of any school in the city, the dropout rate fell and reading and math scores went up. “When I first came here” in 1976, “everyone hated me. I was the enemy,” Headmaster Jerome Winegar told the press in 1985. Now, on the wall of my office is a certificate saying, “Thank you for making us proud of our school — The Graduating Class of 1980.”
Instead of 140 cops patrolling the school, security was now organized by six people recruited from the area’s neighborhood watch. The senior class president elected in 1981 was Black.
The Battle of Boston played an important role in strengthening and advancing the unity of the U.S. working class. Further advances will require a challenge to the inequities of capitalist rule.
Susan LaMont was the organizer of the Socialist Workers Party’s Boston branch during the height of the desegregation struggle.