Modern Boston History Class Exam 2

Lecture 4.1 !1

Lecture 4.1 The 1960s History 385

Julie de Chantal

Blaming the victim In this lecture will talk about the conflicts and activism that emerge in the city in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This period was especially important as it set the tone for the 1970s and the busing crisis. As we start, I would like you to read this piece called “Blaming the Victim.” I think that it will set the stage for what we will talk about today especially concerning the Black community living in Boston

“What is the culturally deprived child doing in school? What is wrong with the victim? In pushing this logic, no one remembers to ask questions about the collapsing building and the torn textbooks, the frightened, insensitive teachers, the six additional desks in the room, the blustering, frightened principals, the relentless segregation, the callous administrator, the irrelevant curriculum, the bigoted or cowardly members of the school board, the fairy tale leaders or the self-serving faculty of the local teacher’s college. We encourage to confine our attention to the child to dwell on all his alleged defects. Cultural deprivation becomes an omnibus explanation for the educational disaster area known as the inner-city school. This is blaming the victim.”

As in everything, one of the first steps to stop victim blaming is to create programs to address the issues present in the city.

Addressing issues in the neighborhood Violence Across the city, violence rose following the war. A sociologist at Harvard University, Walter Miller, studied the violence in the streets, and noticed that gangs were slowly marking their territories. You can read his unpublished manuscript about the topic here: https://live- crim.ws.asu.edu/sites/default/files/%5Bterm%3Aname%5D/ %5Bnode%3Acreate%3Acustom%3AYm%5D/city-gangs-book.pdf

Miller noticed that gang territories in Boston were rather fluid, and that this fluidity allowed violence to be less explosive than it was in other cities. Already in the 1950s, gangs developed a dress code to show their affiliations. If the zoot suit marked some teenagers and young adults as rebellious in the 1940s, color-coded outfits, letter jackets, and “dungarees,” identified gang members in the 1950s and 1960s. Even non-criminal groups, like Ellen Jackson’s group of friends (we will see who she is later), who named themselves the “Emanon” (a play on “No Name” reversed), wore jackets to display their belonging to their “gang.” Some teens, who had joined criminal gangs, carried weapons such as knives, belts, clubs, chains, or even rubber hoses

Lecture 4.1 !2

filled with rocks. Following the murder of Rabbi Jacob I. Zuber on December 31, 1952, Greater Boston cities pondered the use of curfews to regain control over the streets.

Some teenage gang members committed petty crimes, vandalized property, drank while under age, and fought each other. Random attacks against non-gang residents took places on the street, in public transportation, or in public spaces. Some gangs were even blamed for the derailment of a freight train. In 1955 alone, the city saw 13 murders and 105 aggravated assaults, a large number for the time.

Racial lines Interestingly, though, violence in the streets of Boston did not seem to cross racial lines. In the 1950s, gangs were mostly segregated along neighborhood lines. Within these gangs, people of different descent rubbed elbows. White gangs, for example, often included youth of Irish Catholics, French Canadians, Italians, and youth of British origin. Most of the members of the Royals, one of the Black gangs established in Roxbury, had Southern origins and were not Boston natives. Overall, the criminal activities of the Royals resembled that of the white gangs in the city. They committed petty theft, burglaries, hold ups, threatened residents of the neighborhoods, and fought among each others. Yet, historians, sociologists, and reporters alike failed to record any interracial incidents in the period immediately following World War II. This finding is not to imply that tensions did not exist between members of Black and white rival gangs. It is simply that violence between gangs did not seem to be based predominantly on racial hatred.

Freedom House Muriel and Otto Snowden, who fought to democratize the Boston school system, attempted to address the issue of gang violence in Roxbury in their own way. In 1949, Muriel and Otto Snowden founded Freedom House, a grassroots organization meant to help “different races, different faiths, playing together and building together for a better tomorrow.” At Freedom House, they organized activities for children of all ages, thinking that if a child was resourceful enough at a young age, and belonged to groups who encouraged them to be self-sufficient and self-reliant, in addition to having racial pride, then, they would be less tempted to join criminal organization once in their teens.

Freedom House slowly became a political center in the Black community, creating projects to address all types of issues. In reaction to the Urban Renewal fiasco, they focused on what they nicknamed Human Renewal Projects.

