Lindsay Verola Education 001 Common Ground Essay March 12, 2008 The desegregation of the Boston Public

Schools is a very complicated issue. Common Ground by John Anthony Lukas explores in detail how the city of Boston dealt with integration through the lives of three families living during this time. Boston was a very divided city in the middle of the 20th century; there were clear racial lines drawn through neighborhoods that segregated the school system between black and white students. The white schools received a larger share of the citys budget and better resources including buildings, books, and teachers. Even in 1994, twenty years after busing started in Boston, there was still tension concerning what had happened in the seventies to try and integrate the public schools. As the Boston School Committee continued to reject the existence of de facto segregation in the school system, the NAACP along with black parents appealed to the court system to try and integrate the schools. Judge Arthur A. Garrity decision on this case stated that there was segregation in the Boston schools; his plan to fix this problem used forced busing to alleviate the racial imbalance in the school system. Garritys integration plan was faced with opposition from a variety of sources and caused many problems around the city. The three families whose lives are discussed in Common Ground are people who were intricately connected to the busing crisis. The Divers, the McGoffs and the Twymons are all on different ends of the school situation and represent different ethnicities and viewpoints from this time.

The decision that Garrity handed down to the city of Boston was a carefully researched, exceedingly long document. Colin Diver, a Harvard educated white lawyer, appreciated Garritys decision for its sound legal argument that left no room for questions. Colin advocated racial equality and at that time had fully supported the Judge in his arguments. However it seems as though an older more experienced Colin would look back and blame the Judge for the trouble in Boston. After dealing with the police and court system while fighting the crime in the South End, Colin learned to question the way that judges handled cases; he felt that too often they would fail to think about the effects their decisions brought to ordinary people. The Judge had all but ignored the imminent disaster that his plan would create. At the end of the book, a different Colin begins to emerge; one who was able to question the appropriateness of Garritys solution for the city. Colin Diver wasnt the only person who didnt agree with the Judges decision to use forced busing to integrate the schools. There were many people who blamed the Judge for the crisis that emerged in 1974. Among these people were Louise Day Hicks, the chairwoman of the Boston School Committee, Kevin White, the mayor of Boston, and Lisa McGoff, an Irish student at Charlestown Senior High School. Hicks felt that the Boston Public Schools were not segregated and therefore had no responsibility to the black parents demanding change. When the judge released his decision she was very strong in her opposition to his demands. The Boston School Committee refused to cooperate or help with the effects of his decision. Hicks would continue to say that the School Committee had always been against busing and that the judge was solely responsible for the effects of busing on the city Boston. From the very beginning, Hicks

felt that busing was undemocratic and un-American and spent her years on the School Committee working to prevent this and other forms of balancing. Kevin White and Hicks had often stood on opposite ends of busing, with Hicks part of the anti-busing movement and White trying desperately to make it work, just so he could hold the city together. He was given the task of supporting a law that had upset a great many people including the President of the United States. White had an interesting situation in that he was forced as the Mayor to support busing although he didnt agree with it himself. He spent time traveling the city convincing parents and community members that it wasnt worth the childrens safety to fight the city when the busing started in September. When White approached Judge Garrity for help, the Judge refused to deal with him outside of court, and even in court the two authorities were clearly at war with each other. White was outraged that Garrity wouldnt help him enforce the law that was threatening to tear apart the city. White resented the fact that everyone had deserted him during this time, leaving him to deal with the mess that the Judges order created. White would probably look back at this time and question why Garrity did not give him the support he needed in order to make a difference during those critical months in Boston. Lisa McGoff was ready to start her junior year in high school when Garritys decision changed the end of her school experience completely. She felt that as a townie, she had a right to an uninterrupted education at the Charlestown High she had always attended. Lisa blamed all of the adults who stood against her dream of her last two years in the high school she had envisioned. These adults included Judge Garrity and all those she knew who had abandoned the townies by supporting the busing that had invaded their

