In 1974, U.S. District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. ordered the Boston Public Schools to bus students between predominantly white and Black neighborhoods. The plan was intended to integrate the schools, but it led to racial violence and protests. The talks here study what happened that year from different perspectives and the long lasting legacy.
Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Farah Stockman hosts a conversation in Roxbury's historic Hibernian Hall to celebrate the culmination of weeks of neighborhood readings on the historic busing crisis that ripped Boston apart in the 1970s. An upcoming film, _The Harvest_, co-produced by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist/historian Douglas Blackmon and award-winning documentary filmmaker Sam Pollard is the impetus for the conversation. Portions of the film inform the conversation. The discussion, moderated by Stockman, includes two former residents of Boston: Michael Patrick MacDonald, who grew up in South Boston’s Old Colony housing project during the 1970s busing crisis, and Cheryl Harris, who grew up in the Mission Hill neighborhood of Boston and experienced the social and political upheaval first-hand as a young mother. The film explores the legacy of public school integration in Blackmon’s hometown of Leland, Mississippi. This Roxbury conversation will find the parallels in the Boston busing crisis and Boston's ongoing issues of system racism.
The Boston busing crisis and public school desegregation of 1974 to 1988 was an extremely contentious period in local history that reverberated nationally. To help students and others understand what happened and why, the Boston Public Schools have created online resources for teaching about the history of segregation, desegregation, and busing in Boston. **Josue D. Sakata**, Assistant Director for History and Social Studies for Boston Public Schools, reviews that history and discusses how it is presented in the Boston Public Schools today, including how the online resource was created and how it is used with students. (Image: Herbert E. Glasier [Public domain], via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:South_Boston_High_School_-_0403002157a_-_City_of_Boston_Archives.jpg "South Boston High School"), image cropped)
