Desegregation on Boston 50 Years Later

Public Education in Boston // Beacon Hill Seminar

?Most know that public education in America began in Boston in 1635 when Philemon Pormort was requested by the leaders of the town to begin a school which has been known ever since as Boston Latin School.

?Many others know that in 1821 English High School was created.? Even though I am a Latin School graduate, I recently attended their 200th Anniversary celebration and even gave them a check!

Some know that Horace Mann left his position as President of the State Senate to become the state’s Chief Education Officer, when the Commonwealth created the State Board of Education and, ahead of many other states, required mandatory education.?

What many do not know is that a primary goal of that legislation was to Americanize immigrants.? Prayers were read from the King James Bible.? The goal was for everyone to think alike, which may or may not have been very democratic. In response to these efforts, alternatives to public education began to arise, slowly, because the Catholic Church did not have the resources that it did in decades later. Catholic parents decided they wanted their children to be educated by nuns and priests.? As recently as 50 or 60 years ago, the parochial school system in Boston was robust.? Today it is not, primarily because there are very few nuns who had worked without compensation and without complaining to educate large numbers of children.

Catholic colleges have flourished.? Boston College, founded in the South End by the Jesuits in 1863 is now a well-respected nationally recognized degree granting institution, as is the College of the Holy Cross a few miles away in Worcester, as are as many other schools.? Catholic colleges remain robust, even as the parochial school system is in decline.

Therefore, long before there was a significant Black population in the city, notwithstanding the Roberts case, in which Charles Sumner argued unsuccessfully for the rights of Black children to go to school with white children some 175 years ago, there were tensions between those governing and those being governed. There were people who made the rules for those who were not like them.? These are parallels to the 20th and the 21st Century.

There also is a robust history of ongoing efforts to review and change the school system.? The one that I studied carefully while doing my thesis in 1970-71, was written under the direction of the late Joseph Cronin of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.? In my opening paragraph, I quoted William Gage, Director of Research for the Massachusetts Advisory Council on Education who wrote “Until the 1920s, the best school systems in the country were found in our great cities and among these Boston was tops…it is not that the quality of the organization and staff of the Boston school system has deteriorated, it is the conditions in which they operate that have so rapidly changed and, in some cases, deteriorated; it is the complexity and magnitude of the problems which the Boston Schools face that demand greater resources and new organization and approaches.” That last sentence, written in 1970, could have been written 50 years later.

Studies of the Boston public schools have been underway for some time.? In 1944, a massive eight-volume study of the Boston Schools was undertaken by the Boston Finance Commission under the direction of Prof. George Strayer of Columbia University. He reported, “Members of the staff of the school system reported again and again to the survey staff that politics had dealt a paralyzing blow to programs in the Boston schools.”? The Strayer Report suggested an appointed school committee with confirmation by the voters at a future date, a system not unlike that used for judges in some states.

In 1953, a major report on school facilities was undertaken by the Harvard Graduate School of Education under the direction of Cyril Sargent, the Director of the Center for Field Studies.? The results of this report led to the closing of more than 30 antiquated school buildings throughout the city, many of them well over a century old.? Perhaps a report like that is needed now!

Nearly a decade later, Sargent was once again called upon, this time by the Boston Redevelopment Authority.? Sargent reminded his readers that Horace Mann had said in 1848, “In schoolhouses, Massachusetts might be called a model for the world.”?

Throughout the 20th Century, there were significant battles for seats on the School Committee beginning in 1961 when there was a reform slate, including Mel King, later a candidate for Mayor. Joining Joe Lee, who had been on the School Committee for years, were South Boston attorney Louise Day Hicks, Arthur Gartland, a prominent insurance man who had been a member of the reform slate, William O’Connor, a college professor and Thomas Eisenstadt, a young lawyer who was Catholic although he bore his father’s Jewish name.? Both Eisenstadt’s father and Hicks’ father had been judges.? Gartland, O’Connor and Lee were too old to embark upon political careers.? Eisenstadt was considered too young. Mrs. Hicks was the perfect age to make a political move.

This leads us up to the era that was focused upon in the Garrity Decision. In 1965, Hicks and her colleagues succeeded in defeating Arthur Gartland, who wanted to adhere to the then recently enacted racial imbalance law and instead elected John McDonough, whose older brother Pat was on the City Council then and later.

I concluded my undergraduate thesis with two quotes.

One from Ian Menzies, a wonderful man from either Australia or New Zealand, who wrote for the Globe for decades.? He said: “The Boston Public Schools will continue to handicap the city and prevent its regrowth unless the Mayor Whites, the City Councils, and concerned citizens apply pressure for change”; and

The other from Jonathan Kozol, author of Death at an Early Age: “The slowness of change is always respectable and reasonable in the eyes of the ones who are only watching; it is a different matter for the ones who are in pain…it is the comfortable people, by and large, who make the decisions in our society. It is only the people that those decisions are going to affect who are expected to stand quietly and watch patiently and wait.”

?One cannot discuss the origins of the Desegregation Order without understanding the structure of the Boston School Committee which has been in existence preceding Boston’s becoming a city in 1821 and which has gone through many changes over a period of decades.? The school committee grew in size, as Boston grew, in the middle of the 19th Century.? As is well known, from 1859-1873, Boston annexed Roxbury, Dorchester, Charlestown, West Roxbury and Brighton which meant we became a much bigger city geographically and a much bigger city in terms of the school population.

