Ruth Batson and Boston's Black Education Movement, 1950s–1970s

In 1855, after decades of petitions, protests, speeches and a court case by Boston's Black community, Massachusetts outlawed segregated public schools. A century later, Boston's schools were segregated again. As the city grew, immigrant groups settled into distinct neighborhoods; in the mid-1900s, redlining and public housing assigned by race followed. The schools became more and more segregated — and schools in Black neighborhoods suffered most from too little money, staff and resources.

In the early 1950s, Black parents, above all mothers, began to organize. One of their founders, Ruth Batson, gave the effort its name: the Black Education Movement.

Proving what no one would count

Batson, the mother of two children in Boston's public schools, joined a parent advisory council and in 1951 ran, unsuccessfully, for the Boston School Committee. In 1953 she turned to the Boston branch of the NAACP, which at her urging created a subcommittee on public schools and made her its chair. Nationally, the NAACP's lawsuits led to the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education: "In the field of public education, the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place."

Boston's segregation was de facto — no law required it, but it existed. In 1961 the NAACP and the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD) began surveying it. When they asked Superintendent Frederick Gillis for statistics, he told them the district did not record students' race. They had to build the evidence from scratch. Help came in 1962 from the Sargent Report, an official survey commissioned independently of the movement, which documented badly run-down school buildings in majority-Black neighborhoods.

Fourteen demands, refused

On June 11, 1963, Batson, Paul Parks, Mel King and others took their findings to the School Committee with 14 demands, among them:

• public acknowledgment that de facto segregation existed;
• open enrollment transfers without the existing limits;
• human relations training for principals and teachers, and permanent teachers for grades 1–3 with classes of 25;
• books and visual aids showing people of all races, and a reading program in every school for grades 1–8;
• an end to discrimination in hiring and assigning teachers, and an investigation into why Boston had no Black principal;
• a review of intelligence testing; and, most important to them, a say in choosing the next superintendent.

The committee would not even acknowledge the problem. "We assigned children to schools nearest to their homes," said Louise Day Hicks, a first-term member. "We reject the charge that this committee has deliberately segregated students." Batson recalled walking into a room full of TV cameras, with committee members "performing for the cameras": "We had gone into the lion's den, like lambs being led to the slaughter."

Lock-out, stay-out

Boycotts were a tactic Boston's equal-schools activists had used a century earlier.

Building alternatives

Parents also worked on their own. In 1963 the Higginson School Parents Organization told its principal: "Our children are not inferior, but they have been receiving, in many instances, an inferior education," listing teacher turnover, inadequate books and too little support for high achievers — urgent, they said, as the city planned three new elementary schools under urban renewal. In 1966 Batson helped create the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO), a voluntary program that placed Black students in open seats in suburban schools in Arlington, Braintree, Brookline, Lexington, Lincoln, Newton and Wellesley — hundreds of children found an alternative this way.

The Racial Imbalance Law

Activists turned to the State House. In 1963 state representative Royal Bolling introduced a bill to withhold state money from racially imbalanced schools — those where more than 50% of students were minorities. It addressed the racial makeup of schools rather than what caused it, and after several attempts it became law in August 1965.

The Boston School Committee refused to comply and lost millions of dollars in state aid. By 1971, with Hicks gone to Congress, the committee began drafting plans to comply, but, given the committee's delays, the State Board of Education announced it would write its own. In 1974 the legislature, responding to public sentiment, repealed the law. The governor vetoed the repeal — then introduced an amendment that ended the withholding of aid, which passed and effectively gutted the law.

So the movement's leaders went to court. The result was the landmark case Morgan v. Hennigan.

Sources

Based on "Black Education Movement in the 20th Century," National Park Service, part of the series Desegregation in the Cradle of Liberty; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The original draws on Ruth Batson's The Black Educational Movement in Boston: A Sequence of Historical Events (Northeastern University School of Education, 2001) and Zebulon Vance Miletsky's Before Busing: A History of Boston's Long Black Freedom Struggle (University of North Carolina Press, 2022).