Forty years ago this June, US District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. ordered Boston to begin busing white and black students to integrate in its racially divided school district. The court order unleashed one of the most ferocious episodes of urban unrest in the country’s history, a period that continues to blemish Boston’s reputation today.
The most famous chronicle of the period remains J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families.
LynNell Hancock, a Columbia University journalism professor, writes a lush paean to the classic history of the city’s busing crisis in the January/February edition of the Columbia Journalism Review. Hancock’s essay, “Uncommon ground,” examines how Lukas, who worked for The Baltimore Sun and The New York Times, achieved what few journalists or others have in the years after Common Ground hit bookshelves in 1985.
“Lukas probably had no intention of writing the great American education story,” Hancock says. “But no nonfiction narrative journalist has touched his genius on the subject before or since.” The book won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.
The article unpacks Lukas’s journalistic techniques, his uncanny ability to analyze major political players like Louise Day Hicks, the notorious Boston School Committee chairwoman; his carefully synced pacing and structure; and his tenacity and fidelity to journalism as a craft. Lukas’s decision to spend four years studying an anti-busing Charlestown family before ditching them as too extreme and settling on the comparatively genteel McGoffs is just one example of what Hancock calls the journalist’s “relentless curiosity” and “legendary intensity” that “sends chills down the spines of the average journalist.”
Hancock underlines that Lukas foreshadowed the decades of white flight that upended the valiant, but ultimately failed desegregation program. She notes that schools in Boston that were 60 percent white 40 years ago are 13 percent white today. The last vestiges busing plan that roiled Boston ended last year.
Lukas also sensed that socio-economic disparities even more than racial ones would rise to the top of the education agenda. Indeed, white flight combined with the more recent phenomenon of middle class black flight prompted by the search for better schools means that desegregation programs have been falling by the wayside for years. This week, the federal courts allowed Arkansas to discontinue providing funds to desegregation programs in Little Rock, the site of another historic racial battle, and two other school districts.
Hancock laments that the advantages of busing in places like Hartford or Raleigh/Wake County, North Carolina, have largely been ignored. (One might add Metco, the Boston and Springfield desegregation program to that list.) Today, policymakers place a premium not on racial integration “done right” to produce gains in student achievement but on charter school creation and teacher evaluation programs.
Finally, Hancock wonders what Lukas would have thought about “this new technocratic climate” “Common Ground is long overdue for a modern sequel,” she concludes. Sadly, Lukas will not be the author of that work. In 1997 at age 64, he committed suicide.
– GABRIELLE GURLEY
COMMONWEALTH
The latest print issue is out. Access it in its entirety online here.
Do district attorneys rubber-stamp police use of deadly force?
Wendy Kaminer and Liam Kerr debate over dark money.
Do Bob Master and Rushika Fernandopulle have the cure for what ails American medicine?
John McDonough, Boston’s interim school superintendent, pushes a bold plan to revamp the teacher hiring process.
Massachusetts may be reliably blue on national political maps, but the inside of the state is increasingly polarized, reports MassINC pollster Steve Koczela.
Meet public defender Anuj Khetarpal, part of an effort to have state attorneys handle more cases for indigent defendants.
BEACON HILL
The Senate tomorrow will take up a bill on early voting that expands on the House-approved measure by allowing extended balloting in all statewide biennial elections and primaries beginning in 2016, rather than just the presidential election and primaries.
State leaders agree on plan to boost funding of the state pension fund so that it is on track to be fully funded by 2036.
Federal prosecutors in ex-Probation boss John O’Brien’s corruption trial may try to paint rigged Probation hiring as a vote-buying scheme by House Speaker Robert DeLeo; DeLeo’s lawyer rips the claim as “fatally flawed and ludicrous.”
MUNICIPAL MATTERS
A study on how to improve downtown Lynn suggests more parks and restaurants, the Item reports.
Boston Police Commissioner William Evans announces a shake-up of the department’s command staff. The moves increase the share of the 22 top jobs held by minority officers from 42 to 54 percent.
Struggling Shrewsbury has limited revenue options, with state and federal aid ebbing and little hope for an expanded tax base, the Telegram & Gazette reports.
The remains of the Lawrence mill ravaged by fire on Monday will be demolished after investigators figure out what caused the blaze, the Eagle-Tribune reports.
Lowell police surround a convenience store where a man is holding a gun on the checkout clerk, only to discover that the scene was part of a short comedy film being shot in the store, the Sun reports.
Leominster steps up enforcement around vacant and abandoned properties.
CASINOS
Keller@Large says don’t bet against Revere voters rejecting the new casino plan.
NATIONAL POLITICS/WASHINGTON
The federal budget agreement includes $75 million in disaster relief for fishermen reeling from depleted stocks and tighter federal regulations on catch limits.
Maine discovers hundreds of welfare recipients are withdrawing their money from ATMs at liquor stores and other restricted places, Governing reports.
Vermont has one of the highest rates of heroin and prescription drug abuse in the country.
Slate wants more politicians to be like embattled New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. The bridge scandal has already cost Christie something more valuable than a shot at the presidency: his fleeting bromance with Bruce Springsteen.
The Atlantic asks, what’s it like to have the president sit down next to you in a coffee shop?
ELECTIONS
Cambridge City Councilor Leland Cheung looks ready to join the Democratic race for lieutenant governor.
Americans for Prosperity , the Koch-funded dark money group, hammers vulnerable Democrats over the Affordable Care Act.
BUSINESS/ECONOMY
Boston Fed chairman Eric Rosengren will announce today the six recipients of a new $1.8 million grant program the Fed is launching to help jump-start economic development in struggling Massachusetts cities.
A federal Appeals Court shot down the FCC’s authority to require so-called “net neutrality” by Internet service providers, which required the broadband companies to ensure there was no favoritism in the speed of digital traffic.
A federal judge rejects the $760 million NFL concussion settlement as too low, Reuters reports.
Another federal judge rules that Oklahoma’s same-sex marriage ban is unconstitutional, the Washington Post reports.
Greater Boston takes a look at bullying in the workplace and efforts by some states to pass bans on it.
EDUCATION
State officials issue a devastating report on the Spencer East-Brookfield Regional School District, citing poor budget planning, squandered money, and declining performance, the Telegram & Gazette reports.
Salem schools, considered underperforming by the state, reach out to adults in the community to serve as volunteer tutors, the Salem News reports.
The Mohawk Trail Regional School District in Western Mass. is considering moving to a four-day school week to saving costs on busing.
HEALTH CARE
Paul Levy says the rosy prospectus from Partners HealthCare in promoting a planned $425 million bond issue is right on the money because of the lack of oversight and regulatory restraints on the largest provider in Massachusetts.
New Bedford police and firefighters will begin carrying Narcan, a nasal spray used to reverse overdoses from opiates, which are now causing more deaths than car accidents nationwide.
TRANSPORTATION
Shirley Leung cheers the investments being made in transit by the Patrick administration, but says the real test will be whether the next governor keeps the projects on track. MassLive outlines plans to increase rail service between Boston and Springfield.
CRIMINAL JUSTICE
Vandals marred Plymouth Rock, spraypainting the word “LIES” over the “1620” on the boulder and drawing an obscene figure and writing several phrases on the portico surrounding the iconic symbol.
A fired Lawrence cop is sentenced to 18 months in prison for his role in a bribery scheme involving a towing company, the Eagle-Tribune reports.
Fall River officials touted the third consecutive year of a decrease in violent crime while taking a shot at Brockton and New Bedford by pointing out those cities had more murders last year than Fall River.
