EIGHT

Television News and the Making of the Boston “Busing Crisis”

The scene in Boston in recent weeks has been reminiscent of hundreds of others that flashed on TV screens at the opening of schools in years gone by. There were angry whites chanting their opposition to a Federal court order, throwing rocks at black school children and screaming defiance and hatred at a symbol of the Federal will to enforce the law. But, the city was not Little Rock or New Orleans . . . the city was Boston.

—ROGER WILKINS, New York Times,September 24, 1974

Throughout the Nation the prevailing view is that court-ordered desegregation of the public schools in Boston proved to be a disaster during the school year 1974–75.

—UNITED STATES COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS, 1975

The Boston school desegregation crisis of 1974 is on its way to becoming a myth.

—JOHN LEUBSDORF, 1978

WHEN BOSTON SCHOOLS OPENED on September 12, 1974, television news crews from ABC, CBS, and NBC were on hand to cover what transpired in the city’s schools and neighborhoods. After years of civil rights protests, lawsuits, court cases, and acts of evasion by school officials, phase 1 of federal judge Arthur Garrity’s order called for nearly seventeen thousand students to be transferred by bus to increase the racial integration of Boston’s schools.1 Few opening days had received so much national media attention, and the news anchors did their best to convey the scene. ABC’s Harry Reasoner opened the newscast by comparing Boston to Little Rock, the last city to receive this level of crisis coverage on account of schools: “What did happen in Boston today was not as bad as what took place during the 1950s at places like Central High in Little Rock, but it wasn’t very pleasant either.”2 On NBC, John Chancellor described how “thousands of white students stayed home to protest a new desegregation plan ordered by a federal judge.” “There were a lot of empty seats on buses and in classrooms as schools opened in Boston today,” Chancellor continued, before concluding, “There were a few demonstrations, arrests, and injuries but it was generally peaceful.”³ In his lead-in to the story, CBS’s Roger Mudd said that “violence marked the beginning of court ordered busing in Boston today,” while reporter Chris Kelly tweaked the formulation in the same segment: “Violence in South Boston marred what was otherwise a peaceful day.”⁴ In trying to balance scenes of violence and calm, each newscast illustrated the difficulty of summarizing a story that unfolded across a number of different schools and neighborhoods and had begun well before September 1974.

Opponents and supporters of court-ordered “busing” questioned the accuracy of media coverage, focusing most often on the city’s leading newspaper, the Boston Globe. “Antibusing” parents and politicians argued that reporters downplayed violence in newly integrated schools and exaggerated racial prejudice as the root cause of “busing” protests. Desegregation supporters, on the other hand, contended that news reports overemphasized violence at a few schools rather than highlighting the relatively peaceful integration of many more schools. While this chapter touches on these media critiques, my goal is to shift the focus away from a narrow view of media accuracy and toward a broader consideration of the role of national television news in shaping Boston’s “busing crisis.” Political scientist Doris Graber describes media crises as “natural or manmade events that pose an immediate and serious threat to the lives and property or to the peace of mind of large numbers of citizens.”⁵ Television news programs cover some events, like floods or airplane crashes, as crises that interrupt the regular news cycle for a few hours or days. Other stories, such as political scandals or wars, play out over a longer time frame, and television news broadcasts frame these as ongoing crises that demand viewers’ attention. The desegregation standoff at Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957, for example, was the first civil rights “crisis” of the television era.⁶ For southern civil rights activists, television news coverage made white mob violence in the Jim Crow South a national rather than regional issue. For television news producers in New York, bringing dramatic images from Little Rock to national audiences helped establish television journalism as a serious endeavor.

