Boston Busing Crisis Erupts, Northern White Resistance to Desegregation

Court-ordered school desegregation begins in Boston amid massive white violence and resistance, shattering illusions that Northern cities differ from Southern segregation. Following Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr.’s June 1974 ruling in Morgan v. Hennigan that Boston School Committee “knowingly carried out a systematic program of segregation affecting all of the city’s students, teachers and school facilities,” nearly 17,000 students are transferred by bus to increase racial integration. On September 9, over 4,000 white demonstrators rally at Boston Common to protest, and when busing begins September 12, Black students desegregating South Boston High School are met by white mobs throwing rocks, bottles, eggs and rotten tomatoes while yelling “Niggers, go home!”

School buses carrying African American children are pelted with eggs, bricks and bottles as police in combat gear fight to control angry white protesters besieging schools. Nine Black children are injured and 18 buses damaged as locals stone buses carrying elementary students. The violence proves unabating: protests continue for months, many parents keep children home, and in October the National Guard is mobilized to enforce the federal desegregation order. Boston School Committee chairwoman Louise Day Hicks forms Restore Our Alienated Rights (ROAR), an anti-desegregation organization using tactics modeled ironically on the civil rights movement—marches in Charlestown and South Boston, public prayers, sit-ins, protests at prominent Bostonians’ homes, mock funerals, and a march on Washington DC.

In response to ongoing violence, Judge Garrity issues a September 1975 judicial order prohibiting groups of three or more from gathering within 100 yards of South Boston High School. The crisis influences Boston politics for decades and triggers white flight to suburbs, leading to unprecedented violence, national headlines, and public school enrollment decline to roughly half its early 1970s level. Currently, Boston Public Schools have roughly 85 percent students of color compared to the white majority (57 percent) when busing began, with students of color now more racially isolated than before desegregation efforts.