By 1876, there were 116 members of the Boston School Committee, most selected from wards since the city added new wards as towns were annexed.? Members were assigned to serve on the committee for certain schools, most likely the ones of interest to them.?

Chapter 141 of the Acts of 1875 changed the composition of the school committee, reducing it to 25; 8 elected each year for a 3-year term at large, with the mayor serving ex officio.? In 1885 the first Irish Catholic was elected Mayor Boston.? Immediately, the state legislature, suspicious of Boston by nature and then dominated by Yankee Protestant Republicans, began to limit the mayor’s powers.? One of the first acts was to relieve the mayor of his duties as a member of the school committee.?

In 1881, the Great and General Court passed an act permitting women to vote for their local school committees.? It was rumored in the Boston newspapers in 1885 that there was a massive registration drive among Catholic women, most of them Irish, in opposition to the recommendation of The Pilot, Boston’s Catholic newspaper.? If Catholic women did not vote to elect the school committee at large, it would imperil the ability of Catholics to get elected. Within a couple of years, a full Protestant/Catholic battle was waged as the somewhat underground committee of 100 – a group of wealthy businessmen - sought to drive Irish Catholics out of politics and off the school committee. The pro-Protestant group had encouraged women and women’s’ suffrage groups, to get as many Protestant women as possible to vote so as to preserve Protestant domination of the schools. The Protestant women voted in great numbers and no Catholics were elected in 1888 and in 1889.? In fact, for nearly a decade a Catholic did not sit on the Boston School Committee even though, at that point, many of the students were Catholics.? You can see there is a parallel here to the 20th Century.

In 1905, at a time of great churning in cities across America in the midst of the progressive movement, a blue-ribbon citizens group charging “trading to ensure promotions” drafted and filed for consideration by the legislature a bill proposing that the mayor have the power to appoint a 3–7-member Boston School Committee.? This group was led by James Jackson Storrow who had been frustrated while serving on the larger committee.? Along with Harvard Professors Paul Hanus and Henry Holmes, Storrow drafted the bill and gathered support from dozens of civic leaders, several former mayors and also Louis Brandeis.? Pressure from the women voters in the city who could still vote only for the school committee, however, convinced the legislature to retain the elective method although reducing the size of the committee to five elected at large for staggered terms.

It was the 5-person At Large committee which was the defendant in the Morgan case. The committee had been populated for many decades primarily by Irish Catholic lawyers interested in their political advancement.? One member of the school committee, Maurice J. Tobin, who rose to prominence when he defeated James Michael Curley for mayor in 1937 and again in 1941, then became Governor of the Commonwealth for two years and Secretary of Labor under President Harry Truman.

One of the exceptions to the rule was a gadfly named Isadore HY Muchnick, who was on the school committee for a bit in the 1950s.? Izzy Muchnick, who had been responsible for getting a tryout for Jackie Robinson at Fenway Park while he served on the City Council representing a constituency which included people of color, once stated that the school committee is the only office where there is “income but no salary.”? How corrupt individual school committee members were is difficult to quantify. One thing was certain: until a number of us worked hard to reform state campaign finance laws in the mid-1970s, each member of the school committee was the beneficiary of a yearly “testimonial” while not a candidate for office, which meant that the receipts of the evening were between him, God and the IRS.? It was well known that school committee employees would rush to these events with cash in hand.

When I had my first fundraiser after being elected, in December 1972 at the Aquarium, we charged $15.? Many school employees attended, even some who had not been invited and paid $25 cash, because that was the norm.? Peter Shrag’s Village School Downtown speaks of appointments for custodians and truant officers being awarded in groups of five so that each school committee member could get one. At Large elections were not a good system, especially since those elected were not representative of the city nor of the children attending the schools.

When running in 1971, I made changing the structure of the school committee one of my campaign planks. I worked very hard to pull it off, but did not succeed until a referendum held in 1981, just as I was exiting City Hall; I was one of the chairs of a committee advocating for a change to 9 districts and 4 At Large.? This was not the number I had started out with, but I was happy to accept it.? We prevailed, given the financial support of the business community which understood there was something very wrong with a school committee where most everyone was white, while the majority of the school children were not.

I believed, deep in my heart, that by having school committee members elected from districts, we would have citizens, parents, the common man and woman stepping up to run.? Was I wrong! The great majority of those elected weren’t that different from those elected before, even though some of them might not have looked the same. It became an enormous bureaucracy with numerous staff. One school committee member, Grace Romero, known as “Amazing Grace,” even had a man named Weeks who attended events with her and tasted her food since she was convinced someone was trying to poison her.? This did not inspire confidence.

While Ray Flynn was mayor, a number of us prevailed upon him to put an appointed committee on the ballot. It succeeded and some very good and decent people were appointed to the school committee, the thought being it would be de-politicized.? The statute required that a referendum on maintaining that committee be placed back on the ballot in the late 1990s when Tom Menino was mayor.? The only neighborhoods which opposed the appointed committee were Roxbury and South Boston.? Those neighborhoods finally agreed on something!

That’s the committee we have right now.? It is a committee which some believe is invisible.? There are discussions, and legislation, to return to an elected committee.? Many of us who observed scenarios such as I have referenced over a period of years consider that option disastrous.

One more footnote, even though the Boston School Committee of 9 and 4 did not fare well, the City Council of 9 and 4, at least until its recent difficulties, has been representative, and I would argue productive.

Who knows what happens next – whether a future school committee might attract men like A Lawrence Lowell, who later became President of Harvard, or whether it will serve as a steppingstone for those looking to advance themselves politically.

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