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.;"

"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."