[hurbledr]

>Boston did not have a Jim Crow system – if a black child lived in a white area, he could go to the local mostly white school.

So you are arguing that Boston was so racially tolerant in the 70's that they had no racist policies either explicit or implicit, and that a black kid could go to a white school completely unmolested? That they wouldn't be yelled at or beaten? That they would be welcomed with open arms?

[devinhelton]

What I wrote is what I wrote, and what argued is what I argued. Boston did not have a Jim Crow system whereby all blacks kids went to black schools and all white kids went to white schools. Schools were assigned by neighborhood, (with some ability for transfers). So if a neighborhood was all white, then you get a very white school. Mixed neighborhoods had more mixed schools. Here is a racial breakdown of the schools, two years before forced busing: https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/downloads/neu:m0...

So what was the experience like of the non-white kids in a majority white school (or vice versa)? That would vary a lot based on the particular school. I certainly do not argue that all schools would "welcome with open arms" outsiders of a different ethnicity. And especially not Charlestown High and South Boston High -- those neighborhood were quite parochial. When Italians started going to Charlestown High for instance, they were called "Wops" and such and there were fights. I don't have any good information on the experience of any black students attending those schools before forced busing. Most black students taking advantage of open enrollment would have gone elsewhere because Charlestown High and South Boston HIgh were crappy and overcrowded.

There was a voluntary busing program in Boston called Project Exodus in the mid 1960s whereby up to 600 black students were bused to mostly white schools. There was a survey of parents, that found ( https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/downloads/neu:m0... ) : "Other findings indicate that the mothers think that grades have improved, the amount of homework the children have to do has increased, their children have more white friends, that there is not a lot of prejudice or discrimination encountered at the new schools. With respect to this last distribution, only seven (or 10%) of the respondents felt that their children encountered a lot of prejudice, fifteen percent thought their children encountered some, while 70 percent thought their children encountered litttle or no prejudice or discrimination"