‘The Busing Battleground’- documentary about the battle against integrating school buses in Boston, 1974

And the eponymous book about it...

1975 CBS 60 Minutes with Mike Wallace: "SOUTHIE"- Boston, or "Southie," is an residential neighborhood with a strong Irish-American heritage. Roxbury and Dorchester residents didn't like this bussing arrangement any more than Southie did. People wanted to go to school in their own neighborhoods.

I like to think the rise in biraciality across the country is to thank for busing. I still cringe at the way we were used to placate furious parents. I was only in the second or third grade. When the black kids came in, the white kids all started pawing these poor black kids skin and hair. No guidance whatsoever from the teacher or principal. To the black kids credit, they dealt with it graciously in my class, but fights soon broke out elsewhere and immediately “A fight! A fight! A nigger and a white!” became a commonplace rhyme during recess.

I bet there are a lot of people on DL who wish schools were never integrated.

I grew up on the South Shore of Massachusetts, and was in grade school when this was going on. My suburb/school weren't affected, meaning they weren't integrated. But I still remember so vividly that this was the dinner table conversation every night during this time. My parents were Democrats and pro-busing. My father's office was on D street in South Boston, so really ground zero. He'd come home every night with stories. And the local news every night was all about this. I still remember the names of the players: Pixie Palladino. Louise Day Hicks.

A few years ago I met a woman my age who grew up in Southie. She was an RN, and one of several children of a single mother in the JD Street projects. When forced busing was enacted, her mother went to Whitey Bulger and asked him for money to send her kids to parochial school, and he said yes to her and many other families who requested the same thing.

I think at the end of the day I just feel sad. I thought that we were making progress, and we'd see racism in the rear view mirror by the time I was an adult. Instead, it remains a huge scourge in our country.

I was in an (almost) exclusively white suburban high school at the time. I was already being bullied - decades later, a much younger man I was crushing on asked if I was being bullied because I was “handsome” - so the thought I’d be going to school in a high-crime urban area terrified the hell out of me.

Tonight at 9pm

R5, thank you for sharing your story.

I’m really anxious to watch this episode. Busing is such a complicated issue.

It boggles my mind that Brown v. the Board Of Education was the early 1950s and that it took so long for any real action to be taken.

I agree (sadly) with R4 — and to think that nearly 70 years after Brown many districts still remain segregated.

R8 many schools here in NYC, especially in Manhattan and Brooklyn, are pretty segregated.

I remember about a decade ago they put something in plan to integrate two of the schools by me here in Brooklyn. The schools are only blocks away from one another but one was mostly black followed by Hispanic with very few others and the other school was almost all white followed by Asian with few others. Well the city wanted to integrate the two schools and the white parents were not happy about it. I remember Facebook posts about it from local groups and parents were pissed. Someone called them out, about how “white liberals” always want diversity etc. until they actually have to have diversity etc. it’s all a show to them.

R5, Elvira 'Pixie' Palladino succumbed to diabetes back in 2006. RIP Pixie!!

Back in the mid-70s while enrolled in high school myself, I came up with a plan to score cool free logo t-shirts/sweatshirts etc from various radio stations and high schools around the country.

It worked like this, I'd go downtown to the Main Public Library (in my hometown of Indianapolis) and I'd ask to see the phone books for different US cities. I'd get the addresses of certain radio stations and high schools. Then I'd write them and ask for free merchandise. I'd tell the radio stations I used to live in that particular city and was a devoted listener but now lived elsewhere and would love to have any items they had with the station's logo on them. I'd get bumper stickers etc but often a tee-shirt. I'd always offer to pay for it but most of these stations just sent me the stuff free of charge.

When I contacted high schools I worded my pitch a little differently. I claimed to be the parent of a student of their school who unfortunately had to unenroll there since our family moved out of the area. Then I'd ask for items with the school's logo on it for my kid to wear proudly in their new home.

I remember contacting South Boston High School during this time 'cause with the busing thing it was in the national news a lot. They sent me a maroon sweatshirt with South Boston High School on the front of it. I liked it a wore it quite a bit. However, the best freebie I got from a school while doing this was NYC"s Brooklyn Technical HS. They sent me a cool sateen disco attire thin varsity jacket with Brooklyn Tech written out on the back of it.

My sister went to Brooklyn Tech.

It’s starting now. I love these docs.

R9 — there’s a really great podcast that I believe is based on the school(s) you posted about.

Will never forget those photos of the ratchet white men ramming the American flag into the stomach of the black man. Awful human beings.

Remember what Joe Biden said about it? Jungle something something something......

I didn’t know Whitey Bulger was even involved, planning to kill black students coming in on the buses.

Boston is a shithole city.

Boston is not a shithole.

Absolutely insane that by the year 1985 over 70% of Boston public schools were POC because that many white kids dropped out or were put in private schools just not to integrate. Insane.