Television played a crucial role in defining Boston in 1974 as a “crisis” situation similar to Little Rock in 1957, but television broadcasts did not present the Boston story with the same moral clarity. Whereas Little Rock offered images of courageous and composed black youth (reluctantly backed by President Dwight Eisenhower and the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division) asserting their right to an equal education against white mobs and Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, television framed Boston as being about “busing” rather than school desegregation. The limitations of this “busing” frame were twofold. On the one hand, “busing” coverage focused on the white protestors who were most adamantly against court-ordered “busing” for school desegregation, and said remarkably little about students (black or white), schools, or education. On the other hand, “busing” coverage featured protests against court-ordered “busing” without regard for the history of school segregation that led to the court orders. By 1974, television news had already offered extensive coverage of protests against court-ordered “busing” in cites like Pontiac, San Francisco, and Denver. Coverage of these protests fueled “busing” as a national issue, even though “busing” for desegregation involved a fraction of the students transported by school bus. As the New York Times reported in 1972, “little ‘forced busing’ has been put into effect by court or government order when compared to the nearly 20 million pupils transported at public expense for all other purposes and the steady increase in busing that has taken place for decades without public opposition.”7 As this report suggests, in Boston and other cities, “busing” had long been used to transport students to large comprehensive high schools and also to maintain segregation. Arguments offered by parents and politicians against “busing” were particularly persuasive on television news because they voiced demands for neighborhood schools that circulated with little discussion of how these neighborhoods and schools became segregated.

By shifting the focus from print media to television, this chapter illuminates the production techniques of a medium that framed the “busing crisis” in Boston for millions of national viewers. First, I examine how the television coverage of Boston “busing” in the mid-1970s focused on reports, analysis, and predictions regarding “antibusing” protests and violence. This day-by-day focus on current and emergent scenes of crisis ignored the history of desegregation efforts since the 1960s, including those that had received television coverage in earlier years, like the community-funded Operation Exodus program to bus black children to schools in other neighborhoods and the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s suspension of federal school aid to Boston for violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Second, I consider how television news framed the use of force in the Boston “busing” story. Much of the footage from Boston focused on confrontations between “antibusing” protestors and authorities from the Boston police and other law enforcement agencies. These confrontations provided television producers with compelling visuals to illustrate “forced busing,” but this framing made it appear as though this was the first time local and federal force influenced school segregation. Enforcement of federal policies that shaped residential and school segregation, as well as the lack of enforcement of Massachusetts’s Racial Imbalance legislation, remained out of view. Third, I look at how television news offered viewers background reports on two places at the center of the “busing” story, South Boston and Charlestown. These profiles foregrounded a spatial perspective that echoed protestors’ calls to defend “neighborhood schools” and obscured the ordinariness of the racial attitudes in these neighborhoods. This emphasis on working-class neighborhoods also focused attention away from resistance to school desegregation in middle-class areas like Hyde Park or West Roxbury. Finally, I analyze how local television news programs in other cities presented “busing” in Boston as a failed policy and regularly replayed archived footage from Boston to underscore efforts to educate viewers on the importance of upholding the law and avoiding violence. Boston was neither the first nor the last city to witness violent resistance to school desegregation, but extensive television news coverage fixed Boston as the emblematic “busing” crisis and shaped popular conceptions of the history of “busing” for school desegregation.

ON THE SCENE

The substantial television news reporting of the Boston “busing” crisis in the mid-1970s both relied on and overlooked media coverage of earlier school desegregation battles in the city. Camera crews and reporters from the three national networks would not have been on the scene in Boston, prepared to film the first day of school in September 1974, if the city had not already been identified as a newsworthy site. Television cameras converged on Boston in September 1974 because television news had already visited Boston to cover earlier “busing” programs, “antibusing” protests, and legal maneuvering on civil rights policies. What is striking is how little of this recent historical context, broadcast in the 1960s and early 1970s, shows up in the reports from the mid-1970s. Once phase 1 of Judge Garrity’s court order started in September 1974, television coverage focused on crisis reporting, offering day-by-day accounts of current and emergent signs of trouble. Reports portrayed fights among students and clashes between “antibusing” protestors and police, as well as predictions, offered by reporters and the parents, politicians, and community leaders they interviewed, about whether “busing” would go better or worse in the days, weeks, and months ahead. On one hand, this crisis coverage shifted the focus away from the historical context of school desegregation in Boston, instead framing the “busing” story like a television serial where viewers would need to tune in regularly to see the next development. At the same time, once television news established “busing” in Boston as an ongoing crisis and assigned news personnel to cover the story on a regular basis, almost any incident related to “busing” in the city was deemed newsworthy. After a fight among students at Hyde Park High School in January 1975, for example, ABC’s Gregory Jackson noted that “a simple schoolboy fistfight here can have consequences unlike that of a fistfight almost anywhere else.”8 Jackson correctly identified television’s power to amplify school conflicts in Boston, but left unstated television’s role in broadcasting news of schoolboy fistfights to a national audience.

