Last updated: May 30, 2024
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Desegregation Protests at the Bunker Hill Monument
Boston Public Library
This article is part of the series "Desegregation in the Cradle of Liberty." This series explores the Black struggle for equal education in Boston from 1787 to 1976, culminating with protests and violence experienced under forced busing in Boston in the 1970s.
During the struggle to desegregate Boston public schools in the 1970s, activists rallied and protested throughout the city, including at many historic sites that now comprise the National Parks of Boston. In 1975, busing arrived in Charlestown, and with its arrival the Bunker Hill Monument and surrounding area became center stage in the fight against forced busing.
Local residents felt it a major injustice that they now had to bus their children to other schools, after having had so recently fought for their neighborhood schools during Urban Renewal. They did not want Black students from outside their neighborhood using their schools. Many residents felt the City had broken its promises to them.
The community’s struggle against Urban Renewal also prepared local residents for this new fight against desegregation. Many of the community activists who organized against urban renewal came back to organize against busing.
School Starts
When school began on September 8, 1975, parents and youth gathered in Charlestown to protest busing. Though the protests initially focused on maintaining neighborhood schools, they soon exposed the racist views of many people and violence quickly escalated.
Hordes of protesters lined up on the first day of school along with a large police and media presence. Staged at Bunker Hill Monument and "pressed against the fence," reporters waited to see what would happen.[1]
While the morning started off peacefully, the tone quickly changed. Local youth beat and burned an effigy of a Black person on Bunker Hill Avenue as a sign of their increasing hostility to busing.[2]
The Boston Phoenix, Volume 4, Issue 37, September 16, 1975
Charlestown parents felt that busing violated their rights since they did not have a choice on where to send their children to school. The Boston Globe captured this feeling among Charlestown residents when it wrote:
The first battle of Bunker Hill began 'America’s War of Independence.' Now, a second battle of Bunker Hill is going on, day after day, because the people of an ancient, pleasant and self-contained Irish-American neighborhood bitterly object to court-ordered busing for their schools.[3]
Powder Keg
To organize their anti-busing efforts, Charlestown parents formed Powder Keg, an offshoot of the anti-busing group Restore Our Alienated Rights (ROAR) in South Boston. Putting their newfound community activist skills to work, mothers primarily planned and organized many of this group’s protests.
These mothers used tactics observed from the anti-war and women’s liberation movement of the 1960s. Claiming the issue as a "women’s issue" since it impacted their families, these women took to the streets to protest busing.[4]
The Charlestown mothers vowed to march every day at 11am in the Bunker Hill area until the city stopped the busing. Pat Russell, the head of Powder Key, told The Boston Globe:
If Martin Luther King could march in silent prayer, the mothers of Charlestown can also do it in silent prayer. We are going to march every day until our prayers are answered.[5]
Boston Globe, September 9, 1975
The Middle Ground versus Radical Militantism
While much of the community remained up in arms about forced busing, some members tried to be amicable. Moe Gillen, who had become a leader during the fight for urban renewal, returned as a community activist. While against busing, Gillen believed it could be possible to find a middle ground in the desegregation plan to help achieve everyone’s goals. During the fall of 1975, he put together a task force of state representatives, clergy, parents, and several militants to negotiate the plan with the court.[6] The task force run by Gillen proved to be relatively successful. They succeeded in having a say in the future desegregation plans for the high school and prevented Charlestown High School from being turned into a technical magnet school. Due to Gillen’s ability to negotiate between the different factions in Charlestown, Judge Garrity invited him to serve on the Citywide Coordinating Committee, a parents advisory committee on desegregation.
While some, such as Gillen, navigated the middle ground to represent the community and its needs, many turned to radical militantism. Four members of the task force resigned in protest after Gillen took the position on Citywide Coordinating Committee. This radical militantism often turned protests and rallies violent. For example, in 1976, a Charlestown resident, Joseph Rakes, escalated the protest at City Hall and attacked Black Civil Rights lawyer Ted Landsmark with the American flag.
