White families fled to suburbs rather than send children to integrated schools

Evidence

Following a state court ruling over the summer that found a pattern of de facto segregation in Boston’s public schools, the city implements a busing plan on the first day of school. It is met with fierce resistance by local white residents. Throughout the fall, and in years to come, white protesters violently harass buses carrying Black schoolchildren; over the next decade, many white families in Boston, and in other urban areas around the country where desegregation busing is used, move to predominantly white suburbs rather than send their children to integrated schools. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1187

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the nationwide ‘white flight’ phenomenon and the limits of court-ordered desegregation as a remedy—relevant to the reader’s own work on how desegregation policy backfired. — connects to: Whites’ freedom to flee schools was denied because it exposed segregationist logic as self-defeating — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 369; Whites abandoned prized public spaces rather than see them integrated — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 433; Black working-class parents rejected one-way busing as unequal integration (+4 more)