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Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s

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The book was a fabulous resource for a school paper.

It was extremely informative.

One of the best books on the subject in my opinion.

Read this for graduate American history course.

Ronald P. Fonnisano's book , Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s, is an excellent insight into busing struggles in Boston. Boston Public Schools is the oldest public school system in the United States. Boston Latin (1635) was the first public high school and The Mather School (l939) is the oldest free public school. Before 1974, Boston was known as the home of abolitionists and reformers. It had the reputation of being the most educated city with the oldest university and the most college students per square mile. It was called 'The Athens of America." This nickname evoked enlightened thinking. However, that was the last adjective that television viewers would use to describe the violent mobs that attacked school buses in

South Boston on the fall of 1974.

The events on September of 1974 marked the beginning of the most violent period in the city of Boston since the Revolutionary War. Under pressure from African American parents and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Judge W. Arthur Ganity issued the order to desegregate the Boston public schools. Legally the schools had been desegregated in 1855 but in practice they were not. On the first day of school most students boycotted classes and protesters mobbed the school busses and entrances. Protests continued non stop for years. Historian Ronald P. Formisano was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the time and he was teaching a college class on the desegregation of the Boston schools. His book, Boston Against Busing, focuses on the actions and motives of the white anti-busing protesters.

Formisano writes that even though all schools in Boston were deteriorating physically and instruction wise and Boston students were scoring low on national standardized tests, ghetto schools were worse than white neighborhood schools. I Less money was spent on African American pupils than on white students. Formisano points out that the schools were subject to the political whims of school committee politics. African American protests went unheard because they were the minority and politicians only cared about the votes of the white majority.

Following years of waiting to be heard, African American parents accused the Boston School Committee of intentionally keeping schools segregated in violation of the 14th Amendment. The class action suit trial began in 1970 and judge Ganity made his decision in favor of the plaintiffs on June of 1974. He presided over the desegregation of the Boston schools and began in pmt with busing students from Roxbury, the poorest African American neighborhood in Boston to South Boston, the poorest white neighborhood in Boston.

Geographically this made some sense since these are bordering areas of Boston. The people in both neighborhoods were of different races and ethnicities yet they had very similar problems. Formisano explains that businesses always set up shop in the suburbs and that the city had become a "postindustrial" administrative and service center." All poor inhabitants of Boston shared the same economic problems. High unemployment, absentee fathers and lack of higher education were common hurdles to overcome for many inhabitants of both Roxbury and South Boston.

Even though Roxbury was a neighboring area, to the Irish it was a separate country that had nothing to do with them. They saw African Americans as totally alien. Formisano does an excellent job of explaining the background for the violence. Throughout the book he explains the roots of Irish political power in Boston and the competitiveness between ethnic communities. The Irish had developed a strong system of patronage in city departments. The police, fire, public works and education departments were dominated by the Irish who only hired their own or other whites. The suit to desegregate schools was just one suit brought by minorities against the Boston power structure. The Irish saw desegregation in the work place as well as in schools as a danger to their political supremacy in Boston.

South Boston had been long populated by many people of Irish decent. The community had grown interdependent since the Irish began to arrive in Boston. They had suffered great discrimination in the 19th century but though staying united they had gained political control in Boston. They even saw one of their own become president in 1960. They were fiercely loyal to each other and never forgot their roots. South Boston was their protected enclave. Outsiders were not welcome. By the 1970s many

families with higher income and opportunity had moved to the suburbs and the poorest remained defending their community.

Formisano explains well how the neighborhood functioned around the high school. South Boston High was more of a social center than an educational building, For the adults it was a place full of memories where their children could meet their friends' children and perpetuate the relationships. Football games against East Boston or Charlestown high schools where community events of one ethnic neighborhood against another. The Irish played against the Italians or the Polish.

To the west lay Roxbury. In the 1970s it was an African American ghetto. Earlier it had been the African American cultural and business center of Boston but, like in South Boston, any families that could, moved to the suburbs. Children attended schools that were slowly disintegrating. People from South Boston and other white neighborhoods had very negative perceptions of the inhabitants of Roxbury. African American students were seen as criminals from the crime-infested ghetto come to destroy their jealously guarded community.

