Covered

How did the school's magazine cover desegregation over the years? In the 1962 issue (then called the Bulletin), there was a small piece about how two graduates, Ruth Turner, M.A.T.'62, and Jean Bennett, M.A.T.'62, spent the summer holding classes in a converted church for black children in Prince Edward County, Va. The public schools in Prince Edward had been closed since 1959 because of "massive resistance" to desegregation, as Leslie "Skip" Griffin Jr., Ed.M.'74, writes about in his essay for this issue. Two years later, the winter 1964–1965 issue was devoted to "education and race relations" and included essays on social psychology and racial balance and another look at Prince Edward County, this time by Neil Sullivan, Ed.D.'57, a New York superintendent who took a leave of absence in 1963 to become superintendent — at the request of then-attorney general Robert Kennedy — of a privately funded Prince Edward Free School. The experience was challenging, starting with the fact that he had to hire 100 professional staff members in just 10 days. At times, even life threatening. As a 2005 Washington Post obituary for Sullivan said of that time, "Sullivan's home was shot at, the roof of his white Buick convertible was slashed, and he fielded threatening phone calls at all hours. 'It was a living hell,' he later said."

A decade later, the Ed School again tackled desegregation, this time with a case study of Boston, which had, since June 1974, become a public and legal battleground over busing. This included four pieces written by alumni, including an interview with Gregory Anrig, M.A.T.'56, Ed.D.'63, the Massachusetts Commissioner of Education who had succeeded Neil Sullivan, who served in the commonwealth from 1969 to 1972. Again, in 2000, the Bulletin revisited busing in Boston and talked about the prominent role Ed School alumni activists and faculty members like Professor emeritus Chuck Willie and former dean Francis Keppel played in the trying to make progress in the city at the time.

Finally, in 2006, the magazine, by then renamed Ed., took a critical look at school resegregation, more than 50 years after Brown v. Board. As then-Dean Kathleen McCartney wrote in her introduction to the issue, "Across the nation, districts — often due to court orders — are removing racial considerations as they populate schools. Some argue that desegregation is no longer necessary in today's society, while others fear a return to the days of separate and decidedly unequal education."