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"We Saved the City": Black Struggles for Educational Equality in Boston, 1960-1976
... Pushing back against scholars who explain racist violence as an outgrowth of class oppression, Theoharis warns against naturalizing such responses as the only ones possible on the part of working-class white people, noting that both opposition to and support for the court order cut across socio-economic groups. 5 Examining citizen participation in the court-ordered councils shows that alternatives to the "reactionary populism" expressed by segregationists did indeed exist. 6 While their racist neighbors protested and refused to comply with the desegregation plan, other white Bostonians joined efforts to make it work. ...
Court-ordered desegregation of the Boston Public Schools in the 1970s has often been cast as an example of federal overreach that inflicted a disruptive “forced busing” plan on the city, generating only racial conflict and trauma while failing to ensure educational equality. Yet by encouraging citizen participation in developing and implementing plans for eliminating racism from the school system, the court order opened space for parents and community members to get involved in the public schools on an unprecedented scale. While some white Bostonians responded to desegregation with racist violence, others took advantage of the opportunities provided by the court order to press their vision for a more inclusive school system that would prepare children to live in an interracial democracy. Their efforts came up against an entrenched, self-interested bureaucracy that had no interest in sharing power or significantly reallocating educational resources. The struggles over education reform that played out in the offices of school administrators reveal the diverse interests and motivations that undermined school desegregation in Boston and allowed inequities to persist.
In 1963 and 1964, organizers in Boston held Freedom Stay-Outs—one-day school boycotts—to protest the neglect of predominantly Black schools from the Boston School Committee, the governing body of the Boston Public Schools. Boycotting students attended Freedom Schools, where they learned about Black history and discussed issues facing Black youth. This article examines the 1964 Stay-Out and Freedom Schools as spaces where Black educators, organizers, parents, and students developed and enacted a vision of integrated education distinct from the dominant models of integration proposed in Boston and across the nation post- Brown v. Board (1954). The 1964 Freedom Schools modeled reciprocal integration , a vision for integrated education that promotes bidirectional physical and cultural movement, rather than the dominant model of integration that moved Black children into white schools to be taught white history and culture. Reciprocal integration was developed through Black parents’ and students’ educational testimony, the Stay-Out organizers’ own educational analysis, and the practical necessity of interracial organizing.
p>If the Supreme Court rules against the wishes of the majority, how can that majority respond? I argue that while federal judges will never stand for election, majorities can employ various response mechanisms to counter-majoritarian decisions. I draw out observable expectations for inter-branch, local, and electoral responses. I then test these expectations in cases from the “mature” New Deal—communism, school prayer, busing, and abortion—showing the range of effective results achieved by anti-Court majorities. Given these results, I conclude that there is no “accountability problem”; there is just a narrow definition of accountability.</p
Outsourcing Government: Boston and the Rise of Public–Private Partnerships - Volume 19 Issue 4 - CLAIRE DUNNING
If the Supreme Court rules against the wishes of the majority, how can that majority respond? I argue that while federal judges will never stand for election, majorities can employ various response mechanisms to counter-majoritarian decisions. I draw out observable expectations for inter-branch, local, and electoral responses. I then test these expectations in cases from the “mature” New Deal—communism, school prayer, busing, and abortion—showing the range of effective results achieved by anti-Court majorities. Given these results, I conclude that there is no “accountability problem”; there is just a narrow definition of accountability.
In this article, Zoë Burkholder explores the historical interplay of the emergence of tolerance education in the United States and the rise of black educational activism in Boston. By uncovering a pointed lack of tolerance education in Boston and a widespread promotion of tolerance education in other cities in the early half of the twentieth century, the author reveals how racial, historical, and political factors complicated tolerance education's local implementation in Boston. Informed by local racialized politics in the 1940s, the predominantly Irish Catholic teaching force in Boston declined to teach lessons on racial tolerance that were popular nationwide during World War II. Burkholder argues that this site of active teacher resistance against tolerance education provided fertile ground for black educational activism in Boston during the civil rights movement. These findings presage the well-documented virulence of white protest to school integration in Boston and complicate our understanding of integration in today's educational context.
This article looks at ideologies of motherhood within the welfare rights movement of the late 1960s and the anti-busing struggle of the early 1970s, primarily focusing on Boston. It argues that, within these seemingly very different movements, women’s identities as mothers played an integral role in motivating their activism. It also explores similarities in how both movements drew upon maternal ideologies, rhetoric and symbolism to justify their protests and advance their cause. However, gender was intricately entwined with race and class, and this article analyzes key differences in the way welfare rights and anti-busing activists understood and used motherhood within their respective struggles. Furthermore, it examines how participation in social protest impacted on women’s ideas about gender. Engaging with current debates over the complex relationship between maternalism and feminism, it examines how women within the welfare rights and anti-busing movements reacted to the burgeoning feminist movement of the era. Although these movements were born out of similar maternal outlooks, they differed significantly in the extent to which participants came to re-examine traditional gender ideologies or develop a feminist consciousness. While many welfare recipients developed a feminist consciousness as a result of their activism, anti-busing women generally eschewed feminism and remained wedded to conventional gender roles. Ultimately then, this study enriches our understanding of the way in which gender intersects with race and class to shape political activism and social change.
This article examines the early history of Boston's black public affairs television program Say Brother from 1968-1970. This history shows that as a local broadcast, WGBH's Say Brother could take a more outspoken position than a national program, such as Black Journal, could have taken. The article explores the radical pedagogy offered by Say Brother, which attempted to impart "new principles of Blackness" to its viewers using multiple genres. Through an analysis of the archived program and interviews with former staff members, the article demonstrates how Say Brother's youthful creators took advantage of establishment fears about black uprisings to create an openly critical television show that examined black discontent, showcased black viewpoints and black artists and overcame a cancellation attempt by rallying community response.
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