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We talk about racism in the United States like it only happens in the South. But the nasty truth is that the North is also guilty of racist behavior. This is evident in the way that we behaved when schools were integrated by bus.
Brown v. Board of Education called for public schools to integrate. However, it took decades for many public schools to carry out this directive. It wasn't until the 1970s that the Boston schools were forced to integrate. But how?
Schools are frequently attended by children who live in a given school district. But the North had divided itself up by race, forcing black people to live only in certain areas of a city. Black children were not going to white public schools because they simply didn't live in white neighborhoods. This was de facto segregation at work. So when schools were called to integrate, they had to come up with a plan. They would bus students between schools, thus integrating them.
But there were problems. In Boston, they started this program by cross-populating poor schools with poor schools. So the quality of education didn't go up. Violence broke out across the city as parents and children alike struggled to welcome people who looked different than them.
In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Zebulon Miletsky, Associate Professor, Africana Studies and History at Stony Brook University.
Sources:
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Before Busing: A History of Boston's Long Black Freedom Struggle by Dr. Zebulon Miletsky
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Boston Against Busing by Ronald P Formisano
- Boston Globe (1960-); Sep 26, 1968; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Boston Globe pg. 1 and 32
- Nixon's radio address about integration
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The Busing Battleground PBS documentary (worth a watch!)
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GBH's coverage of busing
- American Archive video collection on busing
Discussion Questions:
- Integration was going to be difficult. How should it have been handled?
- Would you send your kids to a potentially unsafe school? What if it meant helping to integrate it?
- Was the uproar over integrated busing about more than just race?
- Why is it that black parents sometimes didn't want their kids going to formerly white schools?
- How do people like Ms. Hicks build a political career on a single issue?
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