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Ed School Activists in the Field
After several years of grassroots organizing in Washington, D.C., in the early 1960s, Jackson returned to Boston and ran tutoring programs at Freedom House, a civic center in Roxbury founded in 1949 to address community concerns ranging from education and urban renewal to minority hiring. In her master's work at HGSE, she explored an array of options for placing Roxbury children in desegregated schools, included court-mandated busing. After graduation, Jackson went to work for the state education department. Deciding after a year that she missed working at the grassroots level, Jackson took a job as director of the Institute on Schools and Education at Freedom House. "Freedom House was often called the 'Black Pentagon' in those days, because everyone came there—politicians, clergy, reporters from all over the world, the FBI, parents, and children," says Jackson. The cadre of African-American intellectuals who ran Freedom House, she adds, included Ed School faculty and students. After the first day of busing in 1974, more than 300 shaken parents from Roxbury turned up at Freedom House; so did Boston Mayor Kevin White. Upset about the rough treatment of their children by South Boston mobs, the parents demanded better security measures. In the months that followed, says Jackson, people came to Freedom House on the heels of major incidents—such as when a black student was accused of stabbing a white student at South Boston High—or just when they needed to decompress. "A lot of people would come to Freedom House at the end of the day just to talk and share their experiences," she says. "We had a big auditorium that was our meeting room, and it would be packed!" Dozens of Ed School students, as well as those from Harvard College and other local colleges and universities, volunteered at Freedom House during this era, doing tasks ranging from answering the phones to tutoring children. "We had about 75 or 100 students working with us," Jackson recalls. "They were mostly white kids who were very interested in education and civil rights; they were terrific—extremely helpful." HGSE doctoral student Erna Bryant, Ed.M.'70, C.A.S.'71, Ed.D.'74, was a regular attendee of meetings at Freedom House; so was her husband, Bernard Bryant, C.A.S.'70. "Erna had convinced me to apply to the Ed School; she was very much a mentor to me," says Jackson. "The minority community at the School was very small in those days, but we had such camaraderie." When Leslie Francis "Skip" Griffin, Jr., Ed.M.'74, first came to Massachusetts in the early 1960s to attend Newton North High School, after legislators in his native state of Virginia closed the schools of Prince Edward County rather than desegregate them, he knew little of Boston's race problems. What he found in suburban Newton, and then at Harvard, were progressive educators and few other blacks. Little did he dream that, 15 years later, he would be roaming the halls of South Boston High, breaking up fights and helping suspend upwards of 25 students a day. "I enrolled at Harvard College on the heels of a summer shaken up by Stokely Carmichael and the Black Power movement," says Griffin, who is now director of public affairs at the Boston Globe. "This was pre-affirmative action, and there were about 40 black kids in each [college] class, which was considered huge in those days—astronomical." Having participated in his first civil-rights protest at age 14, Griffin got involved in the burgeoning student movement at Harvard, where he "sort of became one of its leaders," he says. "Things really exploded in the spring of 1968 after Martin Luther King's assassination. That's when we really put pressure on Harvard—with the help of community people and national civil-rights people—to expand its commitment to enrolling black students and hiring black faculty." During the spring of 1969, Griffin and two other African-American students were the first students to ever address a Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences faculty meeting. After graduation, Griffin returned to the South for two years, where he registered black voters and helped black candidates to run for local office. Upon returning to Cambridge, he worked in an alternative education program for a year in the Cambridge Public Schools and then enrolled at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in the fall of 1973. Many at HGSE in this era believed that civil rights and education went hand in hand, says Griffin. "There were a lot of folks with long hair or big Afros who were convinced that the way to change the world was through the schools." Tensions simmered, however, he adds. "While a lot of people at HGSE were for desegregation, some had already started to question whether this was the best way to achieve an effective educational outcome for black students." Acting as a disciplinarian at South Boston High "was just nuts at first," says Griffin. "Fights were pretty routine, and the police relied on us to break them up. There was a tremendous amount of pressure on those of us working at South Boston High. Mentally, it was very, very tough." His job, Griffin adds wryly, would not have been possible for someone who "wasn't young and in good shape." But the development of an in-house suspension program and of schools-within-the-school—"all those alternative programs of the 1970s"—ultimately lowered racial tensions at South Boston High, he says. Reflecting on their experience at HGSE, Griffin and Jackson say that they found much "ferment" and "goodwill." "A lot of different groups were making their presence felt at the Ed School at that time," says Griffin. "There was a contingent of Native Americans, an Asian-American group, as well as a number of black students and faculty who had been active in various civil-rights struggles around the country. I thought it was a pretty exciting place to be." Jackson adds, in a tone of quiet conviction, "That the Ed School community helped with desegregation in Boston was a great thing; it truly did itself proud. I found a lot of warmth at the School, a lot of openness in talking about issues of education and civil rights. It was a great experience being a student there, a great experience!" Next page: Dismantling Desegregation HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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