school. To the youths of Charlestown, Garrity was the man trying to destroy their school. Lisa went to class on that first day to show Garrity and the police that they couldnt keep her from her school. However when she got there, she realized that she had already lost the school that she knew. Her year at Charlestown was to be filled with sit-ins, boycotts and fights because of the judges decision to use forced busing. Lisa McGoff might be the one to have changed the most since high school. Because she was so young when this happened, she couldnt have realized that her school might have been fine with the new black students if the adults in the community had accepted the black students. Then maybe her classmates might have been more welcoming and integration could have been achieved more peacefully. While it seems as if Lisas problems began with Garritys decision, the way that her town reacted to the situation only made everything much worse. Rachel Twymons experience with Charlestown was very different. When she went to the open house for the new black parents she found a broken down building and an unwelcoming town. Rachel knew that by putting her children on the bus to school she would be subjecting them daily to a community filled with people who didnt want them to be there. All Rachel wanted to provide to her children was a decent education. She had worked hard to keep them out of the schools that she felt werent educating her children properly. The people who lived in Charlestown made it impossible for her to guarantee that her children would be educated that year. Rachels children would have had a chance at an integrated education if the whites in Charlestown accepted them to their community. To Rachel these were the people who created the mess for her children. They created a terrible situation in which she couldnt trust her faith that integration was good for the

schools. And Rachel Twymon was the kind of person who did want integration to succeed. She wanted the school in Charlestown to work for her children because the public system they had endured until them wasnt working for the black population in Boston. Rachel believed that her children could get better instruction at an integrated school. Blacks generally couldnt afford housing outside of the black neighborhoods, leading to a prevalence of black schools that didnt receive enough money from the city in order to provide for the students. These schools had fewer teachers, more students, and fewer resources than the predominantly white schools. Rachel Tywmon felt that integration was the best way for her children to get their share of the citys resources. She wanted more black teachers in the schools, black studies courses, and equal facilities. Rachel also felt a connection to the mixed community of her youth when she had been able to live in a racially equal world. She knew that her children would have to learn how to live with whites so she wanted them to have these experiences so that they would be comfortable interacting in a white world. The Divers also believed that living in a racially mixed community was a more fulfilling living experience. Colin Diver struggled to create that kind of atmosphere around them in the South End. They were trying to create an ethnically and racially diverse neighborhood in which they could safely raise their children. This was their plan to solve the segregation problems in Boston. They knew that unless people tried to create an integrated society there would always be segregation. When the Divers moved to the South End they were looking for a house that would truly allow them to experience life in the middle of the city. When they needed to send their oldest child to school, they looked

for a school in which he could interact with different students in an open environment. The Bancroft school shows the Divers commitment to the problems in Boston. By sending their child to a racially mixed school they were attempting to integrate the city themselves. Their school was praised for its exceptional achievement of quality desegregated education. Colin Diver had tried throughout his life to help the black community in Boston reach an equal footing with whites. To Colin, the problem was very clear; something needed to be done to reach a state of equality. The Mayor wasnt as precise about his definition of the problems present in the school system in Boston. A politician at heart, Kevin White often cared more about how his decisions made him look than how they actually affected the people he was responsible for. He also hesitated to do anything related to the schools because he did not want to be responsible for the school committees actions. He did realize that something was wrong with the school system and that some action needed to be taken in order to peacefully follow the Judges orders. If White could have, he would have pawned this entire issue on to some other authority figure to avoid accumulating the blame when things went wrong. White stated that although desegregation in Boston was a noble objective he was opposed to busing as a way of achieving this and didnt come up with any other method of desegregating the schools. Looking back on the situation White was in, it seems as if he should have been more active in working towards a solution that he thought was viable. Instead, he didnt touch the issue until it was forced onto him by the busing order. If he had been able to think of a more practical idea to desegregate, a lot of trouble might have been avoided. He might have been able to control the city instead of reaping the effects of a plan that no one supported.