Television cameras were available to capture minor incidents like this because news media had covered the Boston school desegregation conflict intermittently over the prior decade. National television news and magazines reported on Louise Day Hicks’s rise to political power amid the white “backlash” to “busing” in mid-1960s Boston, as well as Operation Exodus, where black parents and students organized use of the city’s open enrollment policy to transfer to less crowded schools with better resources. In addition to following the “busing” and open enrollment battles of the 1960s, television news networks also covered the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s (HEW) investigation of Boston in 1971. These reports detailed how the Boston School Committee maintained segregated schools and connected Boston to broader school segregation trends in the North. In December 1971, HEW charged Boston with violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Both CBS and ABC broadcast clips from the press conference, where J. Stanley Pottinger, director of the Office of Civil Rights in HEW said, “As a result of official actions taken since 1965, the Boston Public School System has adopted and administered student assignment and grade organization policies in such a manner as to create two separate, racially identifiable school subsystems. One predominately white and the other predominately nonwhite.”⁹ HEW’s charges anticipated Judge Garrity’s decision three years later and added weight to the arguments advanced by Boston’s civil rights advocates. Television news framed HEW’s investigation of Boston as having implications for other northern cities. ABC’s Gregory Jackson concluded, “The question that remains is . . . where HEW moves next. The political overtones are clear. So is the fact that there is not a single major Northern school system that is basically any different from Boston.”10 Reporting on the early stages of the HEW investigation in April 1971, CBS’s Daniel Schorr closed on a similar note: “It will probably be months before the federal government makes up its mind to decide whether to charge Boston with fostering discrimination by an open enrollment policy. . . . But the implied challenge to the oldest public school system in the nation is already having its unsettling effect. If Boston can be subject to civil rights surveillance, then what city is safe?”¹¹ While making important gestures toward the regional and national implications of HEW’s censuring of Boston, these reports also highlight how the mainstream media, based in the North, covered northern school desegregation differently from the South. Whereas television and print journalists touted their role in exposing the deeply entrenched systems of segregation in the South, they were forever surprised to find evidence of school segregation in cities like Boston, New York, Chicago, or Philadelphia. Like Roger Wilkins in the New York Times (“The city was not Little Rock or New Orleans . . . the city was Boston”) or Daniel Schorr on CBS (“If Boston can be subject to civil rights surveillance, then what city is safe?”), these journalists treated Boston’s school segregation as anomalous and surprising, even as they reported on documented violations of students’ constitutional rights. Still, these reports told a national audience of viewers about specific actions by the Boston School Committee regarding school siting and student transfer policies, all well before television returned to Boston to cover the “busing crisis” in 1974.

While this earlier media attention encouraged news outlets to be on the scene for phase 1 in September 1974, the crucial context they provided for Garrity’s order faded out of view, replaced by day-to-day crisis coverage. This crisis coverage began on September 9, three days before the start of school, with reporting on a protest march to Boston Common. ABC’s Harry Reasoner described how “some 4,000 demonstrators, all of them white, most of them women, booed [Senator Edward Kennedy] off a stage in downtown Boston,” when he attempted to explain his views on “busing.”¹² On CBS, which estimated the crowd at 8,000 to 10,000, reporter Jackie Castleberry described how “as Senator Kennedy retreated to his office, the crowd began to push, hurling eggs and insults. Just as the Senator reached shelter inside, the crowd rushed, pounding and then shattering a glass window.”13 The television footage of the confrontation is chaotic. The images are unsteady, filmed by camera operators jostled by the crowd, and the shouts of demonstrators are punctuated by the sound of shattering glass. The rally and confrontation cast Boston as a tense city, and ABC and CBS closed their segments on notes of anticipation and apprehension. “For many other communities the first weeks of school have been traumatic,” ABC’s Lem Tucker concluded. “Boston officials thought they had prepared well enough to prevent that here. Today’s incident, however, leaves questions that cannot be answered until school opens on Thursday.”¹⁴ This feeling of anticipation and apprehension pervaded crisis coverage of “busing” in Boston, and television news presented the story as an unfolding drama that viewers could watch on a regular schedule. As NBC’s Richard Hunt noted on the eve of the opening of schools, “The police are worried, the Mayor is worried, blacks are worried, and whites are worried. So the prospect is many thousands of parents will keep their children home tomorrow and until they feel the schools are safe. And that may take weeks.”¹⁵