Human Renewal projects In the late 1950s, Boston razed “slums,” districts where a number of residents of African American, Hispanic, or foreign descent lived, in order to build what promised to be accessible housing, new highways, government offices, and commercial buildings. In the early 1960s, considering the situation, the US Commission on Civil Rights asked the Massachusetts Advisory Committee to report on housing conditions in the state. The Committee was especially interested

Lecture 4.1 !3

in the residential segregation plaguing Boston. Following the study, it confirmed that Bostonians experienced de facto segregation in their city.

• de facto: in fact. In this case, Boston did not have laws on the books like many states in the South, prohibiting African Americans from living anywhere in the city. However, socioeconomic factors prevented Black residents from establishing themselves in certain neighborhoods.

• de jure: by law. Prior to the decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Southern legislatures passed laws sanctioning segregation (separate but equal… which was ultimately never really equal by fact). Segregation, in these case was de jure, by law.

As a consequence of the housing segregation, most of the city services, (schools, welfare, buses, etc) were effectively segregated, if they were based on neighborhood lines. With the report in hand, a number of activists then decided to take the matters into their own hands. They used organizations that were already in place in the city to create their own anti-poverty initiatives and to help people in their neighborhood.

Women’s Service Club In Migrant Program For example, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Women’s Service Club developed programs to help young single Black women living in the city. Founded in 1919, the organization had opened its doors to young college women who studied in the city. Most colleges in the Boston area allowed Black students to enroll, however, they did not allow them to reside in the dormitories with the rest of the students. Through the program, young women could establish their residence at the headquarters of the association on Massachusetts Avenue, for the length of their enrollment in a higher education establishment. For ten dollars a week or less depending on their means, the young women received room and board in a dormitory arranged to fulfill their needs. The association provided them with furnished rooms, a housemother, and recreational activities.

Once Boston-area colleges opened their dormitories to Black women in the early-1960s, the organization decided to launch the In-Migrant project, which sought to help young Southern migrant women who came to the city seeking to improve their conditions. The In-Migrant program aimed to reduce the skills gap between rural and urban Southern women and their Northern counterparts. While the program targeted migrants coming from the South, it also helped Black immigrants coming from the Caribbean who lacked proper skills to take on domestic work in the United States. The In-Migrant program helped bring these women up to speed on modern appliances and Boston’s employers’ expectations. Program leaders also helped them find jobs with decent employers.

The program leaders assumed that most of the Black women who came to the city came to become domestic workers (there were few other options really for women with little education). There were ads in the newspapers that offered to pay for their trip to Boston, offered women a room once on site, and led them to believe that they could easily “make thirty-five, forty dollars

Lecture 4.1 !4

a week,” purchase their own television, and live a comfortable life. They mostly did not make good on their promises, and left the women stranded in the city.

The Women’s Service Club played a political card in training these young women properly. Once trained, they could organize to get better conditions for all domestic workers in the city, just like domestic workers had done in the South. They could finally secure a salary on which they could support their family, and not just survive. Seeing that the project had consistent results, the ABCD seized the opportunity to include it in the city’s urban Renewal efforts.

ABCD The Action for Boston Community Development was an anti-poverty and community development organization founded in 1961. In 1961, Ed Logue, the director of the BRA argued that the city needed “a social service agency or humanitarian organization for those people whose houses they’re tearing down and taking away.” Almost a decade after the Urban renewal projects begun, the city acknowledged that it needed to do something else “besides just walking in and telling them you’re taking their house.” The mayor, convinced of the importance of such agency, called together some of the city’s activists. In 1962, upon its incorporation, the ABCD received a grant from the Ford Foundation, giving the agency its first million dollars.

The composition of the Board of Directors, however, showed the city’s priorities. With one exception, the first board was an all-men group, representing corporate interests. Melnea Cass, the exception, was neither a business person or a man. She was a Black women and a community activist.

Melnea Cass Cass was born in Richmond in 1896. Her family moved to the city in 1901. She had been a civil rights activists for most of her life, beginning with voter registration in 1920, creating a cooperative child care resource at the Robert Gould Shaw House in the 1920s, and participating in a large number of organizations in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. She was the founder of the In- Migrant Program, and attempted to keep the ABCD in line with its mission.