Another problem, according to Formisano, was that *'the teachers were overwhelmingly white and Irish Catholic female," and...the top administrators, of course, were male Irish Catholics:' They all believed they were doing a good Job. He writes that they were negatively predisposed against the African American students, ..they believed that the blacks should raise themselves up as other immigrant groups had done before them ... Further, the blacks' criticism of the schools struck most Irish politicians and schoolmen as attacks on them personally."

Formisano is successful in showing that the anti-busing protest movement had many forms and motives. The city officials and the police did not support the court ordered desegregation so they did only what was required. Even President Ford said that he did not support busing. Most people in power did not want it to work, change is never easy. Most violent protesters were from South Boston and Formisano quotes studies that show a connection between unemployment and violent anti-busing protests.

He also shows that many employed people fought busing because of fear for their children or fear of being ostracized by their community. They were afraid of their violent neighbors. Fonnisano believes that the protesters lived in an era that legitimized protest. He calls the movement "re-actionary populism." This is an apt term because most protests were for change; however the anti-busing protesters fiercely wanted to maintain the status quo at all costs. South Boston High School was ...the center stage for the resistance." The resistance was so strong and violent that at the end of the first year, one school official said that, "There simply existed no good will 'on the part of the adult community.'" Formisano writes that violence did not end until the mid 1980s when Boston changed the electoral system and some African Americans were elected to the school committee. The segregated neighborhoods did not change and the economic problems did not go away. Judge Ganity issued the last orders and gave most of the responsibility for the schools to the school committee. Desegregation policies continued in Boston until 1997. By then eighty percent of all students attending Boston public schools were either African American or Hispanic. Most white students had moved away or were attending private schools.

In 2004, the Boston School Committee was "selected as the recipient of the first Award for Urban School Board Excellence from the National School Boards Association/Council of Urban Boards of Education (NSBA/CUBE). The Boston School Committee was chosen for this award for demonstrating excellence in four core areas: board governance, closing the achievement gap, academic achievement, and community engagement. The protesters warned that education in the city would be destroyed It took thirty years, but eventually things could get better.

As a graduate student in philosophy and history, I recommended this book for anyone interested in American history, civil rights era history.

Skirting around its source material to promote a self-referential premise; the book: 'BOSTON AGAINST BUSING: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960's and 1970's'(c. 1991) by history professor Ronald P. Formisano, is a sanctimonius and inconsistent work that provided few insights into the dynamics of Boston's anti-forced busing movement but "demonstrated a kind of intellectual onanism to which the author was dedicated". Fundamentally, documented truisms coupled with dogmatic assertions seemed to be the author's methodology to promote his pet theory of 'Reactionary Populism'.

The American philosopher, W.V. Quine, stated "That nearly any statement can be made to fit with the data, so long as one makes the 'requisite compesatory adjustments'". And these 'adjustments' can be found throughout BOSTON AGAINST BUSING as: question begging (e.g.,"Anyone who reads Garrity's decision in Morgan v. Hennigan will understand why he found the school committee guilty of segregative practices." p.9); truisms (e.g., "The Boston Irish did not feel responsible for slavery or the long history of black oppression. They believed that the blacks should raise themselves up as other immigrant groups had done before them." p. 41); palindromes(e.g., "Hicks was just as much a creature of the backlash as she was one of its creators." p. 30) and in 'post hoc ergo propter hoc' - confused digressions for correlations ("I know that discord between Irish Catholics and African-Americans extended back to before the civil war." p. ix) as distracting fallacies to emphasize the author's own theory of 'Reactionary Populism'.

But Reactionary Populism, defined within chapter eight of BOSTON AGAINST BUSING as "a movement that included the organized and unorganized, militants and moderates, terrorists as well as middle-class reformists respectful of democratic norms of civility." (p. 172) is a crude oversimplification in the description of an indeterminate social class found in South Boston. Thus the author's theory of 'Reactionary Populism' becomes nothing more than another universal existance statement - an unfalsifiable assertion! Such divigations only propound the disparity between the author's notes to the content of his text, as the author eschewed the usual canons of evidence and logic to espouse a historically determinist system along the lines of such specious authors as: Hillson, Lukas, Lupo, and O'Connor.

