The Boston Busing Crisis… Beginning in 1974 and lasting until 1988

In 1965, Massachusetts passed the Racial Imbalance Act, which ordered school districts to desegregate or risk losing state educational funding. The first law of its kind was controversial and was opposed fiercely in Boston, especially in low socio-economic white ethnic areas, such as the Irish-American district in South Boston. Beginning in 1974 and lasting until 1988, a series of protests and riots occurred in Boston, Massachusetts when Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, found the schools were unconstitutionally segregated. As a remedy, he used a busing plan developed by the Massachusetts State Board of Education to implement the state's Racial Imbalance Law. The plan was to bus white kids to predominantly black schools and vice-versa. The legislation provoked outrage from white Bostonians and led to widespread violent protests and resulted in some fatalities. In one incident, a white teenager was nearly stabbed to death by a black teenager at South Boston High School. White residents in the area mobbed the school, trapping the black students inside. The school was forced to close for a month after the stabbing. When South Boston High re-opened, it was guarded by 500 police officers and attended by 400 students. It was also the first school to make use of metal detectors. The conflict lasted for over a decade and led many white families to enroll their children in private schools. Attendance in the effected districts fell from 100,000 to 57,000 and even 20 years later in 2008, the students in Boston Public Schools were 76% black and Hispanic, and only 14% White, a lingering effect of a very sad and violent period in our history.