50 years ago last week, Black children on school buses hid under seats to avoid broken glass. White mobs in South Boston and Charlestown held signs that said “Whites have rights” and “Stop forced busing.” A half century since Boston’s first day of school in 1974, we still struggle to talk about it, though there are some signs that narrative is beginning to change in a hopeful way. 

Sometimes Boston media simply ignores echoes of that era or we hear that it was all a big mistake. Yet, coverage in recent years has begun to unearth some lost history and to frame the issue from new perspectives. So, as we approached an earlier, and obviously quite related, 50 year anniversary, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Judge Garrity’s famous court order was decided less than 3 months before the buses would start up again for the following school year. Our two major news outlets – the Boston Globe and WBUR in partnership with the Emancipator – each published a series on the June 21 anniversary of the Garrity decision, in addition to coverage in local press and public events both at the 50 year marks for the court order and then, later, the first day of school in 1974.

I tried to read/watch all of it, and this post is my attempt to start making sense of what it means for the contemporary conversation about school integration. If you’d like to catch up, here’s my Google doc with everything I could find. There’s a lot to say! I’ll highlight just a few common ways the media framed the issue, focusing on the unstated beliefs/values/implications that seem to follow from those frames. 

Frame 1: “Busing”

It’s not at all surprising, but of course it must be mentioned: The coverage of the Garrity order focused not on the order itself, but on the aftermath. The buses. It was indeed a big deal. The Boston Globe series was even titled “Busing at 50.” This might sound completely logical, but that is only because of the way this history has been distorted. Within the frame of “busing,” we see the White rage. The spectacle. As highlighted in a recent panel discussion near the anniversary, there’s a lot that is not included in the “busing” frame:

• The court case was not focused on remedy. Morgan v. Hennigan was filed by Black families after more than a decade of activism for educational opportunity. Starting with a school committee hearing in June 1963, the Boston School Committee steadfastly refused to acknowledge even the existence of segregation in Boston Public Schools. The court case was specifically focused on whether (or not) segregation existed in a way that violated students’ constitutional rights. 
• Garrity’s decision faced 22 appeals at different levels of the court system, reaching the US Supreme Court 6 times in various forms. Each appeal affirmed the original decision. 
• When the court found a constitutional violation, it had to act immediately. However, because the school committee had refused to acknowledge segregation in the district, it had no plan for fixing it. The school committee focused efforts on fighting the decision as opposed to developing a workable plan in compliance. So, Garrity deferred to the best plan available- a system for cross-district transportation developed by the state department of education and approved by the state supreme court. The Boston School Committee even rejected an earlier plan that involved less “busing.” 
• It made sense to use buses. After all, buses were used in BPS before the court order. Notably, buses took white students to the city’s elite public high schools, and no one called it “busing.” In total, about 30,000 students used a school bus in the 1972-73 school year, the year before Garrity’s decision.

Despite the above, news outlets still pin the remedy on the court decision, as in this line from a WGBH article published just last week: “Garrity’s remedy was to bus Black and white students across the city to integrate schools — a decision that was met with great resistance.” (Emphasis mine.)

When “busing” is emphasized, it not only ignores important historical facts, it also stifles any real conversation about solutions. At perhaps its best, the “busing” frame points us to moral outrages that should inspire action, but I think that instead we look at the “busing” frame in order to congratulate ourselves for being “better” now. At its worst, the “busing” frame leads us to a dead end, as suggested pointedly in this quote from the Globe series: “From an educational standpoint, the money, energy, and heartache poured into busing had mostly been a waste.” 

Frame 2: “Math and Morality”

The “math and morality” frame came out in articles that covered Boston segregation alongside a fantastic new report from the state’s Racial Imbalance Advisory Council (RIAC), detailing contemporary segregation across Massachusetts. One of several recent reports on this topic, the RIAC report is the most updated, and its release was timed to coincide with the Morgan v. Hennigan anniversary. 

In the “math and morality” frame, the writer points to the extent of contemporary segregation and casts an (understandably) disapproving gaze. Here’s an example excerpt:

“Segregation is alive and well in Massachusetts. More than 225,000 students attend segregated or intensely segregated nonwhite schools, those where the nonwhite student population represents at least 71 percent of the total, according to the 2024 annual report from the Racial Imbalance Advisory Council.”

