School Mistakenly Buses Boy To Boston

www.thebostonchannel.com ^ | Friday, September 5, 2003 | Jack Harper

[livius]

I worked in a school in a primarily (but not entirely) white upper middle class neighborhood in San Francisco, where one year they announced that kids were to be bussed in from the most depressed black neighborhood in the city. Needless to say, after that, any child in the school who was black was automatically assumed to live in the miserable Hunter's Point housing projects and probably be one of the 12 "fatherless" children of a welfare mother/hooker.

We had several black children there who were the kids of black doctors and lawyers who lived in the neighborhood before bussing. Guess what: they were all transferred into private schools by the end of the first year of bussing.

[Flash Bazbeaux]

My father was born in Dorchester too, as was my mother, and, for that matter, so was I, my brother, my sisters, and my cousins [St. Margaret's Hospital, and most of the parents on the street where I grew up.

Dorchester is not all poor, probably not "predominantly black", and was never "predominantly Jewish", albeit there was a sizeable Jewish community around Blue Hill Avenue, and in Mattapan, which is not Dorchester. Those areas are all black now. There used to be a saying in Boston real estate circles, which is crude, but seemed to reflect reality, that "the blacks follow the Jews." Nat Hentoff is a one famous Jew who originally comes from Dorchester.

Dorchester, in comparison to Boston, is somewhat analagous to Brooklyn, when compared to New York, in the sense that it is the largest sub-entity of the city. About a quarter of Bostonians live in Dorchester. Like Brooklyn, it has lots of poor areas, but some decent areas as well. Much of it is working class.

From at least as early as the 1930s, to the late 1960s, Dorchester was predominantly Catholic, and mostly Irish, with some Poles. When you asked someone where they were from, they would tell you what parish you were from.

The blacks started moving in in the early 70s, because the banks in Boston got together and agreed that that was where they would allow them to move to. A line was drawn down Washington Street, known as the B-BURG line. West of Washinton Street, the blacks could buy. East, they could not. My grandmother's house was three houses West of Washington street. The entire neighborhood changed in about nine months.

When I was in high school, we had a Metco kid from that same neighborhood. Metco is a voluntary program which predates the "forced busing" in Boston by many years. In my opinion the results were less than stellar, becausee many of the kids woound up in the lower half of the class when they are bussed to the suburbs. It makes for a long day, riding that bus, so the kids who participate are making some sacrifices. Some of the kids do well.

Now Dorchester has a lot of Vietnamese, and a full fledged Asian supermarket, where I visted last month on one of my trips to the East Coast.

[aberaussie]

My kid's first bus ride in preschool here in Charlotte was worse.

I grew up in Charlotte and was a seventh grader when they started the forced busing. How far were they busing your preschooler? I think some heads should have rolled over that.

I have to think my experience in Charlotte is a contributing factor to my choice to homeschool my kids.

[Hildy]

Very interesting history. Thank you for posting this.

[merry10]

My daughter is bused to another school since she is deaf and requires speech therapy, and sign interpreters. One day, when she was 3, she was put on a bus with a spanish speaking driver who of course could not sign to the kids and also got lost. Last year the bus driver dropped her off at the house (he said she convinced him to...she signs, he didn't, go figure)...dropped her off. Of course no one was home but luckily a neighbor saw her and kept her safe for me. I have lots of fun bus stories!

[wai-ming]

Wellesley is an affluent suburb of Boston, populated mostly by WASPs and Jews, while Dorchester is a poor, inner-city neighborhood with a mostly black population.

Wellesley is also where Hillary went to school. Certainly, she wouldn't condone living in a rich, white, affluent suburb while all those poor minority children in the inner city suffered. Perish the thought!

[gitmo]

It was a 30 min drive by car. Apparently a 7 hour drive by bus. I never found out if they could make it faster.

We just got rid of forced busing here. I knew parents who had kids riding an hour and a 2-3 hours, each kid in a different direction to spread their race more evenly.

[grania]

I'm with you. A teacher, on one of the first days of school, mistakingly put a child on the wrong bus. What happened? A caring parent in the black neighborhood helped the child and probably would have laughed it off if the media weren't short of disasters that day.

Guess what? Young students are often put on the wrong bus the first few days of school. The kid probably enjoyed the field trip to the inner city!

Lighten up, folks. The child was not abused or abandoned, just given a free bus ride.

[grania]

The blacks started moving in in the early 70s, because the banks in Boston got together and agreed that that was where they would allow them to move to

In the autumn of '68 I substituted a few times in the Junior High off of Blue Hill Ave. (name?)

At the time, the school was undergoing a change. It had originally been a school with a large Jewish population in a Jewish area of the town. Because of the busing decision, every time there was an opening, a parent from other areas of the city could move their child in. Well, what was happening was the students without high standards chased out the others.

If I recall correctly, the angriest parents were the blacks who were the first to move to Mattapan and then see the neighborhood schools become what they were moving from.

The real estate agents really feasted off of the house sales caused by busing messing up neighborhoods.

[sweetliberty]

"The child was not abused or abandoned, just given a free bus ride."

And probably got out of going to school that day.

[sweetliberty]

"We just got rid of forced busing here."

Busing is one of the worst ideas to ever come along. I think that was a major warning that we were losing all perspective and common sense in decision making. We ignored it.

[aberaussie]

We just got rid of forced busing here. I knew parents who had kids riding an hour and a 2-3 hours, each kid in a different direction to spread their race more evenly.

Did anyone ever evaluate whether or not the forced busing accomplished their goals? Were there ever any stated, measureable goals? I know when I had to attend four different schools in six years because they kept redrawing the lines, I really did not understand the point.

[gitmo]

Charlotte was the first city to have forced busing. I believe we had it for 25 years. When the lawsuit was won to end forced busing the Board of Education said that would not be fair because the schools in the white neighborhoods were modern and well equipped and the schools in the black neighborhoods were antiquated and poorly equipped. They were essentially in the same state of disrepair that they were in when we started busing. I wrote a letter to the editor asking why was it OK to send a mixture of races to schools that are antiquated and poorly equipped? And why weren't they preparing for this over the last 25 years?