Boston Forced Busing
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“Boston Against Busing: Race, Class and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s”
By: Ronald P. Formisano
The book “Boston Against Busing: Race, Class and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s” written by Ronald P. Formisano examines the opposition of court-ordered desegregation through forced busing. The author comes to the conclusion that the issue surrounding integration is a far more complex issue than just racism that enveloped the southern half of the country during this time period. Formisano argues that there were broader elements including a class struggle, white backlash and “reactionary populism” that contributed to the emotions of those involved.
Formisano is persuasive in his arguments that the Boston anti-busing movement was a led by “grass-root insurgents” from the dominate Irish-Catholic working-class neighborhoods in South Boston. These protesters felt that their tight knit existence was being threatened by the rich, suburban liberals whose children were not effected by the enforcement of the busing.
The author points out that it was an issue of “white resistance” rather than racism that played a role in the violence of the protests. I believe that this is a contradictory statement. What Formisano calls “white resistance” is the violent reaction to the
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movement of African American students into predominantly white neighborhood schools and the mixing of two separate but legally equal peoples.
Is the rock throwing at buses carrying elementary age children, stabbings at South Boston High School and riots on the streets outside the schools affected by the integration any different from the U.S. Army escorting nine African American students into school in Little Rock, Arkansas?
The author skirts around the central issue of racism by calling it a “class struggle” within the white population of Boston during the 1960s and 1970s. Formisano discuses the phenomenon known as “white flight”, where great numbers of white families left the cities for the suburbs. This was not only for a better lifestyle, but a way to distance themselves from the African Americans, who settled in northern urban areas following the second Great Migration.
Throughout the text Formisano ignores the voices of who I believe play a key role in the forced busing era: the students involved and the African Americans from West Roxbury. His primary focus is on the Irish of South Boston, the school committee members including the most vocal opponent Louise Day Hicks and the white politicians and judges who enforced the busing. This leaves the work a bit unbalanced and does not give first hand accounts of what the students felt. The African American point of view suffers in order to promote the sentiments of the Irish working class.
His argument was strongest in pointing out the practice of “de facto segregation”, ut this was one of the most obvious facts. It was defined as the Boston schools were segregated not by an institution of racism in the South, but by the structure of the
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neighborhoods and residential patterns within the City. Where the population was predominantly white the schools were close to 95 percent white and vice versa.
Formisano states that the infrastructure of segregation was not due to the actions of the Boston School Committee, but of the inactions to blend the school districts. U.S. District Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. agreed concluding that “There was a deliberate discriminatory operation in place,” and ordered the desegregation of Boston schools. This ruling lead to the white backlash Formisano explores in his book.
The author explains that this was not a race war, but rather a class struggle. “The role of class was connected to broad changes that took place in the distribution of blacks within the United States during the twentieth century.” He points out that Boston suburbs grew from two to three million in the 1950s due to the era of “white flight.” This led to highly concentrated areas of African Americans and poor whites in Boston, who took pride in their culture and neighborhoods.
The busing battleground did not take place in the affluential areas where the enforcers resided. It was on the “turf” of the Irish, who Formisano explains highly resented African Americans as early as the pre-Civil War. This sentiment was born “in part by Yankee reformers tending to be sympathetic to black slaves and freed persons but hostile to Irish Catholic immigrants.”
Formisano explains that the anger and resentment was not only from the attitudes of the Irish towards the African Americans but directed towards the “limousine liberals.” These were the suburbanites and Beacon Hill cronies whose children did not attend the
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schools affected by the busing. This led the Irish of South Boston to angrily lash out and protect their neighborhoods from the social experimentation