Watch American Experience: The Busing Battleground on WITF TV
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Aimee Bealer
On September 12, 1974, police were stationed outside Boston schools as Black and white students were bused for the first time between neighborhoods to comply with a federal court desegregation order.
Watch American Experience: The Busing Battleground Monday, September 11 at 9pm on WITF TV or stream it for free until October 10 with the PBS or WITF app!
The cross-town busing met with shocking violence, much of it directed at children: angry white protestors threw rocks at buses and hurled racial epithets as students walked into their new schools. The chaos and racial unrest would escalate and continue for years. Using eyewitness accounts, oral histories and rare news footage, American Experience: The Busing Battleground pulls back the curtain on the volatile effort to end school segregation, detailing the decades-long struggle for educational equity that preceded the crisis.
Boston finally ended policies that required schools to bus students for desegregation in 1999, by which time more than 70 percent of the city’s students were children of color. Looking back, Black activist Bryant Rollins rues the fact that during the heightened tensions of the time, white and Black communities couldn’t listen to each other. “A lot of the conflict that arose during the ’60s and ’70s was avoidable,” he says. “People were in a state of violent agreement. What we agreed about was the inefficacy of busing. We did not slow down, take a deep breath, take a step back and ask ourselves what’s possible together. That’s a tragedy. Everybody has lost.”
Watch American Experience: The Busing Battleground Monday, September 11 at 9pm on WITF TV or stream it for free until October 10 with the PBS or WITF app!
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