When Boston’s Fight Over Busing Reached Harvard

When William G. “Bill” Fletcher Jr. ’76 arrived at Harvard in 1972, he thought he had come to a welcoming city.

He knew Boston was segregated. But from the outside, he said, the city still carried a liberal “veneer” that distinguished it from other places in the country.

Within his first week at the College, that facade fell.

Just minutes from Harvard Yard, Fletcher heard someone yell a racist slur and tell him to “catch.”

“I saw this can approaching my head. I ducked,” Fletcher said. “They drove off. These white guys drove off laughing.”

For members of the Class of 1976, Boston’s busing crisis unfolded almost exactly alongside their four years at Harvard — exposing racial violence just across the Charles River and forcing some students to confront how close the city’s turmoil was to campus.

The crisis formally began in June 1974, when a federal judge ordered Boston Public Schools to bus students across neighborhood lines to desegregate its schools. The ruling sparked protests and violence, especially in white neighborhoods such as South Boston.

But as the violence unfolded across the Charles River, Fletcher said the issue often felt muted on Harvard’s campus. For most students, he said, the busing fight was “irrelevant unless they were interested in politics or interested in Boston.”

For students of color and campus activists, though, busing was a “critical issue.”

Much of the activism work at the time ran through the Phillips Brooks House Association, Harvard’s largest student service organization, according to Alan Brickman ’76, who chaired the Education Committee at PBHA. While groups often engaged in advocacy in Boston, efforts rarely addressed busing directly.

Brickman said PBHA’s volunteers largely focused on Cambridge schools due to long-term partnerships with the school district.

“We were mostly placing volunteers in the Cambridge schools, so we weren’t placing volunteers in the Boston schools, for the most part,” Brickman said. “We sort of made a commitment to Cambridge, because you know, the University’s in Cambridge.”

Shortly after the ruling, Brickman said PBHA tried to expand programming to South Boston, where resistance to busing had intensified. But the principal of South Boston High School turned the organization away.

Brickman said he asked what Harvard students could do to support desegregation. The principal told him that despite the volunteer work PBHA could offer, the situation at the school was “very volatile” and could not accommodate PBHA programming.

Of the 129 arrests reported in October 1974, 40 were at South Boston High School.

Harvard sat on a boundary line: close enough for students to volunteer in Boston schools, but distant enough for many to treat the violence as someone else’s crisis. That distance narrowed sharply in April 1976, just weeks before the Class of 1976’s Commencement.

Nearly two years after the busing order took effect, Dennis J. Henderson ’79, a Black first-year, was chased down and beaten by a group of young white people in an East Boston MBTA station. Henderson was returning from a volunteer shift counseling children in the city and told The Crimson at the time that the group let him pass before charging him from behind in “some sort of planned attack,” beating him while shouting racial slurs.

No one in the crowded station intervened.

The attack on Henderson served as a cold reminder to many Harvard students that the violence they had read about was not distant, but unfolding alongside them. For some students, that had been clear from the beginning of the busing crisis, and many had already tried to engage directly with the neighborhoods where the fight was being waged.

Fletcher recalled one student he knew who put himself directly inside the crisis. The student looked young enough to pass for a high schooler and “was so pissed off about what was going on,” Fletcher said, that he carried a pistol and rode along with Black children being bused into hostile neighborhoods.

“He did it to defend them if they were attacked,” Fletcher said.

Brickman also became more directly involved during his senior year, when — after years of volunteering in Cambridge — he was assigned to be a neighborhood organizer in Charlestown, a predominantly white neighborhood. He visited local shops, trying to recruit residents to a progressive organizing group.

What he encountered frightened him. Brickman said people spoke openly about stockpiling weapons and planning violent confrontations with state police enforcing the desegregation order.

“I just remember how scary it was,” he said.

Brickman said he did not fully understand the severity of the crisis until he found himself in the neighborhoods where opposition to busing had come to a head.

Still, Fletcher said, the busing order and the violence that followed were often secondary on campus to other advocacy efforts gaining traction at the same time — including the campaign for the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute and the fight over affirmative action.

In the spring of 1975, students occupied Massachusetts Hall to demand student representation in the creation of the Du Bois Institute, which they wanted established as a research center tied to the Afro-American Studies Department and as a permanent home for the study of Black life at Harvard.

The following year, the fight for affirmative action — where Fletcher chaired undergraduate organizing efforts — pushed Harvard to set concrete targets for hiring faculty and admitting students of color, rather than relying on vague promises.

Both efforts drew more attention from Harvard students than the busing crisis. But for the students organizing around them, the movements were connected by the same demand: that institutions prove their commitments to racial equality with action.

For Bruce A. Jacobs ’77, who helped with the Mass Hall sit-in, there was never a clean line between the two.

“The elitism at Harvard and the white supremacist climate in Boston at that time were related from our point of view as students of color,” he wrote in a statement.

Jacobs described the violence in Boston as “a terrible display of how many white Americans use racial hatred as an escape valve for their rage against an economically unfair society.”

“This was a time when many things were on the table,” Jacobs wrote. “Whatever your perspective, it was an intense, furious time.”

—Staff writer Shawn A. Boehmer can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at shawnb.18. Follow him on X @ShawnBoehmer.