Professor Formisano would only have strengthened his work if he had actually included interviews and opinions of Boston residents who were actually involved in the street demonstrations to have realized that the protest against busing centered on the use of 'force' to send kids to non-selected schools in dangerous areas; an acknowledgment of the federal judge's violation of the separation of powers act; and that the Boston schools were never segregated, 'de facto' or 'de jure' in the first place. As even the author indicated, Boston residents were not against the Racial Imbalance Act. But he omited that each of the several thousand protesters were individual eye-witnesses that the schools were neither segregated nor imbalanced.

Instead, admiting he was unaffected and far away, the author's only source on South Boston were his graduate students or colleagues doing most of the research: ("...[they] called to my attention countless books, articles, and newspaper stories ... and sending them not only through the campus mail but even to Italy during the 1989 spring semester, where I continued to work on the manuscript while on a Fullbright." p.xv)

Obviously this professor did not commit himself entirely to his text, and it showed in his work. So while historian Dr. Formisano was commuting outside of Boston between the city of Cambridge and the city of Worcester, on September 12th, 1974, the first day of forced busing in Boston, my fellow classmates and I walked into Southie High to begin our senior (fourth) year; then on December 11th, 1974, I witnessed a stabbing of a classmate outside the headmaster's office on the second floor adjacent to the trophy case! Yet neither myself nor any of my classmates had ever been interviewed by the journalistic or academic 'experts' on the topic of forced busing.

The book: BOSTON AGAINST BUSING, was only written in Boston's seventeenth year of forced busing. Today in its twenty-ninth year, South Boston High School is 95% black & hispanic in a 90% white neighborhood; Southie High had been declared officially 'dysfunctional' by the Massachusetts Board of Education; and the court order costs Boston taxpayers $25 million a year to implement. Yet, thanks to judicial interference, what was once an adequate school system has been reduced to a wasteland!

Invalid as history; the book: BOSTON AGAINST BUSING by history professor Ronald P. Formisano is a smugly written, unbalanced, and, considering the author's Ph.d. in history, a surprisingly biased inquiry into the nature of Boston's forced busing protest to promulgate a history professor's unfalsifiable assertion of 'reactionary populism'. This work of 'Ignoratio Elenchi' is neither political science, social science, nor sociology and cannot be recommended.

Ronald Formisano's "Boston Against Busing" is the single most valuable -- though not the most significant -- book about the school integration crisis in Boston in the mid-1970s. Contrary to the prevailing thought on the Boston busing imbroglio, Formisano argues that the crisis was not only a manifestation of rage and racism, but was also the natural reaction of working-class and ethnic Bostonians to a decade's worth of promises from public officials that busing would never come to Boston. Indeed, a number of public officials in Boston, such as School Committee Chairwoman/Mayoral Candidate Louise Day Hicks and School Committee member Jim Kerrigan, built their careers on such promises, which primarily served to do nothing more than enflame the passions of citizens. Another thorny aspect of the crisis that Formisano handily details is the perceptive anger and resentment of working class and white ethnic Bostonians that their neighborhoods were hijacked for social experimentation by so-called "limousine liberals" from the suburbs. This anger, which welled up in South Boston, Charlestown and other sections of the city, arose from the fact that schools like South Boston High School and Charlestown High School were no more white and non-integrated than the suburban school systems in which the judges and politicians who ordered busing lived - yet it was the city schools that faced federal orders to integrate. Formisano has written an incisive book that moves forward our knowledge of the Boston busing crisis. The book cuts more directly to the heart of the situation than J. Anthony Lukas' "Common Ground," which is a far more celebrated work. Formisano's book is more scholarly and research-driven and less anecdotal and windy than Lukas' book. Overall, "Boston Against Busing" is highly recommended.

Funny how busing caused such a flap in Boston and no southerners hopped on buses to go demonstrate in the streets of Boston.