New media covered the confrontations and acts of violence that met school desegregation efforts, but what defined Boston as a crisis situation was the sense that conflicts would continue to develop in the coming days, weeks, months, and years. “Violence has flared again in the Boston school busing dispute,” CBS’s Walter Cronkite said as he introduced a December 11, 1974, segment on a stabbing at South Boston High School, while a few days later, NBC’s John Chancellor described how “a federally ordered school busing plan has kept parts of the city in turmoil for months.”¹⁶ Reporting on the reopening of South Boston High School the following month, ABC’s Gregory Jackson, speaking over film of students filing out of the school building past police in riot helmets, concluded, “It would be foolish to say the struggle is over.”¹⁷ The approach of phase 2 of Judge Garrity’s plan in September 1975, which expanded the number of schools and students involved in “busing” for desegregation, brought similar reports regarding the continuation of violence in Boston. NBC’s Robert Hager warned, “All through the last school year when whites in South Boston were in turmoil over school busing, the city’s black communities were generally calm. But now there seems to be a new feeling of militance.”¹⁸ Opening with a tranquil image of the Boston skyline and sailboats on the Charles River, ABC’s Charles Gibson said, “The appearance of Boston belies the city’s troubles. Its schools open September 8th, no one is anywhere near ready.” September 8 loomed as a dreaded date, but it arrived without any significant altercations. As NBC’s Robert Hager described it, “A school day [that] began full of fears about trouble, ended without much trouble.”19 Without any major developments, the opening of schools on September 8, 1975, was not necessarily newsworthy, but it was made newsworthy by months of crisis coverage over the prior year. Television news kept a spotlight on Boston through the mid-1970s, with current and emergent scenes of trouble given center stage. Once the Boston “busing crisis” was an established news frame, the possibility of conflict and predictions about what might happen next became newsworthy subjects. This crisis coverage displaced reports on earlier desegregation efforts in the city, which had helped establish “busing” in Boston as worthy of close media attention in the first place.

FRAMING FORCE

Many of the best-known images of “busing” in Boston do not feature students or schools, but instead offer vivid displays of force in confrontations between “antibusing” protestors and law enforcement authorities. This media frame emphasized that the Boston “busing crisis” was about force. “Media frames,” sociologist Todd Gitlin suggests, “are persistent patterns of cognitions, interpretation, and presentation, of selection, emphasis, and exclusion, by which symbol-handlers routinely organize discourse, whether verbal or visual.”²⁰ Television news framed much of the reporting of the Boston “busing crisis” around clashes between white protesters and police but said little about the students or schools that were ostensibly at the center of the story. Television footage of these confrontations features an array of law enforcement tactics: police motorcades lead the way for buses while police helicopters hover overhead; police officers with riot helmets push protestors away from schools and out of the way of buses; and police officers on horseback lead charges to break up gatherings of protestors. In addition to Boston police, state police officers, U.S. federal marshals, National Guard soldiers, and FBI agents further enforcement power. ABC’s Gregory Jackson described the arrayed authorities on hand for the reopening of South Boston High School in January 1975 as “a show of force more befitting a riot than a school opening.”²¹ Television rendered clashes between protestors and police with a visceral energy. In several cases, segments included film of the confrontations without voice-over commentary from reporters or anchors, production techniques akin to the way network news presents footage from riots or war zones. NBC’s report on December 11, 1974, for example, includes a forty-five-second clip without commentary. After reporter Phil Brady’s terse introduction, “The Police moved in,” the clip shows mounted police riding through a crowd in South Boston, a police officer with his knee on the back of a demonstrator, and other police officers holding protesters against squad cars. Without the reporter’s commentary, the images are accompanied by loud crowd noise and indecipherable shouts.22 Clips like these present police power in stark detail, but it is not clear who or what these police are protecting. Black children do not feature prominently in these clips, and school desegregation is rarely mentioned. There are many law enforcement authorities, but it is not clear which law they are in Boston to enforce.

FIGURES 31 AND 32. In covering Boston’s “busing crisis,” television news provided viewers with numerous images of police and other law enforcement authorities clashing with white “antibusing” protestors. NBC Nightly News, December 11, 1974.

