Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s

by Ronald P. Formiso

A Book Review by Matt Buckles

March 2009

By the time most students of history reach high school, they have likely studied the Civil Rights Movement in America in one way or another for nearly a decade across content areas. In addition, there lives are no doubt greatly impacted by the stories and lessons of Civil Rights they learn from their families. Yet there are certainly aspects of the Civil Rights Movement in which the average layperson may not be keenly aware, especially if he does not have the perspective of living through its height. Some of the most challenging aspects of Civil Rights to fully comprehend, and certainly some of the least taught, are the motives and complex opinions of people who opposed Civil Rights legislation beyond simply racism. In Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s, Ronald P. Formiso investigates these motives and the complex interplay of race, class, and ethnicity as related to anti-busing organizations in Boston during the movement to desegregate public schools. Formiso’s intricate analysis of Boston effectively connects the issues of race, class, and ethnicity to busing, which provides a fascinating vignette into the complex ethnic conflicts of Boston. However by providing such a detailed analysis of Boston, he misses the broader social implications that he attempts to bring to light using Boston as a case study.

Countless books have been written to analyze the effects of race, class, and ethnicity on individuals, but most tend to treat other factors as a control when studying one. Formiso effectively connects these forces and analyze the degree to which they compete and counteract each other. However, in bringing to light the ethnic and class differences and motivations, he does not deemphasize race as a factor in and of itself. Overt racism certainly played a role in the Anti-Busing Movement, but more powerful are the unspoken benefits whites gain from the “institutional arrangements that keep a huge proportion of the black population in a subordinate position” (x). Federal District Judge Arthur Garrity indirectly accused the Boston School Committee of committing this form of racism through specific policies. “The committee refused to do simple acts that might have reduced racial imbalance, such as redistricting or locating new schools on the borders of neighborhoods” (45). As a result, between 1966 and 1973, the number of “imbalanced schools” climbed from 46 to 75 (46). Public opinion seemed at the surface to be vastly against the court decision, but in reality most people did not have truly intense feelings one way or another, but the Anti-Busing Movement became the most vocal. For them, it was an issue of “rights,” which could be won using protest methods they believed to be similar in means and ends to those of the Civil Rights Movement in the South.

However, Formiso uses class and ethnicity to make the seemingly obvious but usually unstated argument that “racism alone” cannot explain the motivations and feelings of people who protested desegregation. One recurring theme in the speeches from Anti-Busers was the class-dominated prejudice that existed between urban and suburban whites. “De-segregation schemes usually began and ended by mixing poor blacks and working- or middle-class whites, while the lives of upper-middle-class and rich whites remained untouched” (x). Significantly, the specific schools forced to desegregate were in the poorest sections of Boston.

In possibly the most insightful section of the book, Formiso refers to this group as leading a movement based on “reactionary populism” – a term he coins to describe the contradictory nature of the groups’ conservative policy agenda and their working- and lower-middle class backgrounds and anti-government sentiment (172). According to Formiso, it is obvious in the protests of the Anti-Busers that it is not busing but rather “the idea of having their children attend a school…in…an all-black neighborhood” (52). Here the motivations are clear because they have lived through forced red-lining and white-flight and have seen the negative effects that population change can have on a community, which did nothing but reinforce stereotypes. For this reason, the true motivations of the white working-class have differed very little from the turn of the 20^th Century – a connection that is glaringly missing from Formiso’s argument. As millions of immigrants entered immigrant cities, African Americans began entering northern cities as well in the First Great Migration, which led to poor blacks and poor whites competing for jobs. For the working-class and immigrants, racial identity was important to have a group to stand above.

Ethnic ties, especially among Irish in South Boston or “Southie,” are more tightly knit than just about any other major city, and he uses these connections to discuss other motivations for the Anti-Busing Movement, which was centered in and around Southie. Southie is a working-class white, heavily Irish neighborhood, and South Boston High School seemed to become the center of the most outspoken groups, public protests, violence, and student walkouts. Because of these ties, many saw desegregation as a threat to the lives that they knew. For many people the worst aspect of school desegregation may have been that it served as a shift from their localized lives. For these people, the status quo may not have been perfect, but it worked, and changing it seemed unnecessary and potentially frightening. Schools like Southie High were “old, often dilapidated but beloved buildings [that] served less as educational institutions providing upward mobility and more as community socializing agents” (17).

Young children of the neighborhood grew up “dying to go to Southie High” because for many people in the working-class, going to proms and high school sporting events would be the best time of their life before moving on to boring and often physically demanding jobs and parenting too early (17). Indeed, when the desegregation issues and busing protests began to conflict with these traditional cultural events such as the annual high school football game with Eastie High, people who had before remained on the sidelines now found themselves loudly protesting as well (81). To the Boston white elite, they saw Southie as an archaic institution and judged the people of South Boston to be “localist, uneducated, and unlike themselves, bigoted” (17). This oversight emphasizes Formiso’s general thesis that race, class, and ethnicity never interact in a vacuum, and if elites simply impose fixes to racial problems, ethnic and class issues (or vice versa) will arise (xi).

The thesis is logical, and proven logically in the case of Boston, but it is still insufficient. There is a glaringly neglected discussion of the role gender played on the events – especially since it is children who are being desegregated, and adult mothers and fathers who are fighting about how to most effectively educate them with racial, ethnic, and class dominated biases.

In spite of no real mention of gender, the larger problem with the book is that it goes into exhaustive detail about individuals in Boston connected to the movement. The reader gets bogged down with details about their personal lives, and the book does not do enough to connect their experiences to broader issues or experiences. His argument is set up nicely, but at times it reads almost as a newspaper account of the events from the perspective of hindsight by simply recounting the minutia of the events and the evolving court cases. Impressively, however, he is able to judge all parties equally and remain relatively objective in recounting.

Without the big picture connections, it loses its value as a history, however. More importantly, it loses its value as a text that can be beneficial for the teaching of the Anti-Busing Movement as a reaction to the Civil Rights Movement. There might be certain excerpts of his general thesis that could be presented to high school students, but they are too short to really accomplish anything. As far as content for the teacher, the race/class/ethnicity interplay is valuable to consider when teaching history; to effectively address each of the issues (as well as gender) the others must not be ignored. Unfortunately, his methods do not provide a very good model for a good method of teaching this concept. The topics could be valuable for students to consider and discuss value judgments, however. Students could attempt to answer the essential questions, “What are the costs and benefits of integration?” and “What is the difference between ‘integration’ and ‘desegregation’?”