Only in Boston
Busing and the Long Reckoning
On June 21, 1974, a federal judge ruled that the people running Boston’s public schools had segregated them on purpose: knowingly, through decisions they made and kept making, rather than by accident or as a side effect of where families happened to live. Everything that came next, the buses, the rocks, the police, the years, follows from that single finding, and it is the key to understanding this city.
What Garrity actually found
The case was Morgan v. Hennigan, filed by the NAACP in March 1972 on behalf of Black parents, and Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. spent two years on it. The distinction he drew is the one most people get wrong, so hold onto it: he found that the Boston School Committee had intentionally kept the schools apart, rather than watching them drift apart because neighborhoods happened to be separate. Then he showed his work, in the places the committee chose to build schools, the district lines it drew, the schools it fed into one another, the teachers it assigned, and the students it let into the exam schools and the vocational programs. Every one of those was a choice, and the pattern they made together was unmistakable.
Nine years earlier, in 1965, Massachusetts had passed the Racial Imbalance Act, the first law of its kind in the country, requiring districts to desegregate. Boston’s School Committee, led for years by Louise Day Hicks, spent the next decade refusing to comply. The court arrived only after ten years of a public body openly declining to obey the law.
What happened
Garrity ordered busing. Phase I, in the fall of 1974, moved something like 17,000 to 18,000 students, and it paired the two neighborhoods with the least appetite for each other: South Boston and Roxbury. Phase II, the following year, extended it citywide to roughly 24,000 more.
September 12, 1974 was the first day of school. Crowds threw rocks and bottles at buses carrying Black children. The violence did not burn out in a week. State police were posted at South Boston High School for about three years, roughly 350 of them. In December 1975 the court took South Boston High away from the city entirely and put it into federal receivership.
On April 5, 1976, outside City Hall, a Black lawyer named Ted Landsmark was attacked by a white teenager wielding an American flag on its pole. A photographer for the Boston Herald caught the moment, and the photograph won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. It is probably the most famous image ever made in this city, and it is famous for the worst possible reason. The photograph is still under copyright, so go and find it deliberately, then look up what Ted Landsmark did afterward: he went on to lead the Boston Architectural College, serve on the city’s planning board, and he directs a policy center at Northeastern today. He stayed in the city that did that to him.
What it cost, and what came after
White families left, and the enrollment numbers record it. BPS had somewhere around 93,000 to 96,000 students in the early 1970s and about 57,000 by 1988, while the white share of enrollment fell from roughly 64 percent in 1970 to about 15 percent by 1988. Desegregating a school system depends on families staying inside it, and that is the hardest fact on this page.
The court let go slowly. Oversight passed to the state Board of Education in December 1982. Garrity issued his final orders in 1985. The School Committee got full control back in 1988. In 1999 race stopped being used as a factor in assigning students to schools at all.
Today Boston Public Schools is about 45 percent Hispanic, 28 percent Black, 15 percent white and 8 percent Asian. Two very different claims tend to get mashed together here, so keep them apart. That BPS today is far less white than the city around it is settled. Whether students are spread more or less evenly across individual schools than they once were is a second question, it needs its own evidence, and it deserves to be argued on that evidence.
One more fact belongs on this page. As far as we can find, the City of Boston and its School Committee have never formally apologized for deliberately segregating these schools. Mayor Kevin White apologized in 1974 for failing to protect children on a single day, which is a much narrower thing. The reckoning in the title of this page remains, in that specific sense, unfinished, and finishing it falls to your generation.
METCO, which is still running, and which you can join
In 1966, before any court ordered anything, Black parents in Boston built a voluntary program to get their children into better-resourced suburban schools. It was called METCO. It is sixty years old in 2026 and it never stopped. Roughly 3,200 Boston students ride out to 34 suburban districts today.
If you are a Boston resident in kindergarten through grade 10, you can apply. It is an online application, you rank up to three districts, and placement is a random lottery by grade. METCO can be reached at 617-427-1545.
Fifty years after the buses, the most durable thing to come out of this history is a program that Black parents started themselves, without being told to.
This is the history of the building you sit in. The most durable thing to come out of 1974 was built by parents who were never asked and never waited to be. METCO is still running, and you can join it. A Boston student sits on the School Committee now. This history is still open, which is another way of saying it is still yours to finish.
Photos: “Busing Information Phone Bank,” City of Boston Archives, Mayor Kevin White photographs (Collection #0245.002), September 1974. CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.