This is an excerpt from my book-in-progress, You Would Choose Now: Measuring America’s Progress Toward Fairness and Tolerance. It’s a data-driven exploration of progress (or not) in public opinion and civil rights. The completed chapters are available as an Early Access edition on LeanPub.
This excerpt is from Chapter 4, Segregation, which I added on November 2, 2026.
September 7, 1978 was my first day of sixth grade. I left my house in West Roxbury, which is a neighborhood of Boston, walked a few blocks to the bus stop, and got on the bus. I rode east into another neighborhood, Roslindale, and past the Washington Irving Middle School, where most kids in West Roxbury went — but we did not stop there. Instead we continued east into another neighborhood, Mattapan, to the Solomon Lewenberg Middle School.
You might wonder why I didn’t go to the closest school to my house, which was less than two miles away — or even the second closest, the William B. Rogers Middle School, which was three miles away. Why was I bused to the Lewenberg school, more than four miles away?
To understand that, you have to understand some Boston history. In 1974, federal judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. ruled that the Boston Public Schools had deliberately maintained racial segregation. Although Massachusetts had no laws requiring separate schools, Garrity found that the School Committee had intentionally drawn attendance zones, located new schools, and managed transfers in ways that kept many schools almost entirely White or almost entirely Black. Because the segregation was intentional — and not just the result of segregated housing patterns — it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
To remedy the violation, Garrity ordered a desegregation plan that reassigned students to different schools. For many children, including me, that meant riding a bus across the city to attend a school in a different neighborhood.
The first year of the plan was one of the ugliest episodes in Boston’s history, the desegregation busing crisis. On the first day of school, hundreds of protesters gathered outside South Boston High School, where buses carrying Black students from Roxbury were met by violent crowds. As police escorted students into the school, demonstrators threw rocks, bottles, and eggs. Several people were injured, and many protesters were arrested.
Throughout the school year, there were fights inside the schools, attacks on buses, and repeated confrontations between protesters and police. Anti-busing rallies drew thousands of participants and counter-protesters.
Conflict continued into the following year. In April 1976, a newspaper photographer captured a White teenager attacking a Black attorney with the staff of an American flag. The photograph, titled The Soiling of Old Glory, appeared in newspapers nationwide and became a symbol of the crisis.
After 1976, the protests and violence subsided. When I got on the bus in 1978, the desegregation plan was starting its fifth year, and for me the academic year was uneventful.
But Boston is still a highly segregated city, like many other cities in the United States. In this chapter, we’ll look at attitudes about segregation, how they have changed over the last fifty years, and how people experience segregation now.
Boston was not the first city to use busing to desegregate schools. Some of the first were Evanston, Illinois, in 1967 and Berkeley, California, in 1968. In 1965, in Charlotte, North Carolina, a group of Black families sued the Board of Education for failing to desegregate the schools. A federal court ordered the school district to implement busing. In 1971, the order was appealed to the Supreme Court, which unanimously supported the order. By then, federal courts had ordered busing as a remedy for segregation in several other cities.
Boston was also not the only city where busing was met with violence. In 1971 in Pontiac, Michigan, members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) bombed ten empty school buses.
Public opinion and busing¶
In 1972, the first year of the General Social Survey, busing was a national political issue. Presidential candidate George Wallace campaigned against it in the Democratic primaries, and President Nixon asked Congress to halt new busing orders.
This history is why the GSS included this question:
In general, do you favor or oppose the busing of Black and White school children from one school district to another?
The following figure shows the percentage in favor, for Black and non-Black respondents.
Figure 1:busing — Time series by race of respondent: percent in favor of busing for school integration, non-Black and Black respondents.
Among non-Black respondents, support for busing rose from 15% to 34% between 1972 and 1996. Among Black respondents, a majority supported busing throughout, rising from 53% to 61%.
This and the other examples in the chapter indicate that we have made progress toward integration and tolerance. None of this work is done — West Roxbury is still mostly White, and Mattapan is still mostly Black, and many Americans still live, work, and socialize in spaces that are regrettably segregated. But the trends are consistently toward integration.
This is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of You Would Choose Now. The rest of the chapter covers restrictive covenants and the Fair Housing Act, segregation in neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces, and the most aptly named Supreme Court case ever, Loving v. Virginia.
The first four chapters of You Would Choose Now are available now as an Early Access edition on LeanPub. If you buy now, you get each new chapter as it is released.