In 1985 a judge gave the public school committee full control back. They ended busing in 1999.

I was in Louisville at around the same time, another place with court-ordered desegregation. However, I wanted to get bused to Central High in downtown Louisville. I loved the black students with picks in their huge Afros. Everyone smoking in the central courtyard. I developed a love for black dick there!

PS: Met Muhammad Ali there one time giving away copies of the Koran outside school one time (a la Gideons).

R21 great fictional story. Your location and story and age changes every few days it seems.

Busing was pretty much a disaster.

That little girl was me.

Busing in Berkeley was the diometric opposite of Boston. The implied snide in your post adds nothing to the conversation.

r25 we're talking about Boston

R26

R24 posted about Berkeley —don’t be a numnut.

Yes r25, busing did work in a lot of cities and busing is still operating in some cities and suburbs. However, white Bostonians were not having it and made those black peoples lives hell.

The worst part is the white teens would jump the black teens and when the black teenager would even attempt to defend himself he was the one suspended and not the white teens.

Boston = Birmingham of the North.

Dennis Lehane’s latest novel is set in Southie in this period and it’s terrific.

No shit R26. I read Common Ground when it was published. I have family in West Roxbury and Roslindale…and Hyde Park.

I was replying to an attempted crack at the VP and her experience growing up in Boston.

I don’t need your Cliff Notes version, thanks.

^for R28

*berkeley not boston…but you knew that

Here's the entire documentary-

That stuff is triggering, I won’t lie…

There was a far left liberal columnist called Nicholas Von Hoffman who was the original left wing seat on 60 Minute's Point/Counterpoint segment.

Naturally he was 110% pro bussing. Soon it was discovered he had removed his own kids from Boston public schools and placed in private schools. His response was refreshingly straight forward.

𝑊ℎ𝑦 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑚𝑦 𝑘𝑖𝑑𝑠 𝑝𝑎𝑦 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑚𝑦 𝑝𝑜𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙 𝑏𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑓𝑠?

At some point soon following this statement he was let go from 60 Minutes and replaced by a woman who inspired television history.

Busing was one of those progressive ideas that had unintended catastrophic results. Whites fled the cities en masse.

R36 to be fair I don’t think he took them out of public school because they would have to school with black kids as much as so they don’t have to go through all the chaos that was happening in those schools at the time. Had things gone smooth I think he would have kept them there but because everything became chaotic and very violent he took them out.

No shit it's triggering, that's why we try and keep the opening of this particular can contained to February, otherwise we'd get nothing done.

R37 no, they didn’t. They just took their kids out of public schools or allowed them to drop out. They stayed living in their areas. It wasn’t just city kids being bussed, it was suburban kids too. It happened all over Boston, not just the inner city.

[quote] There was a far left liberal columnist called Nicholas Von Hoffman

Hi Defatso.

[quote]𝑊ℎ𝑦 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑚𝑦 𝑘𝑖𝑑𝑠 𝑝𝑎𝑦 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑚𝑦 𝑝𝑜𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙 𝑏𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑓𝑠?

Where is that quote from? I just looked it up and can’t find it.

R22, not all heroes wear capes.

R41 good question. Let’s see if he can provide a link.

The judges around the country ruling in favor of mandating busing at that time, lived in elite areas and none of their offspring/family members ever had to experience the effects of busing themselves.

In this documentary, the judge that approved the busing mandate for Boston, W. Arthur Garrity Jr., lived in the upscale suburb of Wellesley. Same thing happened in my hometown of Indianapolis. The judge that ruled in favor of mandated busing , Samuel Hugh Dillin, had no skin in game, so to speak, either.

What makes you think he was circumcised, r44???

R44 upper middle class and wealthy people never experience what we do or did, ever. That’s history. Still happens.

Most of their kids were in private schools to begin with though.

Small towns (at least back in the 70s) were so different than the cities: we just all went to school together from first grade to 12th and worked it out as best we could since there was then only one elementary, one junior high and one high school.

What a travesty.

This was a phenomenal documentary. I enjoyed watching it very much as it was very honest and well done. No trying to rewrite shit like some do, telling it like it was, not even censoring the N word. I appreciated that in a way.

It reminded me of the docs The History Channel used to do back in the 90s. They were so good back then. Todays aren’t nearly as good and ignore a lot of facts when discussing certain topics

There’s a huge difference between desegregation and integration. As a kid, it was an early lesson for me how the media and others would falsely and deliberately try to make two different things seem synonymous for political purposes.

Boston segregation was TRUE segregation. It wasn’t white people together and black people in others, it was based on ethnicity. You had a town where Italians lived, a town where the Irish lived (Irish were all over Boston though), a town for Asians, a town for the Hispanics, a town for the blacks, the WASPs were usually in the upper class suburban areas… the Irish didn’t live in the Italian areas, that’s how segregated it was.