When President Gerald Ford commented on Boston’s “busing crisis” in fall 1974, he linked these televised images of violence to his opposition to “forced busing.” “I deplore the violence that I have read about and seen on television,” Ford told reporters at a news conference. “I think that it is most unfortunate. I would like to add this, however: the court decision in that case, in my judgment, was not the best solution to quality education in Boston. I have consistently opposed forced ‘busing’ to achieve racial balance as a solution to quality education, and, therefore, I respectfully disagree with the judge’s order.”23 Ford’s remarks drew mixed reactions from Bostonians. “Antibusing” activists applauded the president. “I was so happy when I heard his statement, I felt like screaming,” said Fran Johnnene, a leader of Restore Our Alienated Rights (ROAR). “Thank God, someone is on our side.” Paul Parks, a civil rights advocate who was soon to be appointed Massachusetts state secretary of education, was more critical of Ford. “The President talks about racial imbalance,” Parks said. “This is not racial imbalance. This makes me think he’s confused. The Boston situation is the School Committee’s violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.”²⁴

While violent confrontations between police and protestors provided television news with a steady stream of images to illustrate and dramatize the “busing” issue, this framing presented the confrontations as the first instances of local or federal force in the school segregation issue. The authorities tasked with maintaining peace outside the schools were extremely visible, and this visibility made their force seem like the first action in the “busing” dispute, more immediate than the federal, state, and local policies that shaped residential and school segregation. Judge Garrity’s decision in Morgan v. Hennigan, in contrast, identified the use of force by the Boston School Committee and superintendent: “The court concludes that the defendants took many actions in their official capacities with the purpose and intent to segregate the Boston public schools and that such actions caused current conditions of segregation in the Boston public schools.”25 These actions were massive in scale and duration but not easily captured by television cameras or slotted into network news segments. “Plaintiffs have proved that the defendants intentionally segregated schools at all levels,” Garrity wrote, “built new schools for a decade with sizes and locations designed to promote segregation; maintained patterns of overcrowding and underutilization which promoted segregation at 26 schools; and expanded the capacity of approximately 40 schools by means of portables and additions when students could have been assigned to other schools with the effect of reducing racial imbalance.”²⁶

In their actions and failures to act, school officials built on discrimination in the housing market that contributed to residential and school segregation. A 1963 report on housing discrimination in Boston found that “despite the enactment of a fair housing law, widespread discriminatory housing practices continue to occur in Massachusetts,” adding that “techniques of discrimination employed by real estate brokers, developers, home owners, and landlords are varied, sometimes blunt, sometimes subtle.”²⁷ These repeated acts of discrimination limited the apartments, houses, and neighborhoods available to black Bostonians and combined with official actions by school administrators regarding school siting, zoning, and enrollment policies to produce Boston’s segregated schools. These acts of force are crucial to understanding school segregation, but they remained out of site for viewers watching the Boston “busing crisis” unfold on their television screens. Instead, television news offered viewers intense images of force in confrontations between police and protestors. In this view, Judge Garrity’s “busing” order and the police presence required to ensure its safe implementation are framed as the first acts of force rather than a response to the forces that segregated Boston’s schools.

EXPLAINING PLACE

The long duration of the Boston “busing crisis” meant that television news offered viewers frequent reports on the neighborhoods at the center of the “busing” story. Given the time constraints of television news, these three- to five-minute background reports on South Boston and Charleston signaled a significant effort to explain the places where “busing” conflicts were most visible. The reports focus on neighborhood boundaries, traditions, fears, and prejudices as leading to the failure of “busing,” while obscuring the widespread opposition to school integration in the Boston metropolitan area and nationally.

Television reports on South Boston and Charlestown are most interesting for how they explain these neighborhoods as being apart from Boston. NBC’s Richard Hunt highlighted this separation in introducing a background report on South Boston in October 1974: “On three sides the sea protects South Boston from the rest of the world, and that helps explain why it’s different. On the land a six-lane highway shields the whites of South Boston from the blacks across the road, and that helps explain it. But the people of South Boston are also set apart by their state of mind.”28 CBS’s Chris Kelly offered a similar analysis in a December 1974 background report: “To the people who live here its called ‘Southie,’ a placid community on the surface, geographically isolated from the rest of the city, virtually an island. It is Irish, Roman Catholic, blue collar, and tough. South Boston High towers over this enclave like a monument and now this monument has become a symbol, a symbol of Southie resistance to change. On the opening day of school, South Boston looked like a city in the deep South years ago reacting to the arrival of its first black students.”²⁹ These descriptions, combined with maps that highlighted South Boston, helped present the neighborhood as distinct from Boston, as “a place with a special character all its own,” as NBC described it.³⁰ South Boston’s residents certainly had their share of racial prejudice, but the language of these reports—“different,” “virtually an island,” “set apart by their state of mind,” “like a city in the deep South years ago”—perpetuated the idea that South Boston was a pocket of racism in an otherwise progressive city (Boston) and region (the North).