Within a few months of the creation of the ABCD, Melnea Cass launched the the Homemaker Training Program, again at the Women’s Service Club. The program was an “offshoot of the In- Migrant” program which trained seventeen “disadvantaged” young women for a period of twelve weeks.The program, like the New England Kitchen, helped women run their homes more efficiently, taught them how to cook and sew, and how to take care of children properly. Within weeks, the Department of Labor heard of the program, and asked the Women’s Service Club leaders to pilot a similar program at the national level. The Department provided the Club with the funds to renovate their facilities, to hire instructors, and to get new appliances, both gas and electric. The program also served as a reinsertion program for poor women whose skills might not fit the current job market. It is important to note that all of these programs launched in Boston, started well before President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty.

Lecture 4.1 !5

War on Poverty During most of the 1950s and 1960s, governments (federal, state, or city) handled poverty issues by pushing the issues out of sight (for example with the urban renewal). However, in the 1960s, poverty was omnipresent and could not be handled it in the same way. In 1964, a few months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson launched his domestic programs under the Great Society. The Great Society aimed to eliminate poverty and racial injustice in the United States. The War on Poverty was the most ambitious and the most controversial of the Great Society programs, with the goal of eliminating hunger, illiteracy, and unemployment from American life.

Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 (under the supervision of the Office of Economic Opportunity) was the central piece of the War on Poverty. The OEO was to oversee community based programs:

• the Job Corps to help disadvantaged youth develop marketable skills • The Neighborhood Corps established to give poor urban youths work experience and

to encourage them to stay in school • Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) a domestic version of the Peace Corps

which placed concerned citizens with community-based agencies to work towards empowerment of the poor

• Upward Bound which assisted poor high school students entering college • Food Stamps Act of 1964 Expanded the federal food stamps program • Other Great Society programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and welfare programs

addressed specific needs of the populations.

These programs were available to all poor Americans notwithstanding their racial backgrounds.

Head Start The most successful Great Society program in Boston was Head Start, an 8 week summer crash program to help underprivileged children of age 5 and 6 to get ready for school in September. The idea was that these children did not already have access to the resources necessary for them to be successful in their early years. Around the United States, the program was offered to 100,000 children in 300 communities. In the Summer of 1965, it targeted 3,000 children in Boston.

The program gave children educational opportunities, with cognitive and affective goals (self- esteem, feeling of competency, emotional needs) in addition to “a full preventive health program for the children.” the health program included:

• a Full examination, preventive screening, and immunization shots including “diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, measles, smallpox and polio” if needed. (Massachusetts was the first state to enact mandatory school vaccination in the

Lecture 4.1 !6

1850s, to prevent transmission of smallpox. Some children in poor neighborhoods could not get their vaccination since it was too expensive for their families).

• “hearing and speech evaluations, vision testing, and the laboratory tests necessary to spot anemia, tuberculosis, and kidney disease.”

• they even fit children with “corrective devices such as eyeglasses and hearing aids, available whenever needed.”

• and Dental care.

On a side note, Head Start funded, through the Carnegie Institute, a TV program targeting children who did not have access to the Head Start program in person. Can you tell what it is? (The answer is a the end of this lecture)

Results of the investigation Through Head Start, the Massachusetts Public Health department realized that a large number of children had severe dental problems. Approximately 80% of all children in the Head Start program had cavities (don’t forget that we are talking about pre-schoolers, some of whom still had their baby teeth). More than 25% of them needed urgent attention from a dental professional (dentist, dental surgeon). On average, those who had dental issues had 6 decaying/decayed teeth. Some of the reports stated that most of the children had never been to a dentist or seen a toothbrush prior to their entry into the program (I am not sure that the toothbrush part was true. This statement could be due to the bias toward poor families). The Board of Public Health also noted that children who had poor dental health also usually had poor mental health. (Again, potentially a bias within the report).

In this light, Alan P. Danovitch, the executive secretary of the Massachusetts Citizens Committee for Dental Health, urged dentists to undertake another “complete study of dental health in Massachusetts,” the last large scale study having taken place in 1945, twenty years earlier. Dr. Kastelic who was on the Board of Health also started to push for fluoridation of the city’s water to try to help with the children’s teeth. He based his argument on the fact that Cleveland had already added fluoride to their water, and that children everywhere in the city had good teeth.

