Boston busing desegregation

Boston busing desegregation
Part of the Civil Rights Movement
Date	1974–1988
Location	Boston, Massachusetts
Causes	Desegregation busing

The desegregation of Boston public schools (1974–1988) was a period in which the Boston Public Schools were under court control to desegregate through a system of busing students. The call for desegregation and the first years of its implementation led to a series of racial protests and riots that brought national attention, particularly from 1974 to 1976. In response to the Massachusetts legislature's enactment of the 1965 Racial Imbalance Act, which ordered the state's public schools to desegregate, W. Arthur Garrity Jr. of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts laid out a plan for compulsory busing of students between predominantly white and black areas of the city. The hard control of the desegregation plan lasted for over a decade. It influenced Boston politics and contributed to demographic shifts of Boston's school-age population, leading to a decline of public-school enrollment and white flight to the suburbs. Full control of the desegregation plan was transferred to the Boston School Committee in 1988; in 2013 the busing system was replaced by one with dramatically reduced busing.

The Racial Imbalance Act of 1965 (1965 Chap. 0641. An Act Providing For The Elimination Of Racial Imbalance In The Public Schools, enacted August 18, 1965) is a piece of legislation passed by the Massachusetts General Court which made the segregation of public schools illegal in Massachusetts. The law, the first of its kind in the United States, stated that any public school in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts whose student body was composed of over 50% of minority races was "racially imbalanced." These racially imbalanced schools were to desegregate according to the law or risk losing their state educational funding. An initial report released in March 1965, "Because it is Right-Educationally,"[1] revealed that 55 schools in Massachusetts were racially imbalanced, 44 of which were in the City of Boston. The Boston School Committee was told that the complete integration of the Boston Public Schools needed to happen before September 1966 without the assurance of either significant financial aid or suburban cooperation in accepting African American students from Boston or the schools would lose funding.

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