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"A cop for every kid"
Boston famously imploded. Thanks to relentless media coverage, an image forever ingrained in the historical psyche of the American public is that of buses of black schoolchildren surrounded by mobs of screaming, rock-hurling whites in South Boston. While numerous schools desegregated peacefully, others erupted in violence. Fighting between white and black students at South Boston High School led at times to a massive police presence at the school, "a cop for every kid," observers said. Peterkin's school, English High School, on one occasion roiled with rioting students. Over the next 25 years, white enrollment in the Boston Public Schools declined from more than 50 percent to 15 percent as white families accelerated an exodus to the suburbs that had begun in the 1950s. On the 25th anniversary of the desegregation decision of the late U.S. District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity, Jr., in the summer of 1999, a group of white parents known as "Boston Children First" filed suit in federal court. Charging that the use of race as a factor in assigning children to schools discriminated against white children, the group scored a victory just weeks later when the Boston School Committee decided five to two to drop race as a consideration in student school assignments, starting in the year 2000. A front-page headline in the July 15, 1999, New York Times summed up the meaning of the decision: "Busing's Day Ends." Peterkin, who endured North Carolina's muggy humidity over the summer to help the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District try to maintain its nearly 30-year use of race in student school assignments—an effort that failed in a federal court ruling—says he is "extremely disappointed" with the resegregation of the nation's schools. "Boston's busing struggle was emblematic for the nation's promise of equitable educational opportunity for all," Peterkin says. "We have to ensure that the end of busing in Boston isn't emblematic of the nation's retraction of that promise." Peterkin is not alone in vividly remembering the dramatic early days of desegregation in Boston. The crisis in 1974 presented educators in the Boston area with an extraordinary opportunity for engaging with history. From the beginning, the Boston story was seen as having national implications for race and education, and judging from writings at the time and from interviews today, many individuals at the School felt an urgency akin to that of diplomats, or even soldiers, in wartime. The editor of the HGSE Alumni Bulletin, in an issue devoted to the Boston case, used language that captured the sense of historic civil disorder when she wondered whether Boston would become "another Belfast."
Ed School students, alumni, and faculty played a variety of roles in the events before and after the court-ordered busing. At least two Ed School figures were official advisors to the federal court. Many more—idealistic students and alumni, faculty members eager to make a difference—became activists in the field, changing schools from the inside and starting community organizations. Twenty-five years after buses first began rolling across racially divided neighborhood lines in Boston, diverse people affiliated with HGSE then and now are marking this anniversary by remembering their role in integration's history. Next page: A Year of Turmoil: 1974 HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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