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作者

来源

JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY,Vol.43,Issue2,P.204-217

语言

英文

关键字

Boston; Jim Crow; segregation; civil rights; school desegregation

作者单位

[Miletsky, Zebulon Vance] SUNY Stony Brook, 100 Nicolls Rd, Stony Brook, NY 11794 USA. Miletsky, ZV (reprint author), SUNY Stony Brook, 100 Nicolls Rd, Stony Brook, NY 11794 USA. E-Mail: zebulon.miletsky@stonybrook.edu

摘要

Boston's long Civil Rights Movement in the twentieth century, before the infamous busing crisis, has not received nearly as much attention as the school desegregation period that was ushered in by Federal court order in 1974. While the story of Boston's busing crisis is well known, my goal is to place that moment within the context of a longer freedom struggle in Boston and highlight the city's history of racial inequality and segregation. By looking at both the nineteenthcentury origins of legal discrimination in Boston and the activism during the four decades before the 1970s, I reconstruct these humble but effective efforts in which activists focused mainly on issues of employment, housing, educational equality, and quality of life. The goal of this essay, then, is to contextualize the busing conversation and reconstruct the political context in which black Bostonians embarked on various campaigns to reclaim the legacy of freedom and equality established earlier, in the nineteenth century. In that sense, I argue that Boston was not simply a "southern space" ensconced in the North, but rather was the original template for segregation in the nation, as cited in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). (1)The issues engaged by Boston's freedom movement, from de facto school segregation to employment discrimination, challenge many prevailing popular assumptions about postwar black freedom struggles in other cities. This article aims to investigate the origins of that movement and what gave rise to the unique nature of civil rights organizing activities in Boston before Busing.