Small Mercies

One of the main goals of the early civil rights movement was the integration of public schools. In 1896, the Supreme Court notoriously supported racial segregation on the grounds that schools and other spaces should be “separate but equal.” However, there was an obvious discrepancy in the quality of schools for Black and white children. As the civil rights movement gained traction, activists hoped that exposing the lack of equity in public schools would also expose the entire system of segregation to be deeply harmful to Black people, and therefore a violation of the Constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) scored a signature victory in 1954 with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which mandated the integration of public schools.

Despite this legal triumph, however, attempts at enforcement were often met with fierce resistance. In the Jim Crow South, efforts at integration prompted direct intervention by political leaders and outright violence from racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Many Civil Rights organizations accordingly directed their energies southward, but educational segregation remained a problem in the north as well, particularly in cities like Chicago, New York, and Boston. In Boston, for example, schools actually became more segregated in the wake of the Brown decision as many white families abandoned the cities in favor of the burgeoning suburbs. A vicious cycle therefore took root, in which better-resourced families established new communities that accordingly attracted other better-resourced people. This ruinous process further starved the cities of tax revenue to adequately fund their own schools. Black parents and activist groups began pressing for changes in the 1950s, arguing that even though segregation was not a matter of law as it was in the South, it existed as a matter of fact, and was therefore no less unjust to Black children. The charge provoked intense resistance from white-majority districts and the mostly white politicians who dominated the school board, who argued that racial disparities alone did not justify making a school system a target of Brown. Protests, boycotts, and other forms of social pressure escalated into the 1960s but failed to persuade the Boston School Board.

Some parents recognized that their children enjoyed an advantaged position and feared that the expansion of benefits would dilute their efficacy. Yet the defense of white privilege often relied on racist tropes blaming Black people for having less educational achievement, or incorrectly assuming that a Black presence in schools would necessarily make those schools more prone to drugs and violence. The crisis came to a head in 1974, when federal judge Wendell Arthur Garrity Jr. found Boston schools to be in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Given the unofficial division of Boston into ethnic enclaves, the proposed solution was to bus students from white-majority and Black-majority districts to one another’s schools. White resistance, which until then had been limited to school boards, consequently exploded into public action, making the topic a fixture of national political attention. Protests often focused on the tactic of busing, framing their position as opposition to this specific method rather than integration. However, resistance was frequently racist and often violent in nature, and the focus on busing and its consequences tended to obscure the decades-long efforts of Civil Rights activists to desegregate Boston schools.