How Massachusetts representative Ray Flynn left the Shadow of Busing: Boston politics in the fall of 1974

Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Summer 1999 by Kennedy, Patrick

In the fall of 1974, Boston was the site of violent conflict over the issue of public school desegregation and its implementation. It was during these months that State Representative Raymond L. Flynn (D. -- South Boston) entered the limelight and accelerated his political career, a career which before very long found him in the mayor's office. His opposition to busing spoke to many parents in his constituency and his constant emphasis on important but arguably secondary issues such as police presence and brutality and the slant of the press shifted the focus away from the less solid points in anti-busers' arguments; away from the race issue. By the time of the 1974 election, Flynn had already made himself popular and well-known by opposing busing on the grounds it violated parents' rights. His reelection in 1974 was if anything anticlimactic, but his activity in the September and October preceding the election was significant because of how Flynn opposed busing. His rhetoric and his politics differed slightly -- beginning most noticeably in this period, September through November of 1974 -- from that of his anti-busing allies. The effect of these events on Boston was that, in time, the city elected as mayor a one-time busing opponent who went on to reach out to the black community and to shift the focus as much as possible back to the neighborhoods.

Beginning after the Civil War, accelerating when Reconstruction ended and turning into a flood after World War II, African-Americans fled the oppressive atmosphere of the South and made their way to the comparatively tolerant northern cities like Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. A significant number migrated to Boston and, along with immigrants from other parts of the world, like Latin America and southeast Asia, changed the character of many of Boston's neighborhoods. Predominantly Irish and Jewish in 1955, Roxbury in 1970 was mostly black; seemingly overnight, Mattapan, once almost all Jewish, transformed into an African-American community; blacks moved into pockets of once solidly Irish Dorchester. These changes were facilitated in part by the G.I. Bill which allowed many young World War II veterans, including the many "white ethnics" of Boston, the opportunity to buy houses in the suburbs and move themselves and their families out of the city. From "1950 to 1960, when Boston was losing about 100,000 whites to the suburbs, almost 25,000 blacks were born or moved into the city."^sup 1^

Once settled in their new homes, Boston blacks found the quality of their children's education sorely lacking. The books were older and there were no arrangements for students with special needs. Parents "were angry at the number of inexperienced and substitute teachers at the black schools."2 At the time, children were assigned to schools in their neighborhoods. The problem was that the city didn't spend enough on schools in black areas to meet their educational needs.

A similar problem existed in the South, where the schools were segregated by law. The Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896 made legal the "separate but equal" doctrine, meaning it was lawful to segregate blacks to separate facilities as long as these were of equal quality. In the 1950s, a black father in Topeka, Kansas, decided the all-black school where he was supposed to send his daughter was not equal to the all-white school closer by. This led to the United States Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. The court agreed with Mr. Brown and concluded "that in the field of public education, the doctrine of separate-but-equal has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."3

Many in northern cities believed school segregation was exclusively a Southern problem. After all, in the South segregation was the rule because of laws passed specifically for that purpose. In places like Boston, on the other hand, black students attended different schools from whites -- and indeed as Irish students attended different schools than Italians because, it seemed, things had just happened that way. Blacks simply lived in different sections of the city, that was all. Many in Boston believed "segregation was not allowed; therefore, there was no segregation."^sup 4^ This notion was dealt a blow in 1965 when the state of Massachusetts passed the Racial Imbalance Act, often referred to as the RIA, which sought to "eliminate racial imbalance in public school systems, whatever its cause [emphasis added]. School boards must act when a school's enrollment exceeds 50 percent non-white."5 The RIA was "the most stringent law of its kind in the nation."6

Agitation against this law soon began. Imbalance law opponent Louise Day Hicks was elected to the Boston School Committee and later to the Boston City Council on this issue, although voters declined to use the mayoral election of 1967 to express their opposition to this one law and Hicks lost to Kevin White. One of the key players in the fight against the RIA was State Representative Raymond Flynn.