Enduring Busing: Legacies of Crisis in Late 20th-Century Boston

In February 1975, Ruth Batson, a leader in the movement for desegregated quality education in Boston, came to the city’s federal courthouse hoping that Judge Arthur Garrity would find the city’s mayor, school committee, and state board of education in contempt for resisting the judge’s desegregation plan. Batson arrived hopeful that the court would be a friendly refuge. Instead, the courthouse felt like the home turf of the white anti-busing crowd. Batson described her fear in being outnumbered by, “a festive group without festivity,” sure of themselves in “camaraderie [with] the court officers” and reporters from the local television news. The moment shook Batson, questioning her faith in the power of federal law. “The turf I once valued really began to slip from under my feet.” Batson’s experience stands out for the clarity of her bewilderment, but she was far from alone. In the book project from which this paper derives, I uncover histories made by diverse, often fragmented, communities of parents, organizers, writers, artists, and militant school bus drivers, among others. Over the years, Bostonians have developed increasingly irreconcilable understandings of the history and legacies of “busing” in Boston. Some city boosters, for instance, have described the mid-1970s as a temporary crisis the city left behind during the “Boston Renaissance” of the 1980s and 1990s. This paper points to alternative understandings of the Boston urban crisis, telling the story of Batson’s persistent support of parents and schoolchildren forced to “endure busing,” and her efforts to forge new bases of community resilience and well-being. The paper ends by reflecting on how this history of evolving tensions between the push for private sector power and a vibrant, democratic public sphere can help us rethink the historical timelines and legacies of 20th-century urban crises.