In Boston Massachusetts, Judge Arthur Garrity Jr., believed there was a recurring pattern of racial discrimination taking place within the Boston public schooling system. In 1974, Garrity’s ruling found the schools to be unconstitutionally segregated. As a result, any school with more than a 50% white student body was required to be balanced by race. The Boston School Committee however, continuously disobeyed the ruling and it took the support of the Supreme Court for Garrity’s ruling to be upheld. In one case, the entire junior class of the poor white, South Boston High School would be bused to Roxbury High School, a black high school in the ghetto. Half the sophomores from each school would attend the other and seniors could decide which school to attend. For the next three years, Massachusetts state troopers were stationed at both schools. A small percentage of both groups of students showed up on the first day of the plan. Parents protested, whites and blacks were entering through different doors and an anti-busing movement was formed. Many questioned the academic advantage of “jumbling” these two schools together. Attendance of those enrolled in Boston school districts fell from 100,000 to 40,000 within these years. Protesters felt Garrity was biased since his own children lived in a white suburb and were unaffected by his ruling. Protests soon turned violent. After a black attorney was murdered by way of being stabbed by a lance-like American flag, black teenagers retaliated by causing a white man to crash his car and then continued to pull him out of the car and beat him with rocks putting him in a coma. A white student was stabbed at Roxbury High School and the white residents swarmed the school, trapping the black students inside. Roxbury High School closed for a month and when it opened had metal detectors installed and over 500 policemen guarding a mere 400 person student body. Garrity took control over the school himself in 1975 after firing the school’s principal. He then went on to further his desegregation to include all grades down to first. 6,000 marched against the plan in October, 1975. When the segregation experiment ended in 1988 the damage had already been done. The Boston school district had significantly shrunk. This event displays how extreme some U.S. officials were willing to be in order to restore what they saw was constitutionally right. Garrity’s decision to combine whites and blacks in the Boston school district put lives of every student at risk, angered the general public, and forever left its mark as the percentage of white to black students in the public schools fails to coincide with the percentage of population of white to black children in the area. Civil rights during these times were a priority to many, however the results from Garrity’s ruling helped question if, in some cases, it was necessary for the line between white and black to remain present.
How We Got Here: The '70s. New York, New York: Basic Books. pp. 252-264.
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