On Boston's Mandatory School Busing:

The Boston Public School System, which was run by an extremely opportunistic, racist and patronage and politics-ridden, all-white school committee was deliberately kept racially segregated, thereby not only depriving African-Americans and other non-white Boston public school students of a good decent education, but depriving Boston’s white
working-class students of a decent education as well. Yet, the black schools were even worse. Subsequently the NAACP’s Boston chapter, after years of recalcitrance by the Boston School Committee, under the auspices of the late Louise Day Hicks and her cronies, decided that it was time to file a Federal lawsuit.

Federal District Judge W. Arthur Garrity, Jr., who was originally from Worcester, MA, but moved to Wellesley, through much research and evidence, found that the Boston School Committee had deliberately and knowingly created a dual school system–one for whites and one for non-whites. In the fall of 1974, Boston’s Federal Court-mandated school busing began, with riots, rock and bottle throwing, the shouting of racial epithets, and physical assaults on black and other non-white students who were being bused into Boston’s white ethnic neighborhoods under the Federal court-mandated school busing program.

The most disastrous part of the plan, however, was the part that entailed the cross-busing between Roxbury, the heart of Boston’s black community, and white working-class South Boston (or Southie), both of which were the most racially segregated, had the highest concentrations of extreme grinding poverty, the worst schools in the city, particularly the two high schools in those areas, the highest rates of unemployment, crime and incarceration, especially among young males, the highest rates of substance and alcohol abuse and illegitimacy, especially among teenagers, the highest student school drop-out rates, and the lowest percentages of students who went on to any type of higher education after high school. The same can also be said about the part of the plan that entailed the pairing off of Charlestown, another poor, white tough working-class ethnic neighborhood, with Boston’s South End (not to be confused with South Boston) and Lower Roxbury, as well.

Having said all of the above, I believe that had those two parts of the plan been implemented more gradually, and in a different way, and had the plan been better designed and more smartly implemented, busing would’ve worked out far b