R50 I’m SURE you thought of those things as a kid 🤡

You only thought of that because an adult told you that.

R52, I’m glad you admit you were as much a moron as a kid as you are now.

According to Wikipedia:

[quote]Busing met considerable opposition from both white and black people. The policy resulted in the movement of large numbers of white families to suburbs of large cities, a phenomenon known as white flight, which further reduced the effectiveness of the policy. Many whites who stayed moved their children into private or parochial schools; these effects combined to make many urban school districts predominantly non-white, reducing any effectiveness mandatory busing may have had.

R54 your point?

A Boston Priest explaining how Boston operated back then. You had your area and you didn’t cross through others. That was Boston.

R53 no young child is having those deep thought provoking monologues about the media and race in America.

R57, you are using a straw man to recharacterize the original statement, but I agree that the slow students like you had no “deep thought” moments on any subject.

Boston is so gentrified today, the South End is lots of upper middle class whites now.

R58 no sweetie. No child is thinking about race unless it’s been planted in them by an adult.

R59 it’s a college state now. A lot of popular colleges there now that attract people from all over.

The natives are getting pushed out. It’s happening in every city now. Homelessness is out of control everywhere now.

R60, integration and busing were major news stories. So you were in the slow class in school and also unaware of current events?

many schools here in NYC, especially in Manhattan and Brooklyn, are pretty segregated.

Not in Manhattan they aren’t, unless you’re talking about the magnet HS like Stuyvesant and Math and Science.

They send kids in Manhattan way out of their districts in order to integrate schools. We were UES 20 years ago and the schools were very much set up to be integrated. My son’s school was about 1/3 white, 1/3 Asian and 1/3 black. The Asian kids all lived downtown in Chinatown. My son was originally assigned to a school in midtown that was near 59th St Bridge and I said no way, you’re not sending him to school near a possible terrorist target.

I knew a woman who couldn’t find her son on 9/11. She had a baby, a toddler and a kindergartener. She had to grab the baby, then she threw the toddler in a stroller and took off looking for her son. She lived in Battery Park City. The school was right across the highway and it took hours to find her son. If my son was in midtown, it would take me at least an hour to get there on foot, and who’s to say police wouldn’t stop me from going down there if there was an attack?

Btw, the reason why communication was so fucked up WAS 100% DUE TO RUDY GIULIANI.

First he put THE FUCKING OFFICE OF EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT IN THE WTC, A KNOWN TERRORIST TARGET, though he was told not to do it by NYPD, FDNY, Con Edison, the FBI and the Secret Service.

They all told him to put it in Brooklyn on a different power grid than Manhattan and in an area that didn’t flood. The entire emergency was to have been overseen from the command post in WTC 7. All the equipment, all the communications, all the people who were to report to WTC — all were useless. Officials didn’t know what the fuck they were doing and it was well reported that day in NYC that it was Giuliani’s fault. It wasn’t until 9/12 that he was canonized St Rudy by the White House and the media.

Then Giuliani replaced the outdated FDNY radios with UNTESTED radios that were bought with a NO BID CONTRACT from Motorola. The radios were distributed and a firefighter called Mayday at a fire and nobody heard him. That’s when FDNY contacted Giuliani’s office and said “These radios suck.” So Giuliani gave them back their old radios with no plan to replace them.

I can’t describe to you what it sounded like on 9/11 because fire trucks were racing into the city and it didn’t stop. For hours all you heard were sirens as fire trucks and cop cars headed over the bridges and into the tunnels. They were allowed to come into the city when bridges and tunnels were shut down to public. I thought I would go crazy from the sound of sirens. Every fucking fire department from Virginia to Maine I swear was pouring into Manhattan.

Funny thing is my son was completely oblivious. We had tall windows with deep windowsills and he was playing with his mini trains on the windowsill as cop cars and fire trucks were flying down 2nd Ave. He didn’t even look at look at them.

R62 no. Most kids weren’t sitting around watching news and even if we were I doubt our minds were thinking about how the media was trying to manipulate us and forcing integration. Teens? Yes, possibly. Children? No.

R63 you sure about that? NYC has kept kids and teens in their school districts for over 30 years. In NYC you are automatically assigned by the area code you live in.

R63 NYC has assigned schools by “district” aka zip code since at least the 80s. And that’s how it’s still done to this day with the NYC Public School System.

NYC wasn’t a “busing” city. NYC always had too many people for that. NYC always was a district/zone assigned city. Your zip code gets your child automatically placed in their districts public school. If that school is too crowded they are put on a waiting list and the Department of Education will then put that child in the closest neighboring school. NYC’s 5 boroughs have operated like this for many decades.

R64, I believe you when you say you weren’t capable of thinking about such things at your level, I really do, but you have made a little progress since then, right?

