Monday, December 15, 2008
Judge Arthur W. Garrity
Judge Arthur W. Garrity
"Few men has as much impact on the life of the city as Judge Arthur W. Garrity. He was a man of deep convictions. And whether you agreed or disagreed with his opinion a generation ago, everyone can agree that Judge Garrity's influence on our city will be felt for a long time to come."
~Mayor Thomas M. Menino
All Souls: A Family Story from Southie
A book by Michael Patrick MacDonald."The anti-busing riots of 1974 forever changed Southie, Boston's workign class Irish community, branding it as a violent, racist enclave. Michael Patrick MacDonald grew up in Southie's Old Colony housing project. He describes the way this world within a world felt to the troubled yet keenly gifted observer he was even as a child: '[as if] we were protected, as if the whole neighborhood was watching our backs for threats, watching for all the enemies we could never really define.'
... MacDonald, eight years old when the riots hit, gives an explosive account of the asphalt warfare. He tells of feeling 'part of it all, part of something bigger than I'd ever imagined, part of something that was on the national news everynight.;"
Sunday, December 14, 2008
NPR Report on Busing
National Public Radio did a three-part story in April 2004 on busing in Charlotte, NC, Detroit, MI, and Boston. Click here to listen.
Judge W. Arthur Garrity
W. Arthur Garrity was the Federal Court judge who ruled June 24, 1974 that Boston schools must be desegregated by busing. This ruling triggered riots in the South Boston area.
In a television interview in 1998, Garrity said he had no regrets about his decision, despite the fact that it remained controversial, even in 1998. ''I still think that given the circumstances that existed at the time, what I did was reasonable,'' he said.
Upon Garrity's death in 1999, Mayor Thomas Menino said ''Few men had as much impact on the life of the city as Judge Arthur Garrity. He was a man of deep convictions. And whether you agreed or disagreed with his opinion a generation ago, everyone can agree that Judge Garrity's influence on our city will be felt for a long time to come.''
"The Soiling of Old Glory" Book
Book by Louis P. Masur"Sometimes a moment can change history. This one took 1/250th of a second.
The photograph strikes us with visceral force, even years after the instant it captured. A white man, rage written on his face, lunges to spear a black man who is being held by another white. The assailant’s weapon is the American flag. Boston, April 5, 1976: As the city simmered with racial tension over forced school busing, newsman Stanley Forman hurried to City Hall to photograph that day’s protest, arriving just in time to snap the image that his editor would title “The Soiling of Old Glory.” The photo made headlines across the U.S. and won Forman his second Pulitzer Prize. It shocked Boston, and America: Racial strife had not only not ended with the 1960s, it was alive and well in the cradle of liberty.
Louis P. Masur’s evocative “biography of a photograph” unpacks this arresting image in a tour de force of historical writing. He examines the power of photography and the meaning of the flag, asking why this one picture had so much impact. Most poignantly, Masur recreates the moment and its aftermath, drawing on extensive interviews with Forman and the figures in the photo to reveal not just how the incident happened, but how it changed the lives of the men in it. The Soiling of Old Glory, like the photograph it is named for, offers a dramatic window onto the turbulence of the 1970s and race relations in America."
The Other Boston Busing Story: Whats Won and Lost Across the Boundary Line
A book by Susan E. Eaton."METCO, America's longest-running voluntary school desegregation program, has for 34 years bused black children from Boston's city neighborhoods to predominantly white suburban schools. In contrast to the infamous violence and rage of forced school busing within the city in the 1970s, METCO has quietly and calmly promoted school integration. How has this program affected the lives of its graduates? Would they choose to participate if they had to do it over again? Would they place their own children on the bus to suburbia?
Sixty-five METCO graduates vividly recall their own stories in this revealing book. Susan E. Eaton interviewed program participants who are now adults, asking them to assess the benefits and hardships of crossing racial and class lines on their way to school."
Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s
A book by Ronald P. Formisano."During the fall of 1974 shocking images of racial bigotry and violence emerged from Boston, that graceful, cosmopolitan city known for the excellence of its educational, cultural, and scientific institutions, a city once called 'the Athens of America.' As court-ordered desegregation of the public schools began, entailing intensive busing of both black and white pupils, racial conflict that had been escalating for over a decade overflowed into the streets and schools."
New York Times Article
Political Boston; Before Gay Marriage, There Was Busing
This New York Times article reviews the major events of the Boston busing crisis, and discusses how things have changed today.
Time Magazine
Time Magazine covered the busing crisis extensively in several issues of the magazine. The magazine cover shown above is from a 1975 issue, although the coverage started as early as September of 1965 with this article, an interview with Louise Day Hicks. In the interview, Hicks states that she feels that busing will not solve problems with education. Instead, she proposes "compensatory education" in which students get more "individualized attention" and "remedial instruction." At the time the article was written, Boston had a policy of "open enrollment" that meant any student could transfer to any school in which there was room. However, schools remained racially unbalanced, which the article attribute partially to Hicks' policies. A law recently enacted at the time required schools to correct racial imbalances or forfeit state funding. At the time of the publication, U.S. Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel had begun to investigate the Boston schools as to whether or not they still qualified for $2,000,000 of federal funding.
Students Against Students
Young Caucasian students protest the arrival of African-American students during the early days of busing.
Motorcade Protests
On October 27, 1974 a motorcade of approximately 700 antibusing protestors drove to the home of Gregory Ansig, Boston's State Education Commissioner to speak out against the school desegregation program. The majority of the crowd were from South Boston, but others came from different parts of Boston, as well as nearby suburbs.
The original rally began at the Dedham Shopping Mall. The aforementioned 700 reached Ansig's house and began a smaller protest, while another 600 attempted to drive to the home of the judge who originated the ruling, United State District Judge Arthur W. Garrity. This group was turned back by the police before they reached their destination.
Anti-Busing Protesters Attack Senator Kennedy
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a supporter of the Boston busing regulations, was driven from an anti-busing rally on September 9, 1974. The protesters gathered at a City Hall plaza, and chased Senator Kennedy to a federal building while hurling eggs, tomatoes, and insults. The crowd broke a plate glass window in their attempt to drive the senator away.
Their vehemence was surprising, especially because the predominantly Irish-American crowd was made up of the Kennedy family's most stalwart supporters. His stance in favor of desegregation has left him out of their favors, and they made their feelings known.
In response to the attack, which included shouts of "You should be shot!" and comments about his family, Senator Kennedy had only a few calm, measured statements.
"People feel very strongly about these issues. They're entitled to their views."
After he disappeared into the Federal building--which was, ironically, named for his brother, the assassinated President John F. Kennedy--the crowd resumed the rally.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy Responds to President's Statement
On October 9, 1974 Senator Edward M. Kennedy issued a statement that registered his disapproval with President Ford's public rejection of the Boston desegregation rulings.
"[I am] dismayed by the President's completely inappropriate and insensitive remarks about the school situation in Boston...the President is entitled to his own view about the issue, but the timing of today's remarks can only give aid to those who would flout the decision at this difficult time for our city."
The ruling that Senator Kennedy referenced was the controversial decision made by Boston courts that required schools to bus students from African American neighborhoods to predominately Caucasian school districts in an effort to end segregation in the school system.
The ruling has been met by outrage from both sides and, recently, acts of violence against African American members of the community.
President Gerald Ford Gives Statement
On October 9, 1974 President Gerald Ford spoke publicly about his opposition to the ruling of a Federal judge in Boston that forced desegregation in the schools. He based his opinion on the belief that this ruling would not provide the best solution to the race issue in the schools. He also said that while he disapproved of the order, he was appalled by the acts of violence that followed the court hearing.
This is the first time since the landmark ruling of Brown v. the Board of Education in 1954 that a President has publicly stated his disagreement with a desegregation order after a decision has been made.