History and traditions provided another way to accentuate the uniqueness of South Boston and Charlestown. NBC’s profile of Charlestown in 1975, for example, framed the area’s opposition to “busing” as a product of protecting neighborhood traditions. “When the buses roll into Charlestown on September 8th, they’ll be rolling into one of the oldest neighborhoods in America,” Robert Hager reported, “a neighborhood fiercely proud of its heritage and independence. Sixteen thousand people live in this crowded, working class section of Boston. Most of them are Irish Catholic. Charlestown is barely one mile square, you can walk from one end to the other in barely fifteen minutes. . . . In the past few years, the ‘Townies,’ as they like being called, have seen great change in their community. . . . [B]uses represent more change for Charlestown, change this time the people say they just can’t understand.”31 This profile concluded with images of marchers carrying a sign reading, “Charlestown against Forced Busing.” Like South Boston, profiles of Charlestown presented the neighborhood’s boundaries as sacrosanct, and this privileging of neighborhood echoed the arguments of school integration opponents who advanced “neighborhood schools” as the most important “busing” battleground.

FIGURE 33. NBC’s John Chancellor introduces a profile on South Boston. NBC Nightly News, October 15, 1974.

For all their local history and pride, schools in South Boston and Charlestown were part of the Boston public school system, not autonomous school districts. Geographical neighborhood boundaries, moreover, were not the primary factor in determining student attendance in Boston. Judge Garrity’s decision details how elementary school “district lines weave in and out,” with the effect that “the predominantly black areas are cut away from predominantly white areas.”³² Likewise, high-school enrollments were determined by feeder patterns from specific junior high schools, with black students generally entering high schools after eighth grade and white students after completing ninth grade. “The only consistent basis for the feeder pattern designations, changes and deletions was the racial factor,” Garrity wrote. “Neither distances between schools, capacities of receiving schools, means of transportation or natural boundaries explain them.”33

FIGURE 34. NBC’s profile of Charlestown concluded with footage of a march against “busing” for school desegregation. NBC Nightly News, August 31, 1975.

Profiles of South Boston and Charlestown offered appraisals of places that figured prominently in Boston’s “busing” story, but they also presented these neighborhood battlegrounds as enclaves of white racism removed from Boston and the rest of the country. Judge Garrity’s desegregation plan only affected schools in Boston, not the larger Boston metropolitan area. Suburban communities like Concord, Lincoln, and Lexington, as historian Lily Geismer shows, welcomed a small number of black students from Boston city schools through the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO), but opposed affordable housing programs, two-way “busing” (that is, sending suburban students to Boston schools and vice versa), and other policies that would have threatened their white suburban privilege.³⁴ Opponents of Judge Garrity’s order were also frustrated by what they saw as artificial metropolitan boundaries that kept the suburbs from having to participate in court-ordered “busing” for school desegregation. “In five minutes I can go to Dedham, Needham or Newton,” argued West Roxbury parent K. Marie Clarke. “I can walk to Dedham.”35 Nationally, protesters in Seattle, Pasadena, and Denver expressed their opposition to school integration with different accents but the same intent as those in Boston’s working-class neighborhoods. In short, presenting South Boston and Charleston as uniquely racist let the rest of the Boston metropolitan area and the nation off the hook.

