Ford Hall Forum at Suffolk University; Brandeis University Press; the Boston Desegregation and Busing Initiative and GBH Forum Network present:
Children on the Move: The History of Stark Solutions to Address Inequality in Boston Schools
Screening of the GBH News documentary Never Cried: Boston’s Busing Legacy and a talkback with the filmmaker Emily Judem and
A book talk with Susan E. Eaton, author of The Other Boston Busing Story: What’s Won and Lost Across the Boundary Line.
The evening’s moderator is Stephanie Leydon, executive producer of digital video, GBH News.
Thursday, November 7, 2024
Modern Theatre, 525 Washington Street, Boston, MA 02111
6:00 p.m
Register here to attend in person.
Register here to attend via ZOOM.
This event is free and open to everyone.
Never Cried: Boston’s Busing Legacy
Two sisters confront their trauma from Boston’s busing crisis in a powerful new GBH documentary produced by GBH News’ Emily Judem and Stephanie Leydon.
In September 1974, just two days after her 14th birthday, Leola Hampton boarded a school bus that would launch her into the heart of one of the most divisive and defining moments in Boston history: court-ordered school desegregation. Hampton and her older sister, Linda Stark, were bused from their home in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Roxbury into the white, working-class neighborhood of South Boston. They navigated a violent and virulently racist high school experience so scarring that a half-century later, they are only now beginning to discuss it with each other.
The Other Boston Busing Story: What’s Won and Lost Across the Boundary Line and Susan Eaton.
METCO, America’s longest-running voluntary school desegregation program, buses black children from Boston’s city neighborhoods to predominantly white suburban schools. In contrast to the infamous violence and rage that greeted forced school busing within the city in the 1970s, the work of METCO has quietly and calmly promoted school integration. But how has this program affected the lives of its graduates? Would they choose to participate if they had it to do over again? Would they place their own children on the bus to suburbia? In The Other Boston Busing Story, sixty-five METCO graduates who are now adults answer those questions and more, vividly recalling their own stories and assessing the benefits and hardships of crossing racial and class lines on their way to school.
Susan E. Eaton is the Professor of the Practice and Director of the Sillerman Center for the Advancement of Philanthropy at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management. She is the author, most recently, of Integration Nation: Immigrants, Refugees, and America at Its Best (The New Press) and The Children in Room E4: American Education on Trial. Her previous titles include The Other Boston Busing Story: What’s Won and Lost Across the Boundary Line and, with Gary Orfield, Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education.