The state had mandated a referendum on fluoridation in 1958. Between 1958 and 1967, only 37 communities across the state had a referendum on the issue, and 19 enacted the law. In 1968, the state mandated all communities across the Commonwealth to add fluoride to their water within a certain time period. Boston finally added it to its water in 1978, 8 years after passing the law. The Greater Boston area did the same around the same period of time.

Most comprehensive health program in the nation. At the time where Medicaid was still in its infancy, the state of Massachusetts and the federal government disbursed approximately $55 per child for the health component of Head Start. The national average was $10 to $20. Yet, the health component posed a number of issues.

Lecture 4.1 !7

Follow up treatment was difficult. Boston City Hospital and its affiliated clinics provided care free of charge, but parents could not always follow up. Some working class parents had very little time off to bring their children to appointments. The program assigned nurses to the different cases to follow up, but this did not change anything.

Job Corps The Head Start program also provided jobs to teens and young adults age 16 to 21, who participated in the Neighborhood and Job Corps. As a way to extend the reach of the program to the community, the program recruited young adults and teens in the Job Corps in an “attempt to make up for society’s failure” toward those who had dropped out of school. The Job Corps teamed up with local industries and businesses to secure training for those in the community who did not have access to those opportunities. More than 3000 youth benefited from the program in Boston.

These young people, like the Head Start children, received medical screening, and treatment. If doctors found anything dire that required immediate attention, they sent the youth to the City Hospital for treatment. Compared to the folks who participated in the Head Start program, the young adults were in relatively good physical and mental health. The picture of their dental health, though, was the same as those of the children. The program allocated less money (approximately $30 per person) but still surpassed the national average.

Reaction of the Public Bostonians were divided about Head Start. Some feared that the Head Start program would give the poor Black or Hispanic children an unfair advantage compared to their white peers. A mother found it unfair that her “husband’s middle-income [would] pay for another child’s education when they couldn’t afford to give their own children the same opportunities.” Similarly, another woman did not like how “her” taxes were being used to train the poor whom, she claimed, would start to depend on public assistance for their daily needs. These comments show that people misunderstood how poverty and privilege work, and predate the concept of the “Welfare Queen” popularized under Reagan’s administration.

Unintended consequence One of the intended consequences came not long after the program began. Mothers, who had seen the result of the program on their own children, wondered what would happen when their children left the Head Start program and entered public school in September.

Ellen Jackson was one of these mothers. She was born in Boston 1935 but her parents were from the South. They had come to the city during the first wave of the Great Migration. As a young girl, she attended the Girls’ Latin School in Roxbury. She belonged the to Youth Council of the NAACP, but during that time, the NAACP found the teens too radical and pushed them out by threatening their charter. She graduated from Boston State College in 1958, (the college was merged with what became the

Lecture 4.1 !8

University of Massachusetts Boston in 1982). She married Hugo Jackson in 1954 and had 5 children by the age of 30. Between 1962 and 1964, she served as the parents coordinator for the Northern Student Movement which advocated for students rights. She worked at a bank in 1962 and was fired for going to see Martin Luther King Jr. speak in Boston. She was involved in voter registration and picketed the ABCD for better representation. By all means, she was already an activist. However, in 1965, she became the leading parent in another organization.

Summer of 1965 The Head Start program had provided parents with more control over the direction of their children’s education. As the end of summer neared, they became concerned with what would happened when their children entered public school. They knew the poor conditions of the schools in their neighborhoods. Classes were over crowded, with 35 to 40 students in each class. Teachers had very little resources in their classrooms (think about the torn books mentioned at the beginning of this lecture). Teachers rotated in and back out of the schools quickly. It was not uncommon for students to see 1 or 2 new teacher in a month! Some classes did not have a permanent classroom, so they met in the auditorium with other activities like the glee club, or the drama class (if there was any). Corporal punishment was widespread and accepted/acceptable in all of the city’s public schools.

Ellen rented a space in what she called Agency Row, Blue Hill Avenue in Roxbury. The parents of Head Start students met every single night of the week for the month of August brainstorming a solution to their school problem.

The fight in the city Since the early 1960s, parents had attempted to meet with the Boston School Committee to talk about school desegregation. In 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that segregated education was not equal education. As a result, the Brown v. Board of Education decision abolished segregation in all public schools in the nation. As you can imagine, things did not go as planned, and several cities in the nation refused to desegregated. Despite all of the evidence that the NAACP and other organizations had gathered throughout the years, Louise Day Hicks, the chairwoman of the Boston School Committee refused to even admit that the Boston public school system was still segregated.

