On June 21, 1974, in response to decades of racial segregation and evidence of educational disparities, the U.S. District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity ordered the Boston Public Schools to integrate through a court-mandated busing plan. Despite the city's self-proclaimed reputation as the "cradle of liberty" and the "birthplace of abolition," it had always been, as historian Zebulon Miletsky writes, a deeply racially divided city. Forced busing would catalyze racial violence and class tensions across the city, and media coverage of the unrest would shape Boston's reputation and attitudes towards school desegregation across the country for decades to come. Drawing upon eyewitness accounts of participants, oral histories, and rare news archives, The Busing Battleground examines the 1974 effort to end segregation in Boston's public schools, detailing the decade's long struggle for educational equity that preceded the busing crisis.
American Experience
Court-mandated social integration unleashes racial unrest throughout Boston in the 1970s as Black and White students are bussed together.