Not anymore, R65. Not by a long shot. There were no Chinese families in our neighborhood except for the ones who owned Chinese restaurants. There was literally a school two blocks away from sun and they wouldn’t send my son there. They sent him 20 blocks away (they originally wanted him to go 40 blocks away). There was also PS 6, a supposedly public school that accepted very few children of “the public” but instead accepted children from wealthy, powerful families. It was a public school but operated like a private school. They made sure some black and Spanish kids got accepted there, but they had no Asian requirement to fulfill, for some reason.

There were schools that required testing for entry. The Lab School, Hunter College kindergarten. My neighbors kids got into Hunter because they were biracial. Looked and sounded like Italian American white kids but mom was biracial and made sure she accompanied the kids to the interview to make sure they knew the kids were to be considered African American males.

Then they sent my kid to a different middle school from his elementary school. Which is bizarre because his elementary school went up to 8th grade. So he could’ve stayed in the same school, but TPTB wouldn’t allow it.

His middle school, btw, was run by Asian girls. On parent teacher day, on any day, you were directed on where to go and what to do by Asian girls aged 10-13. And you obeyed them, or else you’d swarmed by then and get a dressing down. I would not mess with those girls.

R68 the issue is you’re lying and instead of letting it go you continue to lie. On another thread you claim you were born in 2005. Now you were a young child in the 70s that was so advanced you were sitting around thinking about media manipulation and racial politics in this country. You lie so much you can’t keep up with them.

You also probably didn’t notice that the comment at r63 was made by you.

R69 let it go. You’re lying. I gave official sources from NYC Government websites backing up my FACTS. Let the lying go. NYC was never a busing city. It was always a district based system and still is to this day. The sites I linked are official sites. Up and running right now.

R49, Are you brain dead and possess no critical thinking skills? The documentary was biased as you'd expect it to be coming from PBS. Basically it was Blacks=good and whites=bad in this tale. No gray showing that there were good and bad on each side.

No real look at the experiences of whites that did get bused to Roxbury High School and in fact went there. Somebody on-line claiming to have been one of them posted about often getting beat up there for being white. (Crickets!!)

If you enroll your kids in private schools or special schools like Brooklyn Tech etc. those are not regular public schools. Those are not city assigned schools. Your kid has to be accepted and kids from all over the city travel to go to those type of schools. But if your kid is going to a regular public school then they are assigned by zone.

R72 you clearly didn’t watch because it very much did interview white people who were forced to go to schools in black areas and have them share their experiences. The difference is while they were usually bullied etc. it wasn’t the level of what was happening to black kids. You wanna be a victim so bad.

R70, so you were slow-witted as a child and you’re also dishonest, making up stuff as you go along. It’s Sunday, do you trolls ever take a day off?

When forced racial school busing was imposed on Los Angeles schools in the late 1970s, the LA school district's most valuable asset, its huge number of smart Jewish students, suddenly vanished.

R75 you just don’t stop lying. It’s so fucking crazy. It doesn’t make a difference. This account will be red tagged soon anyway like your accounts keep getting 🍵

R77, it’s a given that trolls like you don’t even care about what you write, but you do it anyway.

The wheels fell off this..thread. Please clise.

R78 I’m not a troll. I’m just sick of your trolling and lying on a forum for grown men. We are adults. The kid shit needs to be taken back to Reddit, where you have many accounts.

R80, you’ve proven you are a troll and a lying one, perhaps mentally ill as well.

The white students disappeared in LA schools once busing happened.

R82 no they didn’t. And LA was never majority white.

r83 they did.

R83 they didn’t disappear (many were still in the schools) but many were put in private schools or their families moved to the suburbs outside of LA. Unlike Boston, where some of the suburban kids were being bussed to the inner city schools and the inner city kids bussed to the suburbs, LA was not forcing the suburban public schools to do that. Only if you lived within the LA, not in an outside suburb (or rich area, of course). It was the middle class and poor areas that had to.

There were protests from middle class white families but it was nothing like Boston, which is what I assume you mean by objecting. There was no jumping black students, bomb threats, chanting the N word or writing the N word on the steps of the school or kids lockers, there was no throwing bricks and rocks at the buses and black kids, and there was no setting cars on fire or flipping them. The Los Angeleos handled it in a much different manner than Bostonians.

But yes, many of them left the public school system but many stayed in LA.

Sounds fucking interesting

“ Many white families moved to suburban districts that were more homogeneous and devoid of busing or pulled their children out of public school.”

The suburban districts of LA didnt really do the busing thing, so a lot of white families moved to the suburbs. Many of those who stayed in the city just took them out of public schools and placed them in private schools.

[quote] they didn’t disappear (many were still in the schools) but many were put in private schools or their families moved to the suburbs outside of LA.

Yes, that's what I meant. They disappeared from the public schools.