Louise Day Hicks She was born in Boston 1916. Her father was the child of poor Irish immigrants who became one of the wealthiest men in South Boston. He was a successful lawyer, a real estate investor, a director in the banking industry, and later became a judge. Louise Day Hicks went to Simmons College to study economics, and earned a teaching certificate at Wheelock College. She worked as a teacher for 2 years then went on to study law at Boston College Law School (1949 enrollment but left after two years without earning her degree). She then attended Boston University Law School. She graduated in 1955 and opened a law office with her brother. She ran as a reform candidate for the school committee in 1961. To some extent, her move was political

Lecture 4.1 !9

and hypocritical. Her own children were in parochial schools (private catholic school) but her campaign slogan was “the only mother on the ballot.”

She became the chairperson of the committee in 1963. In June that year, the NAACP demanded that the School Committee publicly acknowledged the de facto segregation in the city. She refused to acknowledge the problem, explaining that “De facto segregation was defined to me by the N.A.A.C.P.,” as “the discrimination and exploitation of Negro children and granting inferior education.” She continued to explain that she did not believe that Boston schools gave Black children an inferior education. (In the 1950s and 1960s, the term Negro was used commonly by both Black and white people to describe Black people).

Logic behind her thinking Hicks refused to acknowledge that there was segregation because school assignment followed neighborhood lines. In her mind Black Bostonians “choose their own housing, no one forces them to take it.” What was the flaw in her thinking? A number of academics tried to explain to Hicks and the Committee that systemic poverty and racism caused housing segregation which in turn caused school segregation, but to no avail. Activists in the city used all of the methods that they could think of to challenge the system.

In January, a group of Black students reached out to Hicks to talk about the situation. Brenda Butler, a seventeen year-old student who attended The Jeremiah Burke High School in Roxbury, asked difficult questions. “Why can’t the colored students qualify for [Boston] Latin School and college?” “If the school curriculum is so good in Boston, why are the Negro children so far behind?” “Is it going to take another 100 years before things change?” (Butler used the “100 years” to link the end of slavery and the current situation in the city). The student then “stared tensely“ at Hicks and said, “your process is so slow, I’m just disgusted.” Despite the students’ probing, the committee stood its ground. Hicks responded that, “in time things will work out,” as if the situation would simply change on its own in the near future. “You don’t have to come demonstrating and banging on the door,” she continued, “the door is open.”

In February 1964, the NAACP threatened to sue to the Board, “if the Boston School Committee continues to stand on the issue of de facto segregation.” Attorney Robert Carter, chief counsel for the NAACP, stated that the case had been prepared since January, but that he had held it since the Boston Branch had “sought other means to settle the dispute.”

Freedom Schools In the weeks that followed, the NAACP planned a one-day boycott during which the children could attend Freedom Schools. Freedom School offered a curriculum based on academic teachings and activism. The makeshift schools were located in churches, community centers, and other locations around the neighborhood, and operated by volunteers. (Nearly 600 people volunteered to hold Freedom Schools.)

Lecture 4.1 !10

However, the idea of a boycott raised issues. Considering that the state mandated children to be in school, could the city take legal actions against those who “induce children to skip school”? Could the truant officers remove the children from the Freedom Schools during the boycott?

Edward Brooke Edward Brooke, the first African American Attorney General in the nation, chimed in. Brooke was born in Washington D.C., in 1919. He was born to a middle-class family, attended Dunbar High School (prestigious Black public school in D.C.), and enrolled at Howard University to study social studies and political science. He graduated in 1941, and enlisted in the military after Pearl Harbor. Upon his discharge, he enrolled at Boston University School of Law (graduated in 1948). In 1950, he ran for a seat at the Massachusetts House of Representatives as both Democrat and Republican in the primaries. He won the Republican nomination, but lost general election. He tried for other seats but lost his races. When John Volpe was elected governor in 1961, he recruited him as a chairman of the Finance Commission in Boston. Brooke was elected Attorney General of Massachusetts in 1962, and the first African American Attorney General in any state.

His response to the boycott was that yes, people could be arrested for skipping school. Parents could also be fined for keeping their children home ($50), and children themselves could be fined ($20) for participating in the boycott. Needless to say that Black parents were especially disappointed to hear this from the first Black Attorney General, whom they assumed would be sympathetic to their cause. However, Brooke gave them an even better tool to be win their legal challenge.

