Today – Sept. 12 –marks the 50th anniversary of the day that buses, in the face of violent protests, began to shuttle school children across Boston as part of a court-ordered desegregation plan for the Boston school district.

I’ve spent the last three years working with other volunteers on the Boston Desegregation Busing Initiative to mark the anniversary because that searing experience has stayed with me and I want desperately for people to know this history. But I want even more for students, parents, teachers, administrators, elected officials, and our institutions to act now, and to act together to improve the Boston Public Schools.

To me, race and class are the two lenses through which to look at everything in American life. Living and working in Dorchester in the 1970s, I learned so much about how race limited opportunity and made Black people experience disrespect and even hatred in their daily lives. And how class limited opportunities for a large group of Whites and for people of color and made them sometimes question if it was their own fault rather than a system that kept them down that they hadn’t made it into the middle class.

In August 1975, I joined a demonstration in support of the right of Black people to use Carson Beach in South Boston after six visiting Black Bible salesmen had been harassed and chased off the beach. The 600 mostly Black demonstrators were met at the beach by maybe 1,000 counter demonstrators from Southie, who threw rocks at us over the police phalanx that separated us.

I said to myself: “This is my image of the South and I’m here in the North.” Hubie Jones, a Black Bostonian, used the phrase “Up North” to describe Boston, a variation on the “Down South” reference often used to describe the Jim Crow era in the southern states.

At the time, I was an organizer for Dorchester Community Action Council, which later became Dorchester Fair Share. Dorchester was, and still is, the biggest neighborhood in Boston with about 140,000 people. For a year or more, the only place in all of Dorchester that both our White and Black members felt safe going to a meeting at night was at the Grover Cleveland School in Fields Corner. It was not a good way to live in a neighborhood.

I remember going to a meeting of the anti-busing organization in Dorchester to listen to how they felt. There was a fierce commitment and anger in those attending. They felt that suburbanites like federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity, Boston Globe editor Tom Winship, US Sen. Ted Kennedy, and others were telling them to just go along with busing for desegregation when they lived in places not affected by the law.

Listening to our organization’s White members, I understood their reason to ask why couldn’t they send their kids to neighborhood schools. I later learned that the Boston School Committee intentionally drew the districts, especially for middle and high schools, to make them racially segregated. As one historian, Ron Formisano, wrote of the moment: “The rich sat it out. The middle class fled. And the poor did the desegregating.”

That’s a blunt and fair description of what I witnessed.

Yes, we must remember that most Boston schools opened and stayed peaceful. And that Judge Garrity didn’t order just busing. He ordered the hiring of Black teachers and administrators, racially integrated parent councils in each school, and ruled that one-third of students at the exam schools be young people of color. He also prescribed the beginning of bilingual education.

What if the Supreme Court had not decided, in a 5-4 vote, in July 1974 against the suburbs being included in Garrity’s desegregation orders? As he himself said, “Education is not before the court, segregation is.”

In recent years, I’ve had the opportunity to speak one-on-one with a number of the Black women who worked to desegregate South Boston High School, Hyde Park High School, and Roslindale High School. They spoke about the fights and taunts and worrying when the next incident would be. One said to me, “It wasn’t a way you should go to school.”

They still carry the trauma of those experiences.

The era made heroes of women like Ruth Batson, Ellen Jackson, and Mary Ellen Smith, who led the way for equity in education. They were part of groups working to keep the peace and support the students like the Freedom House Coalition and the Citywide Education Coalition. But buses carrying school children were showered with rocks and bottles many times. Racial epithets were yelled by adults and teens. Fights raged again and again.

I’m hopeful learning about the South Boston Courageous Conversations. When South Boston agencies got some pushback for posting Black Lives Matter signs after George Floyd’s murder, they gathered to figure out what to do. They realized that the elephant in the room was busing. The word was that it had been bad, so don’t talk about it. But they decided to talk about it. They organized four forums with speakers and small group discussions. And they are going to do another such event this fall.

Boston school desegregation with busing was the most important event in Boston during the second half of the 20th Century. Fifty years later, it is still a stain on Boston’s reputation here and around the country.

As William Faulkner wrote of his southern heritage: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” That’s true, too, in our own city.

Lew Finfer, a Dorchester resident, is the co-chair of the Boston Desegregation and Busing Initiative and the Director of Massachusetts Action for Justice.