It wasn’t until the mid-1970s that Boston’s “busing crisis” finally garnered national attention. It was easy to forget that this wasn’t a new phenomenon, that black people in Boston and other cities had been fighting for years to secure equal education, and that powerful local officials and national politicians underwrote school segregation in the North. School desegregation was about the constitutional rights of black students, but in Boston and other Northern cities, the story has been told and retold as a story about the feelings and opinions of white people. The mass protests and violent resistance that greeted school desegregation in mid-1970s Boston engraved that city’s “busing crisis” into school textbooks and cemented the failure of busing and school desegregation in the popular imagination. Contemporary news coverage and historical accounts of Boston’s school desegregation have emphasized the anger that white people in South Boston felt and have rendered Batson and other black Bostonians as bit players in their own civil-rights struggle.
The Lasting Legacy of the Boston Busing Crisis
