The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 9, 2019
If you grew up as a high school kid in the 1970s (as, ahem, I did) then it would be hard to imagine the day that the debate over school busing to achieve racial desegregation — or, “forced busing,” as opponents masterfully branded it — would not only go away but become largely forgotten.
It was impossible back then to turn on your radio and not hear news reports about a heated debate in some school district from Southern California to New England — most notably Boston, where the launch in 1974 of busing to send white kids from working-class South Boston and black kids from Roxbury across invisible racial lines sparked violent riots.
Ever see what many people think is the most iconic image of a divided America in the 1970s — a furious white protester trying to impale a black civil rights attorney with an American flag? That happened on the inflamed streets of Boston in the glorious Bicentennial year of 1976, and the trigger was a demonstration over school busing. Today, historians like Rick Perlstein have pegged the Boston busing crisis as a pivotal moment in rising white backlash against liberal reforms of the 1960s that carried Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980, a right-wing counter-revolution that hasn’t ended yet.