Some wondered whether the President would send in Federal marshals to help control the streets, but a request for Federal aid would have to come directly from the Boston courts. At the moment of the statement, no request had been made.
Coretta Scott King
"Can anyone believe that people using or condoning acts of violence as well as vulgar racial epithets are making a democratic protest against busing? No. They are making a un-democratic assault on equality."
King was joined by Representative Robert Drinan, a Democrat from Massachussetts who also addressed the crowd.
Joseph Rakes
Joseph Rakes was seventeen years old the day of the protest at city hall. He is the young man portrayed in "The Soiling of Old Glory," attempting to spear Theodore Landsmark with an American flag. Rakes says "blind anger motivated me... When the busing started, it was, 'You can't have half your friends'- that's the way it was put towards us. They took half the guys and girls I grew up with and said, 'You're going to school on the other side of town.' Nobody understood it at [age] fifteen."
Rakes' actions at City Hall Plaza led to a conviction for assault with a deadly weapon and a two-year suspended sentence.
Rakes is currently a labor forman living in Maine. He said in a recent interview "The picture-it says what it says, but it doesn't tell the whole story. You know, there's nothing I can do about it. I just move on in my life."
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Theodore Landsmark
Theodore Landsmark was born May 17, 1946 in Kansas City, Missouri. He moved to New York as a child, where he attended Stuyvesant High School and St. Paul's Preparatory. He attended Yale for college, where he earned a BA in political science, before continuing on to Yale's law school. A veteran of civil rights advocacy, Landsmark had marched from Selma, Alabama to Montomery, Alabama in a civil rights march, and had also attended Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral.
On April 5, 1976, Landsmark was going to a meeting at City Hall. As he entered City Hall Plaza, a protester spotted him and yelled a racial slur at him. Another protester punched Landsmark and he fell to the ground. As he got up, Joseph Rakes came after him with and American Flag and hit him with it several times. This entire incident lasted between fifteen and twenty seconds.
The attack broke Landsmark's nose, as shown in the photograph above. At the hospital, Landsmark requested that his nose be bandaged in a way to draw maximum attention.
At a press conference he held two days after the incident, Landsmark said he did not blame the students who attacked him. He labeled them as "poor, working-class victims of a system that used race to mask deeper economic divisions in American society."
The incident turned Landsmark into a local celebrity and he became a spokesman for racial tolerance.
Landsmark is currently a lawyer in Jamaica Plain.
Student Protesters
Before student protestors went out to City Hall Plaza, they gathered in city council chambers. There, Louise Day Hicks served the students hot chocolate and led them in the pledge of allegiance, depicted here.
"The Soiling of Old Glory"
Photo by Stanley J. Forman depicting Joseph Rakes, a 17-year-old South Boston Teen, attacking Theodore Landsmark, a lawyer, with an American flag at a rally at City Hall Plaza on April 5, 1976.
Anna Louise Day Hicks biography
Anna Louise Day Hicks was born on October 16, 1916. She was an Irish-American, who was an American Politician and a lawyer from Boston, Massachusetts. With a Catholic upbringing, she was elected to the Boston School Committee in 1961 and in January two years later was made the chairperson. In June of that year, the NAACP of Boston were outraged by the obvious ignoring of the order for schools in the United States to be desegregated by the Boston school system. During this time there were 13 city schools that were almost 100% black. During this time, Hicks gained immense popularity as a politician as being opposed to the desegregation. But because she was so controversial, she needed bodyguards all day, every day. In 1967 she ran for mayor of Boston and lost by 12,000 votes.
She first gained her fame in 1965 by being against the court-ordered busing of students into the mostly black inner city schools to successfully achieve integration.
"Boston schools are a scapegoat for those who have failed to solve the housing, economic, and social problems of the black citizen." -Anna Louise Day Hicks.
In 1975 a federal judge ordered Boston schools to expand their busing programs to comply with the 1971 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education decision. Hicks started a group called Restore Our Alienated Rights that participated in massive resistance to the desegregation. She was also the first woman president of the Boston City Council.
Friday, December 12, 2008
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