On the other hand, Louise Day Hicks wasnt at all interested in attempting any idea to desegregate the school system because she never believed that anything need to be solved. According to Hicks, there was no de facto segregation in the Boston Public Schools. Therefore, there was no need for anyone to try and change the demographics of each school in Boston. Hicks explained that the complaints about the racial imbalance in the schools were not the responsibility of the School Committee. She stated that it wasnt her job to find the black population of Boston housing in non-black neighborhoods. She said that this was a problem for the entire community. She also said that the Boston Schools should not be a scapegoat for those who have failed to solve black problems related to housing, economic status and social standing. The complaints towards the school district should have instead been directed towards those who could solve these problems. According to Hicks, the school system had no issue with the black community because these factors were beyond its reach. In no way did Hicks ever consider that she should listen to the needs of the black parents who were constantly banging down her door looking for changes to be made in the school system. The only time during the busing that she sought to actually work towards peace was when the Mayor pleaded to her for help, which she gave in exchange for a plethora of jobs for her friends and family. Hicks never felt any real connection with the plight of the blacks towards equal education and strove for years to stop and delay positive change. When busing in Boston first started, Lisa McGoff also felt that there was nothing wrong with the way things were in the school system. Lisa and her mother Alice both took active parts in the anti-busing movement. She saw no reason to shake up her school in order to send some blacks to Charlestown High. She was proud to be a townie in

Charlestown, she didnt see a problem with continuing to go to school the way she had been all of her life. By the beginning of her senior year, Lisa had realized that it wasnt necessary to act differently in school just because there were black students there. She realized that neither the black students nor the white students had received a good education the previous year and that this year she wanted to have a traditional senior year at Charlestown High. She began to veer away from her mothers opinions towards busing in Boston and started school with the intention of having a more normal school year than the previous year. Although Lisa probably never felt entirely comfortable with the black students in her high school or realized the necessity of integration in Boston, she was working towards creating a working community in her high school that included the black students. Lisa might never have realized the problems that the Boston schools faced while she was in high school, however it seems that at the end of the book she was becoming more open minded about blacks in Boston. Looking back now, she probably would feel that the school system did need to change in 1974 and that they were working towards a better situation for the black communities. The busing crisis in Boston was a time when many different feelings came to the surface for these people. In reading this book, it seems that everyone was opposed to busing at some point, no one fully believed that this was truly the best idea for the city. But with no easy choices, and a deeply divided city the people who lived during this time should be credited because they at least tried to make strides towards achieving racial equality. Even though it seems that for most of the book the attempts made to force integration into peoples lives failed completely, there are moments when ideas change and people change. And there were people in this huge story who have shown that they

could see the end result from the beginning; and that on their way there they were shoving as many people along with them as possible. This issue clearly touched many lives very deeply; there were few adults who escaped thinking about busing and its effects on their families. Although it seems that this plan to desegregate didnt work as planned, at the very least it made blacks and whites interact in a way they hadnt been able to previously. It changed the nature of the discussion in Boston and opened the way for blacks to succeed in places they hadnt been able to before. Because of its far reaching effects on the population of Boston, this desegregation plan made people look deeply into what they believed and how they were going to let race affect they way they lived their lives.

Epilogue There are many different issues facing public schools. Although I agree that desegregation is still one of these issues, I dont think that it should be a concern in society. Many school systems have been desegregated since the Brown decision however not all of these schools have been integrated peacefully. More than fifty years later there are many schools that are still segregated or that are moving back towards segregation. There is no single method that is recognized as a good way to integrate a school system. However, there are many methods that have been developed to give students a quality education. Today in many places we still have public schools that are incapable of teaching children the necessary tools to succeed in the world. I think that at this point it is more important to shift the focus from the desegregation issue to issues concerning

providing good education. This is especially true in schools that have been deemed failing by the school system. Schools that have succeeded in creating strong academic programs should be modeled in order to improve the quality of the education in all public schools across the country. If more schools are capable of sending students to colleges, there will be more people who can succeed in life and eventually send their children to a better school system. Segregation is also not the only way to bring diversity to education. Diversity can also be achieved by having more after school activities that will bring students in from multiple districts and encourage them to meet other students who are different. The priority for schools today should be to raise the academic standard in the classrooms as much as possible, to the point that all public schools in the country are on a equal footing, regardless of class or race. Although this is a much slower approach than forced busing, this provides a much more permanent solution that will eventually even out the racial balance of the public schools. Schools should now focus on giving every student in the classroom good academic skills to succeed regardless of who they are sitting next to while they are learning.