World War II set the stage for a mass migration of black Southerners to major cities in the North, Midwest and West. Between 1940 and 1960 about three million blacks left the South. This was the second great migration of blacks in the 20th Century. The post war history of our city, Philadelphia, illustrates how this great migration fared in northern cities during and after the war. The wartime economic boon which opened up jobs for blacks in Philadelphia shipyards and war related industries was short lived. Tens of thousands of factory jobs were lost after World War II. The closing of shipyards, steel plants, and manufacturing concerns. Including the removal of the city's textile base to none union southern cities signaled the decline of Philadelphia industry. The southern black influx continued into the 1950s. In-migration and natural population growth occurred against the backdrop of the city's diminished industrial base, the metropolitan area's transition to a service economy, and White flight to the suburbs. Discriminatory hiring practices at new suburban plants combined with segregation in suburban housing markets. To ghettoize blacks in Philadelphia, where they were excluded from the city's dwindling industrial base. They were also increasingly segregated in all black schools. As was the case in other major cities outside the south. >> After 1971, in the Swan ruling, the Supreme Court turned its attention to desegregation cases arising outside the South. These challenged the notion of defacto segregation. Where segregated schools and cities like Denver and Boston, which had no vestiges of legal apartheid, the result of residential choices made by parents or where school boards involved. A case that rose in Denver, Keyes vs School District Number One was decided in 1973. In Keyes, the court determined that the Denver School Board had gerrymandered school attendance zones and used other techniques to create segregated schools in the northeast part of the city. The court ruled that the school board's actions were State actions tantamount to law. Hence the segregation was de jure. The ruling at Keyes gave Federal District Judge Arthur Garity ruling in similar a case in Boston, a constitutional warrant to order the roll out a large scale busing plan for the city. For years the Boston School Committee had manipulated the segregation of the city schools through gerrymandered attendance zones and other techniques. The plan Judge Garrity authorized phased in the busing program over a two year period. Phase one, 1974, 75 involved busing blacks from Roxbury to South Boston High School. Southie was an Irish American stronghold that erupted in violence when the first buses with black students arrived. And remained in the state of agitation that required a police presence in the high school for the next three years. >> Phase two, 1975 to 1976, involved busing black students from the south end to Charlestown High School, another conservative, Irish-American bastion. The building standing atop Bunker Hill, directly opposite the granite Bunker Hill Memorial. Throughout 1974-75, the first year of Boston busing, outraged mothers organized an anti-busing coalition called ROAR, Restore Our Alienated Rights, and its Charlestown affiliate, Powderkeg, to vigorously protest Garrity's court order. And powder keg moms wore uniforms that consisted of blue wind breakers and white Tam O'shanter caps with blue pom poms on top. The uniformed powder keggers were a frequent presence on Bunker Hill, waving navy semaphore flags to signal to their sons and daughters that the time was ripe for a walk out from the high school. At the 1975 reenactment of the Boston Massacre, they and their ROAR allies disrupted the annual event. The journalist, J., Anthony Lucas, described ROAR's protest action, quote, Minutes before the reenactment was to begin at the historic site on the Boston waterfront. Some 400 anti-bussing demonstrators loomed in the street, led by two drummers beating a funeral dirge, 8 black-clad pallbearers carrying a pine coffin marked R.I.P. Rest in Peace Liberty. Born 1770- Died 1974. >> In 1975, 76 when blacks first entered Charlestown High School the streets and rooftops of the town erupted in violence. As youth gangs so called townies tossed everything including a kitchen sink at the police squads assigned to quell the rioting and ensure safe passage for black students. Boston's busing program was flawed by a fundamental inequity. Poor blacks and working class whites rode the busses of Boston. They bore the burden of Judge Garety's ruling, of Judge Garety's ruling, which held sway only within the city limits. The jurisdiction of the Boston School District. Liberal Senator Ted Kennedy's affluent suburb of Brookline and others around it, like it around Boston weren't affected by court-ordered busing. A point that wasn't lost on the ROAR mothers. They hurled insults and tomatoes at Kennedy, a fellow Catholic. Integration along economic as well as racial lines would have required a cross district 2A busing plan that included Boston's wealthy white suburbs. But that was not to be. Boston would remain under the federal court's busing order until the 1990s. >> In most large, central cities of the north, school district boundaries are coterminous with the city boundaries. It's tremendously difficult to achieve meaningful integration in racially, ethnically isolated inner cities, without suburban participation, i.e., meaningful integration needs a metropolitan solution. That means two way busing across school district lines, transporting city kids to suburban schools, suburban kids to city schools. The litmus test for court ordered metropolitan area wide busing was Detroit. A city that was 65% minority and 35% white. A city that was ringed by 53 virtually all-white suburbs, situated in three counties. In 1974, the Supreme Court adjudicated the constitutionality of federal District Judge Steven J., Roth's decision in the case of Milliken v., Bradley. To mandate a metropolitan area wide desegregation plan that included cross district busing of 310,000 students between Detroit and it's suburbs. Rendering it's decision in Milliken v., Bradley the Supreme Court struck down Roth's ruling. On the grounds that, while his findings proved de jure segregation on the part of school officials in Detroit, it did not prove that state or suburban officials had contributed to Detroit's situation. In a decision of monumental consequence, the high court held that cross district busing between a city and a suburb was allowable only if it could be proven that actions taken by officials of the state or a suburb contributed directly to creating or maintaining segregated schools within the city. >> Milliken v., Bradley sounded and continues to sound, a virtual death nail for metropolitan area wide busing. Which numerous careful scholars have argued is the only means highly stressed, and under resourced, increasingly segregated central city school districts have to achieve racial balance and equity. We turn next to a furious battle that was waged in New York City between black proponents of community control in Brooklyn's Ocean Hill Brownsville district in the United Federation of Teachers. This struggle marked a dramatic trend away from Black's demands for integrated schools to their demands for Black schools operated and controlled by Blacks. [MUSIC]
