Related Papers
Fighting for Civil Rights: School Desegregation in Boston (1965-74), "Rivista di Storia dell'Educazione", n. 1, 2019, pp. 55-68
2019 •
Francesco Landolfi
The article aims to reconstruct the public dissent by part of Boston citizenship about an event which has shocked the Massachusetts’ public eye for a decade. It is a paradox that the center of US education generated a brutal opposition by its population, sometimes resulting in lynching attempts towards the African-American minority. Between 1960s and 1970s, Boston was shocked by a period of urban protests concerning the change of public school system. The core of Irish-American citizenship, led by the president of Boston School Committee, Louise Day Hicks, opposed to the Racial Imbalance Act in 1965. This law supported the improvement of the Boston school body’s racial balancing within public schools. In 1972, the court case Morgan v. Hennigan created a gap in the Boston public school system, which kept supporting segregation. The status quo of this clear segregation between white and non-white students lasted until 1974, when the US federal judge Arthur W. Garrity claimed the Boston public schools as segregationist, forcing the moving (by three years) of 20,000 non-white students within ‘white’ public schools. This coercive approach proved to be a failure during the socalled Boston Busing Crisis (1974-88) and led to several clashes between the law enforcement and the inhabitants of South Boston neighborhood. The lack of closeness between federal authorities and Boston citizenship led to an ethnic struggle, which produced a big decrease of the attendance in public schools.
Register of the Kentucky Historical Society
A review of "From Brown to Meredith: The Long Struggle for School Desegregation in Louisville, Kentucky, 1954–2007" by Tracy E. K’Meyer
2014 •
Brian J Daugherity
Before Busing: Boston's Long Movement for Civil Rights and the Legacy of Jim Crow in the " Cradle of Liberty "
Zebulon V Miletsky
Boston's long Civil Rights Movement in the twentieth century, before the infamous busing crisis, has not received nearly as much attention as the school desegregation period that was ushered in by Federal court order in 1974. While the story of Boston's busing crisis is well known, my goal is to place that moment within the context of a longer freedom struggle in Boston and highlight the city's history of racial inequality and segregation. By looking at both the nineteenth-century origins of legal discrimination in Boston and the activism during the four decades before the 1970s, I reconstruct these humble but effective efforts in which activists focused mainly on issues of employment, housing, educational equality, and quality of life. The goal of this essay, then, is to contextualize the busing conversation and reconstruct the political context in which black Bostonians embarked on various campaigns to reclaim the legacy of freedom and equality established earlier, in the nineteenth century. In that sense, I argue that Boston was not simply a " southern space " ensconced in the North, but rather was the original template for segregation in the nation, as cited in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). 1 The issues engaged by Boston's freedom movement, from de facto school segregation to employment discrimination, challenge many prevailing popular assumptions about postwar black freedom struggles in other cities. This article aims to investigate the origins of that movement and what gave rise to the unique nature of civil rights organizing activities in Boston before Busing.
The Journal of African American History
Oakwood College Students' Quest for Social Justice before and during the Civil Rights Era
2003 •
Holly Fisher-Hickman
Afro-Americans in New York life and history
Leading from Behind the Gap: Post-Racial Politics and the Pedagogy of Black Studies
Seneca Vaught
Harvard Educational Review
From Forced Tolerance to Forced Busing: Wartime Intercultural Education and the Rise of Black Educational Activism In Boston
2010 •
Zoë Burkholder
Teaching packet for "Hands-On-History of Local Black Changemakers." Conference session at “A Community of Changemakers: Exploring the History of Black Activism in Essex County” Essex Heritage, Salem State University, Salem, Mass.
2023 •
Edward L. Bell
In this session we will first examine easily discoverable printed and manuscript local history sources about Nancy Parker (fl. 1752–1825), an Andover woman of Native and African ancestry. We’ll consider transmission of nuggets of biographical information from oral to written forms, and how subsequent history writers drew from previous sources and transformed meanings when they created their historical narratives. Reading original and secondary source texts, we will look for common stereotyping and representative tropes about people of color in this region (e.g., “the last Indian”). We’ll be attentive to explicit and implicative meanings invoked by racialized terms and stereotypical ideas that reflect then-current precepts. Lastly, we’ll examine legal documents, and their technical features will be pointed out. The documents relate to Nancy Parker’s 1771 “freedom suit”—a civil action for liberty from enslavement that she with her attorney brought in the Essex County Court of Common Pleas. Between 1769 and 1779, at least nine successful freedom suits were brought by enslaved Andover people of color of Native, African, and Caribbean ancestry and heritage. Freedom suits were among several modes of resistive, rebellious, and emancipative actions long-used by enslaved people. The earliest lawsuits for liberty in Essex County were brought by Native people and their allies in the 1660s.
The Black Revolution on Campus by Martha Biondi
Toussaint Losier
“Be Your Own Man”: Student Activism and the Birth of Black Studies at Amherst College, 1965–1972
Kabria Baumgartner
Historians have examined how social movements influenced African American student activism in mid-to-late twentieth century America. This essay extends the scholarship by telling the story of African American male student activists who led the fight for curricular reform at Amherst College, then an all-male liberal arts college in Massachusetts. This local story reveals that African American student activism was driven by social movements as well as the distinctive mission of the liberal arts college.
NACLA Report on the Americas
A Hemispheric Approach to Contemporary Black Activism
2017 •
Geísa Mattos