THE LONG SHADOW OF BOSTON

The visibility of the Boston “busing crisis” made the city a cautionary tale for other cities that implemented court-ordered or voluntary “busing” plans for school desegregation after 1974. In Louisville, a citizens’ group called CALM (Concerned About Louisville’s Mood) prepared radio and television advisements and distributed bumper stickers reading, “Nobody Wins when You Lose Your Cool.” In Stockton, California, assistant superintendent Leopoldo Gloria saw the negative example of Boston as encouraging a cooperative atmosphere: “Everybody, even most of the parents, decided early that we did not want another Boston—not here.”³⁶ As the Los Angeles police and school officials prepared for “busing” to start in 1978, they too looked to Boston. “We don’t expect a Boston,” school district security chief Richard Green said. “But our plans are prepared—just in case we have a Boston.”³⁷ The specter of “another Boston” cast a long shadow over “busing” for school desegregation. Boston became synonymous with “busing” in large part because local television news programs regularly replayed the archived footage of violence in Boston. For local television stations, clips from Boston underscored efforts to educate viewers on the importance of upholding the law and avoiding violence. At the same time, these segments reiterated many of the themes from the national television news coverage and cemented the association of “busing” in Boston with violence and the failure of school desegregation.

It took less than a year for other cities to attempt to find transferable lessons from the Boston “busing crisis.” Just before Louisville’s “busing” program started in 1975, Louisville’s WAVE-TV (NBC) sent reporter Dave Nakdimen to Boston for several days to report on “why desegregation in that city has been so violent” and “why what happened there doesn’t have to happen here.” Nakdimen saw the ethnic neighborhoods in Boston as different from Louisville: “The ethnic lines in Boston are very sharply drawn: the Irish, the Poles, the Italians, the Chinese, the Black communities, there’s a very strong sense of ethnic and neighborhood identification. If you’re from South Boston, you’re from ‘Southie,’ if you’re from Charlestown, you are called a ‘Townie,’ and busing was disruptive to this sense of neighborhood identification. In Louisville and Jefferson County, while you have community pride in the various communities . . . these strong ethnic divisions do not exist.”38 Like the network’s background reports on South Boston and Charlestown, this analysis pointed to Boston’s ethnic neighborhoods as limiting the success of “busing.”

Footage of confrontations between police and protestors in South Boston figured prominently in the Louisville report, as well as in features from stations in Dallas, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis. Dallas’s WFFA-TV (ABC) emphasized the show of force by law enforcement: “Those who wanted to start trouble couldn’t get out from under the eyes of nearly 2,000 city, state, and metropolitan police, along with a couple hundred federal marshals. Along bus routes, surrounding neighborhood schools, lining the streets there are men in blue; on foot, on horseback, on motorcycles, in cruisers.”³⁹ Cleveland’s WKYC (NBC) contrasted the violence in Boston with the relatively peaceful integration of schools in Springfield, Massachusetts. The report opened with film of police pushing and arresting protestors in the streets of South Boston: “Several hundred cities in the United States have been ordered to integrate their schools by busing. In a few, the order was met by anger, force, rebellion. It happened that way in Boston. The violence occurred at only four schools in Boston but adults threw stones at children and that grabbed the attention of anyone who had the slightest interest in what has been called ‘forced busing.’”⁴⁰ Los Angeles’s KNXT (CBS) played similar footage of South Boston conflicts, as reporter Mike Parker said: “The problems in Boston and similar problems in other cities across the country have frightened many parents here locally into looking for alternatives to the mandatory busing plan due to start on Tuesday.” Profiles of “frightened” San Fernando Valley parents, who were enrolling their children in private schools or moving to avoid “busing,” followed the Boston footage, suggesting a clear televisual link between opposition to school integration in South Boston and suburban Los Angeles.⁴¹ Eleven years after the start of “busing” in Boston, Indianapolis’s WTHR-TV (NBC) introduced its segment on Boston with a title card, white letters on a black screen, reading, “The Anger: Boston, September 1974,” and the voices of protesting mothers chanting, “Here we go Southie, here we go.” The station explicitly contrasted Boston and the successful start of “busing” in Indianapolis. “In places like Boston,” the anchor’s voice-over intoned, “there was opposition to busing, and they fought it. In Indianapolis, there was opposition to busing and the law was obeyed.”42 Boston, for each of these local television stations, signified the violent failure of “busing” and school integration. Archived television footage from the Boston “busing crisis” showed local viewers why it was important to make sure that their city did not become “another Boston.” At the same time, continually replaying clips of “busing” in Boston left the city looped in time, with the confrontations in South Boston in 1974 and 1975 replayed over and over again. If national network news established “busing” in Boston as a crisis, local news reports drew from the same film footage to make the Boston busing crisis the definitive standard for understanding “busing” for school desegregation.