He told the parents that the state’s Commissioner of Education could order a racial census of any school, in any town of the Commonwealth. The data gathered in the census could then be used by the state and the NAACP to sue to School Committee, should it be found to have maintained segregation in the city. (I will come back to that in a second). The parents defied the governor, and still organized the boycott.

On the day of the boycott (February 29, 1964), the school committee still refused to acknowledge the problem. First, they claimed that, “there [was] no segregation in the Boston schools.” Second, they argued that, “the negro children [were] given the same opportunity to learn as white children.” Third, they stated that Black children benefitted from “a series of experimental programs,” meant to help them succeed in school. (They were considering programs akin to Head Start which had already started in the city) For this reason, “the Negro leadership [was] misguided in calling the boycott.” Finally, the committee members argued, once again, that, “protests [and] demonstrations will in no way aid the Negro’s cause.”

The School Committee claimed that the boycott was not successful, despite the fact that 20,571 of the 92,844 enrolled students were absent on that day. They also claimed that the Black parents did not have the support of the community, despite the fact that several churches, higher

Lecture 4.1 !11

education divisions, religious groups, welfare and housing activists, and medical groups had supported the boycott.

Racial Imbalance law Despite all of the opposition of the school committee, Massachusetts Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights launched the study in 1964. The result were damning, but blamed more than the School Committee. According to the report, the Boston Housing Authority shared part of the responsibility as it perpetuated patterns of segregation in housing which subsequently led to school segregation. As a consequence, Richard Banks, the executive secretary of the Governor’s Committee on Civil Rights, argued that the actions of the Housing Authority “could be construed as support of de jure rather than de facto segregation.”

The conclusions of the report rejoiced Hicks. (Remember how she made the argument that parents chose their living situation). In response to the study, Hicks stated that, while Black children attended predominantly Black schools, “this reflect[ed] the geographical area rather than any design by school authorities.” To add insult to the injury, she accused the NAACP of having “drawn a color line in Boston” as if the issues of segregation did not exist before the organization pointed out the obvious. In 1964, Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited segregation in all public location, including schools.

In 1965, The Department of Education released its report on Racial Imbalance. (Racial imbalance here simply means segregation). During its study, the Department of Education found that 45 schools were “imbalanced.” The researchers also determined that overall, white students were more likely to attend predominantly white schools or schools which enrolled fewer than five students of color. On the opposite, most Black students attended predominantly Black schools. In this sense, the committee concluded that Boston’s schools were indeed segregated.

The report recommended two ways to resolve the issue. • desegregation through open enrollment policies (parents would take their children to

a white school, on their own) • City busing through an exchange program (exchange of Black and white students) in

addition to other strategies.

However, the committee was clear that the burden should be on the city, not on the parents (i.e. the city could not force the parents to use open enrollment to desegregate Boston’s public Schools. Instead, the city had to take action by using any strategies at its disposal in order to comply with the federal desegregation order.) Obviously, the school committee was enraged. They found the recommendations to be “insulting, thoughtless, irresponsible and vicious.” They were appalled, and Hicks said that if put on a city-wide referendum, that she “shall never vote to allow such an unfair and undemocratic action to take place.” The irony of calling a city-wide referendum unfair and undemocratic was not lost on anyone but her. One historian even said that Hicks “talk[ed] about the referendum like Adolf Hitler did and just like Gov. Wallace would—by playing to fear and prejudice.” (Governor Wallace was the governor of Alabama who approved

Lecture 4.1 !12

the use of water canons and dogs on African American Civil Rights protesters. He was pro- segregation and physically stopped African Americans students from entering the University of Alabama after its desegregation in 1963).

By the summer of 1965, nothing had happened. The parents were in the same position with the same questions, and no solution. One day, one of the parents attending the meetings organized by Ellen Jackson (the Head Start mothers) received an anonymous package.

Race Survey The package contained the raw data of the race survey conducted in Boston which had yet to be released publicly. Someone from the Department of Education had put their job on the line to help the parents’ organization. As the Head Start mothers started to compile the number of available seats in classrooms city-wide, they realized that the situation was much more troublesome than they had previously thought. At the same time that classes in Roxbury and Dorchester enrolled between thirty-five and forty-five students, most of the predominantly white schools listed more than five available seats in each class. Some schools, listed as having twenty-seven seats in a class, only enrolled sixteen students. As parents compiled the census data, the number of empty seats that they discovered grew as steadily as their anger. Three seats here, four there, ten in another classroom, the numbers were appalling.

