Morgan v. Hennigan: The Court Case That Desegregated Boston's Schools

Part of the National Park Service series "Desegregation in the Cradle of Liberty," which follows the Black struggle for equal education in Boston from 1787 to 1976.

After decades of activism, advocacy and legislation, Boston's Black community still faced major barriers to education. The Boston School Committee kept denying that the city's schools were racially segregated and did nothing to open up opportunities for Black students. So Black leaders turned to the courts.

The lawsuit

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) sued the school committee. The case took its name from Tallulah Morgan, a Black mother of three students, and Jim Hennigan, chairman of the Boston School Committee. It reached the U.S. District Court in 1972 before Judge W. Arthur Garrity.

Fourteen families, the Morgans among them, argued that the committee had failed to comply with the state's 1965 Racial Imbalance Act.

The ruling

After two years of hearings and study of the schools, Judge Garrity ruled for the plaintiffs on June 21, 1974. He found that

the school authorities had knowingly carried out a systematic program of segregation affecting all of the city's students, teachers and school facilities and had intentionally brought about or maintained a dual school system; that the entire school system of Boston was unconstitutionally segregated.

The ruling drew much criticism, but also defenders. One historian later argued that the evidence left no room to fault it: while the committee denied that de facto segregation existed, it had in fact been practicing de jure segregation, even busing Black and white students to schools other than the ones nearest their homes. (De facto segregation happens despite whatever policy is in place; de jure segregation is imposed by rules, here the committee's own policy.)

With the new school year less than ten weeks away, Garrity ordered a plan to meet the state's racial imbalance law. Phase 1 bused students between white South Boston and Black Roxbury, two of the city's most "geographically isolated" and racially segregated neighborhoods.

Protest

Protest spread quickly across Boston, from City Hall to Dorchester Heights. Parents did not want their children bused out of their neighborhoods, and many objected to pairing South Boston with Roxbury.

Black parents were divided too. Many did not see how being sent to South Boston, another working-class neighborhood, would bring the educational opportunities they had fought for. Ruth Batson, a leader of the Black Education Movement, recalled friends asking why they did not simply press for better schools in their own district. Batson and others rejected that, because they had lived through "separate but equal." Their reasoning was practical: more money was being spent on certain white schools than on Black ones, so they wanted Black children in the schools where the resources were.

Opposition that began as a defense of neighborhood schools soon laid bare the open racism of many white Bostonians. City Council member Louise Day Hicks, a former member of the school committee, State Senator "Billy" Bulger and State Representative Michael Flaherty, both of South Boston, issued a "Declaration of Clarification" against the plan. It cast Roxbury as crime-infested, claimed that sending children there was the only real issue, and made inflammatory claims about Black residents killing white people and about the danger to white women passing through the neighborhood.

Busing begins

On the morning of September 9, 1974, school buses rolled across Boston under Phase 1, the outcome opponents of desegregation had most feared.

All eyes were on South Boston High School. Restore Our Alienated Rights (ROAR), an antibusing group led by Hicks, urged white parents to keep their children home. Ten years earlier, the school committee had declared such boycotts illegal when the Black community used them; now Hicks and others took up the same civil rights tactic.

In the shadow of the Dorchester Heights Monument, several hundred white students and adults gathered at the school to protest the arrival of Black students. Only 56 of the 800 Black students assigned there came, partly out of fear. Police escorted the buses as protesters threw rocks and bottles, broke windows and shouted racial slurs at the students inside.

Busing continues

For 1975–1976 Garrity ordered a new plan, the McCormack Plan, which became the permanent means of integrating the schools. Meant to improve on the first plan, it covered the whole city rather than only South Boston and Roxbury. Groups in other neighborhoods, such as East Boston and Charlestown, then tried to block desegregation as well, and as in South Boston their efforts often turned hostile and deepened the city's racial divide.

Despite protest, violence and national attention, busing continued under official mandate for almost a decade. It ended in 1982, when Garrity handed monitoring to the Massachusetts State Board of Education; he issued his final order in 1985.

The divisions and hostility of those years left a lasting mark on Boston, and efforts to heal them continue. The case's fiftieth anniversary came in 2024.

Sources

• National Park Service, Boston National Historical Park and Boston African American National Historic Site, "The Fight for Equal Education Continues: Morgan v. Hennigan": https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/morgan-v-hennigan.htm
• The article draws on Ruth Batson, The Black Educational Movement in Boston: A Sequence of Historical Events: A Chronology (Northeastern University School of Education, 2001), which reproduces the decision and the "Declaration of Clarification"; Jim Vrabel, A People's History of the New Boston (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014); Zebulon Vance Miletsky, Before Busing: A History of Boston's Long Black Freedom Struggle (University of North Carolina Press, 2022); and Ronald Formisano, Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
• Spelling corrections: the NPS article writes the historian's name "Vabrel," the family's "Mogans," and the chronology's author "Baston" in its notes; this page uses Vrabel, Morgans and Batson. The article's Boston Globe front page and Boston Public Library photograph are not reproduced.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.