Politics at Bunker Hill
Bunker Hill Monument has long been the center of the Charlestown community and continues to be a source of local pride. Because of this, many politicians, including anti-busing leaders, have used the Monument and the memory of the Battle to connect themselves to Boston’s Revolutionary legacy. For example, in 1966, Louise Day Hicks marched in Charlestown during the Bunker Hill Day Parade as she campaigned for mayor.
According to The Boston Globe:
Of all the thousands in the line of march, attention was focused on one group of participants – the politicians. Nearly all office seekers.... were scattered throughout the line of march.[7]
Digital Commonwealth
Beaten at Bunker Hill
As busing continued, racial violence escalated in Charlestown. Residents threw rocks, bricks, and bottles at the buses carrying Black students through Charlestown. Other times, local residents attacked Black students..
One of the most stand out instances of violence occurred in November 1977. Local residents attacked and beat a Black school group from Washington, D.C. who were visiting the Bunker Hill Monument.[8] Covered locally, the story made its way to national coverage in The New York Times as an example of violence inspired by court ordered busing:
The monument is situated in the mostly white Charlestown section, one of several Boston neighborhoods plagued by racial violence in the last several years. Many whites have viewed the violence as a result of a court-ordered integration plan.[9]
The Mayor of Boston issued a formal apology for the attack:
I apologize for the city. It will be a scar on their minds. It will be a scar on the city.[10]
Busing and the Legacy of Bunker Hill
In his Pulitzer prize winning book Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, J. Anthony Lukas captured the hostile mood of Charlestown in the mid-1970s:
If the Townies differed on how to commemorate the Massacre, there was nothing equivocal about June 17, 1975, the two hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill. This was Charlestown’s big day, its moment in the Bicentennial spotlight. But the threat of Garrity’s order hung like the clouds of cannon smoke over the hill, and Powder Keg lost no opportunity to draw parallels with 1775. One large banner draped from a Monument Square rooftop said it all; in bold black letters against a red background it proclaimed: 'We’re right back where we began 200 years ago.'[11]
Despite their best efforts, anti-busing protesters did not succeed in stopping the integration of the schools and the movement began to fizzle. Anti-busing meetings started to draw less and less participants, prompting one person to remark:
We had an anti-busing meeting last Tuesday and, believe me, if the British had walked in they would have laughed us off the battlefield...Where are our patriots? Lying dead on Bunker Hill? Is this what your great-grandfather fought and died for?[12]
The iconic site of Bunker Hill has borne witness to many of the hateful moments that emerged out of the 1970s desegregation movement. While Boston continues to reconcile the ugliness of the response to forced busing and its long-term impact on the city, sites of protest and unrest, such as Bunker Hill, continue to be active spaces of Boston’s ongoing revolution.
Overview Timeline Article
Black Struggle for Equal EducationFootnotes
[1] Joseph Alsop, "Second Battle of Bunker Hill," The Boston Globe, October 11, 1975.
[2] Dave O’Brian, "Shifting Moods: Cops and the Crowds at Charlestown," The Boston Phoenix, Volume 4, Issue 37, September 16, 1975: 8-9 and 19.
[3] Joseph Alsop, "Second Battle of Bunker Hill," The Boston Globe, October 11, 1975.
[4] Kathleen Banks Nutter, "'Militant Mothers:' Boston, Busing, and the Bicentennial of 1976," Historical Journal of Massachusetts, (Fall 2010), 54-55.
[5] "Boston School Attendance Increases 5.7% Charlestown Mothers March Against Busing," The Boston Globe, September 9, 1975.
[6] Ronald Formisano, Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991): 123.
[7] "200,000 View Marchers 6000 Parade at Bunker Hill," The Boston Globe, June 17, 1966.
[8] George Croft, "3 Men Plead Innocent in Charlestown Attack," The Boston Globe, November 23, 1977.
[9] "Visiting Black Group Attacked in Boston," The New York Times, November 15, 1977.
[10] "Visiting Black Group Attacked in Boston," The New York Times, November 15, 1977.
[11] J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, (Vintage: New York, 1986), 317.
[12] Lukas, Common Ground, 472.