As an advocate for integrated schools, of course there are things that I like about this framing. It gets us to look at hard facts that we’ve largely overlooked for decades. It’s what comes next that gets me. Often, the message defaults back to something like “why can’t we fund all schools equitably/make all schools great.” I’d love that! But, it’s never happened in any large scale kind of way, ever, and there are basically no contemporary examples. When media repeats this call, it pretends like segregation is an easily solvable problem as long as we wake up and muster the moral will to do something about it. 

Sometimes, though, the “math and morality” frame doesn’t include much in the way of substantive solutions. It’s not uncommon for these pieces to describe contemporary segregation as “heartbreaking” or “heart-aching” as in the Globe quote above. Just like the “busing” frame, I worry that some find a strange kind of “comfort” in the heartbreaking language. It focuses on the moral anguish of the reader as opposed to directing that reader towards a greater understanding of why the problem persists and what (often challenging) steps are necessary to fix it. 

Frame 3: “Complexity and Complicity”

The “complexity and complicity” frame, as I’m calling it, is basically the opposite of the above. To me, it’s a sign that things are changing in our public conversation about this issue. Even the Globe series includes several stories with this perspective, including consideration of how Chinese immigrants and Latinx families experienced the desegregation era. Though, I found this frame most often in the WBUR/Emancipator series. These articles bring complexity, both to our historical understanding of Boston desegregation as well as potential contemporary solutions. Here’s an example that also summarizes my concern with the over-emphasis on the “busing” frame:

“Through the decades, a misconception has prevailed: Most observers have viewed Garrity’s order as one that was foisted upon the city from on high, as though no Bostonians wanted the desegregation that he initiated. This view erases the years of struggle waged by Black parents and activists.”

Importantly, the “complexity and complexity” perspective centers the very image that is not included in the “busing” and “math and morality” frames- our complicity in maintaining separate and unequal schooling. In a general sense, the complicity framing points to human agency. The other frames leave the reader with mostly directionless outrage- why were white people so racist in the past, why can’t we just make all schools great. Indeed, the system we have now was created not from decrees “on high” but by human agency and we share in a sort of complicity by the simple fact that we haven’t built something better. 

It’s more than just general complicity though, and the rare article engages with this directly: white people, of course, were the barriers to integration. White complicity has changed shape over the years, as outlined in this fantastic article that outlines key events in the years following the court ruling, noting, for example, that in subsequent court cases “White parents were chipping away at [equal protection] rights with claims of reverse discrimination.” 

Meanwhile, an article in the city’s African-American paper specifically distinguishes between white families in the Boston suburbs, noting nuances in how both were complicit in maintaining segregation- suburbanites for maintaining distance from the issue and becoming involved only in measured ways, and white Boston residents for all the reasons you already know. 

We forget that 50 years ago, the buses went both ways: white students also traveled to Black neighborhoods in Boston. There were no rocks or firebombs when Black communities greeted white students. Because of the ways that we talk about this time period, we’ve mostly buried this simple yet profound piece of this history. It’s like we want to think that Boston’s ugly violence was inevitable, that there could have been no other way, but there was a peaceful alternative on the same day, in the same city, on literally the other end of the so-called “busing” route.  

And, there’s so much more: 

• Reverend Vernon Carter held a 114-day vigil in protest of Boston segregation. After 108 days, he had to be rushed to the hospital for exhaustion and heat exposure. He went directly back to the vigil after he got out of the hospital, and he only stopped when the MA governor signed the state’s Racial Imbalance Act, which has also largely been forgotten. That was in 1965, nearly a decade before the event that many regard as the beginning of Boston’s desegregation battle.
• There was a “phase 2” plan that was actually developed by Garrity, unlike the plan that he essentially inherited from the state in 1974. Phase 2 began in 1975, and it included a lot of ideas that would be popular today- bilingual education programs, for example, and partnerships between schools and Boston-based companies. Yet, Phase 2 was never implemented to its full potential due to the resistance from the Boston School Committee.  
• The original teacher and administrator diversity targets from the 1974 order still have not been met (25% Black educators and 10% Latinx and Asian educators). Technically, the district is still under court oversight for this provision of the original order. 
• As in many other cities, the freedom schools set up in Boston’s Black communities are models for the cultural responsiveness/sustainability that is central in today’s debate about curriculum.

Not unlike our retelling of Brown, key events like these easily become buried. Even so many years later, the emergence of new perspectives and new narratives is a positive sign. It’s late, and we have a long way to go but at least we’re starting.