On June 21, 1974, Federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity issued his finding that Boston’s schools were segregated by the actions of the Boston School Committee. He ordered busing as a remedy beginning that September.

There was fierce opposition to the ruling among many whites in Boston while Black families and children acted with courage that fall when rocks pelted their buses on arrival at their new schools.

The history of so-called “busing era” in the middle of the 1970s is a story of some of the most significant events in Boston in the second half of the last century.

The suit that started it all – Morgan v. Hennigan – was filed on March 14, 1972. The named plaintiff, Tallulah Morgan, was one of 15 Black parents with 43 children behind the suit; the named defendant was James Hennigan, the chairman of the Boston School Committee.

A major influence on Judge Garrity’s decision happened at a September 20,1971 meeting at the Patrick O’Hearn School (now called the William Henderson Inclusion School) on Dorchester Avenue near St. Mark’s Church and Fields Corner. Some 400 parents, most of them white, filled the school auditorium while several hundred more listened outside.

The impetus for the gathering was a vote taken by the School Committee that year to overturn a vote it had taken in the late 1960s involving the construction of a new school on Talbot Avenue named after a longtime school committee member, Joseph Lee.

The school had received special state funding on the condition that it be opened as an integrated school, and the School Committee had agreed to this at a time when the neighborhoods around the Lee School were overall somewhat integrated.

The nearby Franklin Field and Franklin Hill developments housed mostly Black families and the neighborhood streets nearby around Woodrow Avenue and off Norfolk Street were mostly populated by white residents. 

But by 1971, those demographics had changed significantly. In 1968, most of this area was designated by the Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group (BBURG) to allow African Americans to buy homes there, a surprising move on its face since Black families in the city had long been discriminated against when it came to home buying. 

Since the BBURG program limited where its program could be used mostly to this area, real estate companies soon set up offices there and employed vicious blockbusting tactics to get whites to sell and move out of the neighborhood. The real estate firms’ conspiracy involved a campaign of door-to-door canvassing, mailings, and phone calls to urge white people to sell, saying explicitly that because Blacks were moving in, they wouldn’t get a fair price if they didn’t sell right away.

In just few years, the evidence of how this malevolent effort had succeeded was stark: Thousands of whites, a large number of them Jews from the streets off Blue Hill Avenue, were gone from the BBURG neighborhoods, leaving the area predominantly Black and the Lee School no longer a candidate for substantially integrated status.

In an attempt to keep the commitment to open the school as integrated, the School Committee came up with a plan for some white students from the neighborhoods around the O’Hearn in the St. Mark’s/Fields Corner area and the Emily Fifield School in Codman Square to be assigned to the Lee School and some African-American students to be assigned to classes at the O’Hearn and Fifield campuses. The School Committee voted, 3-2, to approve the plan, which was not likely to be popular with white parents.

Some Black parents were not happy with their children being assigned to a school located as much a mile away from where they lived, especially because the nearby Lee School was brand new, with a special auditorium for the arts, a huge gym, and other special features.

Many white parents were opposed to having their children go to a farther away school in a Black neighborhood so that it would open integrated. Some of this reaction was driven by fear, some of it by resentment that their kids would have to leave their neighborhood school, and some of it by racism. 

Black parents in general believed that integrated schools were their childrens’ only path to good education as overall the schools in Black neighborhoods had fewer resources, fewer experienced teachers, and needed more repairs.  But in this case, some of these parents preferred a nearby new school to having their children travel farther to integrate another school.

White parents from parts of Codman Square, the St. Mark’s area, and Fields Corner soon organized themselves and set out to get the School Committee to reverse the decision.  The Sept. 21 mass meeting at the O’Hearn School was a forum for their undertaking.

All the local (all white) Dorchester politicians were there with the parents....State Reps. Paul Murphy and Joseph Walsh, state Sen. George Kenneally, and then-Congresswoman Louise Day Hicks. Rev. Leonard Burke, the pastor at St. Matthew’s Church on Stanton Street down from Codman Square, was a major leader of this effort. 

The focus of the organizers was School Committee member James Craven, who was then running for City Council. His chances in that election faced great odds since he had voted for this policy that had white parents up in arms. Craven used the occasion to announce that he was changing his vote, a moment greeted by loud cheers since his reversal insured the repeal of the Lee School plan. Craven claimed he’d originally been given false information on the details of the plan, saying that his candidacy for City Council, which failed in the end, had nothing to do with his changed vote.

State Education Commissioner Neil Sullivan said he was “completely amazed and greatly disappointed” by the vote to reverse the integration plan. Congresswoman Day Hicks, the long-time leader of opposition to school desegregation, said at the meeting that she was “delighted to be here and take part in democracy in action,” according to a Boston Globe article.

Please take what you may have experienced or read about the attitudes and politics that prevailed in 1971 and put yourselves in the shoes of the white and Black parents (and students) and consider what you might have done in that situation.

I remember talking to one white parent, Patricia “Pat” Jones, now deceased, who attended this meeting in opposition to the integration plan. A few years later, she worked for the Citywide Education Coalition that tried to help make the court-ordered desegregation begun in 1974 achieve its goal.  Not many white working-class people would have associated themselves for a group like that in those days.

Black parents filed the Morgan v. Hennigan suit six months after these events, on March 14, 1972, and the Boston NAACP and the Center for Law and Education represented them.

James Hennigan always resented the court suit having his name on it despite his having voted in favor of the integration plan for the Lee School. As told in Jim Vrabel’s “A People’s History of the New Boston,” Hennigan was lamenting: “People said there was no leadership, but when we tried to show leadership, the people didn’t want it.”  Judge Garrity’s 1974 decision finding segregation and ordering busing was significantly impacted by the School Committee’s reversal in this story of the Lee, O’Hearn, and Fifield schools.

The Boston schools still assign students based on the legacy of that court decision. Children do not likely attend their neighborhood school, but one of many in a section of the city that they apply to.  The ugly incidents of racism amidst the protests against busing stained Boston’s reputation for decades into the present. 

Mayor Kim Janey made a point to visit the Edwards School in Charlestown on her first day in office. That was where she had been bused as a little girl and greeted with racial slurs and rocks as her bus arrived. 

It has now been 50 years since that Dorchester campaign and meeting proved significant in the big events we variously call busing and desegregation.

Lew Finfer is a Dorchester resident and an organizer for Massachusetts Communities Action Network.