Testifying about the media coverage of the Boston “busing crisis” to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in August 1975, Boston deputy mayor Robert Kiley reflected,

The essential difference between the national media, particularly television, and the local media, I believe, is that a complex situation has to be telescoped into a maximum 90 seconds’ presentation over a national network, and you don’t sell automobiles by having the desultory aspect of these activities. So my sense is that the national media must go toward the sensational, the easily photographed, the dramatic.⁴³

Three months later, WLBT, a station that had aggressively opposed civil rights in Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s, aired an hour-long special titled “A Southern Perspective on School Busing in Boston,” which offered an analysis of television news similar to Kiley’s. “For years the South was faced with a perplexing question,” the report begins. “How to integrate its schools by the use of court ordered busing. It was a dilemma and the national press watched and filed their reports. Today it is a dilemma and the press is now looking in their own backyard [with film of the Charles River and the Boston skyline on the screen].” Later in the segment, reporter Rae Dillon noted, “Because of the national news media, most people would agree that busing in Boston has not worked. However, only in 7 or 8 of the 140 schools was there any trouble, and these received all of the publicity.”⁴⁴ As both critiques suggest, when national television news programs discussed “busing” in Boston in the mid-1970s, they focused an extraordinary level of attention on violent confrontations taking place in only a few of the city’s schools and neighborhoods. Television news, as this chapter has argued, played a crucial role in framing Boston’s “busing crisis” for a national audience. Television news’ dominant frames for the “busing crisis” presented the story as a conflict between white protestors and police that played out in working-class ethnic neighborhoods, rather than a decades-long fight for the constitutional rights of black students taking place not only in Boston but in cities all over the country. While not overtly sympathetic to the white protestors, national television coverage legitimated the view that “busing” was the problem in Boston.

FIGURE 35. Young black student explains her feelings on school desegregation to an NBC reporter. Television’s “busing crisis” rendered black Bostonians as bit players in their own civil rights story. NBC Nightly News, September 7, 1975.

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Unlike earlier civil rights struggles in the South, media coverage of Boston presented no specific black students—like Elizabeth Eckford and the Little Rock Nine, Vivian Malone Jones and James Hood at the University of Alabama, or James Meredith at the University of Mississippi—whose rights seemed to be at stake. The closest network television news came to presenting black protagonists in the “busing” story was an NBC special report on Roxbury and Dorchester (similar to earlier reports on South Boston and Charlestown) that aired in September 1975. Whereas most broadcasts featured a short sound bite from one black parent or civil rights activist, this report solicited almost a dozen opinions from black business owners, homeowners, parents, and students. The last student to speak was a young girl with braided hair who told the reporter, “I don’t think it’s fair, cause when they come up here to go to school we don’t mess with them, but why when we go to school down there they mess with us? That ain’t fair to me. That ain’t fair to me at all.”45 The girl, perhaps eight or nine years old, is one of the city’s black students whose rights, which were at the center of Judge Garrity’s desegregation order, were elided in media coverage of the “busing crisis.” This young black student presented a different image of the Boston “busing” story, but even here television news presented only a narrow spectrum of her views. Eyes on the Prize, the celebrated documentary on the civil rights movement, closes its segment on “busing” in Boston with this same young girl, using a portion of NBC’s interview that the network did not broadcast. Before her appeal to fairness, the young girl replies to the reporter’s question about what will happen when she goes to school in South Boston by looking toward the camera and saying, “When we go up there we gonna be stoned.”⁴⁶ This blunt prediction, with its mixture of anger and fear, complicates the appeal to fairness that follows. NBC’s decision to edit out the young girl’s anger and fear, even in a detailed national television news report on Roxbury and Dorchester, illuminates how television’s “busing crisis” rendered black Bostonians as bit players in their own civil rights story.

Speaking at Boston College at a conference on the “New Boston” in 1984, community organizer and politician Mel King explained how describing “busing” as a “burden” was detrimental to black people. “Black people are not a burden,” King said. “That is a mean and vicious way of saying something about black people and people of color in this city. . . . We were, and in fact are, an opportunity.” School desegregation, King argued, offered an opportunity for whites “to open up and act in the most humane way possible. And they blew it.”⁴⁷