After tallying approximately thirty thousand elementary school and sixteen thousand junior and high school seats, Ellen came to a simple conclusion; overcrowding only affected the schools located in the neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, and the South End where Black Bostonians lived. The parents continued to meet day in and day out but could not come up with a solution. One day, one of the mothers had an epiphany. She said, “Let’s take the damn kids to their schools!” If the city did not want to act, they could simply use the open enrollment policy to shake things up.

Not desegregation I want to pause here for a second, and emphasize that these parents, contrary to the NAACP, were NOT interested in desegregating the schools in Boston. Instead, they were interested in gaining access to resources, which were mismatched across the city. The Head Start mothers did NOT want to see their students bused around the city for hours before going to school and before coming back home. They wanted their students to stay in their neighborhood. However, the city did not allocate resources properly, and as a result, Black schools did not receive a fair share of what the city had to offer (textbooks, desks, materials, qualified teachers, etc). The idea of taking the kids to the white schools was based on the desegregation model, however, it was the only way that the students could get access to what they needed.

Operation Exodus It only took a few days for the mothers to come up with a plan of action. They deliberately kept the details of “Operation Exodus” secret so that no information could leak to the School Committee. They reached out to parents throughout the neighborhoods, and collected names of

Lecture 4.1 !13

the students who would participate in the project. Reporters heard rumors about the operation, but everything was kept a secret to make sure that it would be a surprise. They booked buses at 3:30 am, only hours before the school day started. Otto Snowden had worked his connections with the Boston Police Department so that they were aware of the plan, and ensured everyone’s safety but still maintained secrecy. That morning, Operation Exodus bused hundreds of children to white schools. It was at this point that the corruption of the system and its desire to maintain segregation became more apparent to everyone.

Corruption Some school principals used creative ways to prevent the enrollment of Black children in their schools. For example one of them had “unbolt[ed] the seats and the desks” in the classrooms, physically lowering the number of seats available for open enrollment. Classes of twenty students could suddenly only take sixteen pupils, with all of the seats already being assigned to current enrollees. Other rooms had been designated as “storerooms” where all types of “boxes of materials and supplies,” audiovisual material, and other items were stacked as to render the room unusable for teaching. Others, although empty and with their seats properly attached to the floor, had been left vacant under the pretext of not having enough children or teachers to use them.

In addition to the manipulation of the physical environment, principals used the system itself to maintain their schools segregated. Black parents realized that a large number of elementary students (white students) of Hyde Park, West Roxbury, Roslindale, and South Boston did not attend the schools in which they were enrolled. Instead, these children attended parochial or private schools at their parents’ expense. By keeping them enrolled “on the books” in the public school system, corrupt administrators secured money and peace of mind in the process. When asked about the empty rooms, reserved for these students, the administrators always had the perfect answers. One claimed that it was “the special education room, and [that] those assignments [had not] been made.” Another answered that “the teacher hadn’t come back and they hadn’t gotten a permanent assignment for the teacher yet.”

Segregation in the new schools Teachers who were unhappy with the new situation segregated Black children within their own classrooms. They sat them at the back of the class, or humiliated them in front of their peers. Black Parents persisted. On the first day of Operation Exodus, 85 students enrolled in new schools. On the second day, more than 100 joined white classrooms. All of the parents who had committed to help and to send their kids were there when called. Operation Exodus ended up transporting nearly 1000 students each day by the end of the program in 1969.

In 1966, the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO) was founded to help continue the mission of Operation Exodus. Contrary to Operation Exodus which was 100% parent and community funded, METCO was state-funded grant program run by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. It was a voluntary program which allowed parents to make a choice. This was the idea that parents wanted, to have choices for their children.

Lecture 4.1 !14

Where does that lead us? Obviously, this is only part of the unfinished desegregation story. We will see next week how this climate led to the Busing Crisis in 1974.

The TV show that I mentioned at the beginning of this lecture was Sesame Street. (If you have a chance to find the first episode, you will see that the concept of “stranger danger” did not exist in the 1960s!)