Before Busing

Don't let the title fool you. Before Busing: Boston's Long Black Freedom Struggle is not a book about the historical lead-up to busing, the controversial strategy to desegregate public schools in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Zebulon Miletsky does offer a fresh take on parts of that story, but he goes much farther. Opening with the Boston arrival of the slave ship Desire in 1638 and closing with a tribute to Black churches as modern vehicles for social change, Miletsky avoids simplistic cause and effect frameworks. Instead, he centers the agency, strategizing, and decision-making of African-American civil rights leaders across more than four centuries of U.S. history. He is singularly focused in his aim to write a new history “that undermines the myth of Boston as a city devoid of racial tensions” (1). While this is a noble pursuit, it's never clear which of Miletsky's broad cast of actors or antagonists believes such a myth or how it shapes daily life. At times, Miletsky appears to be arguing with an elusive ghost idea that haunts but fails to manifest in evidentiary flesh. Yet Miletsky delivers an action-packed historical narrative brimming with enough plot twists, actors, and political intrigue to keep even the most rabid history lover hungry for more.Miletsky is at his scholarly best when connecting fine-grained biographical analysis of his protagonists with the larger political context constraining and enabling their actions. In chapter two, the rivalries between Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, and William Monroe Trotter burst with technicolor realness, channeling white America's obsessive drive to temper calls for Black political, social, or economic equality. Miletsky presents this towering trinity of Black political life as a master lesson on how personal grudges and complicated family histories have shaped the civil rights movement as much as white America's dubious moral code. Miletsky gives readers a brief snapshot of Washington, DuBois, and Trotter all seated at Harvard's 1896 commencement exercises. Washington, who received an honorary degree from Harvard that year, spoke these words: “One of the most vital questions that touch our American life, is how to bring the strong, wealthy and learned into helpful touch with the poorest, the most ignorant, and humble and at the same time, make the one appreciate the vitalizing, strengthening influence of the other. How shall we make the mansions on yon Beacon Street feel and see the need of the spirits in the lowliest cabin in Alabama cotton fields or Louisiana sugar bottoms?”18 Washington's articulation of mutuality and interdependence as cornerstones of America's quest for racial progress incensed DuBois and Trotter.Miletsky shows how all three men become locked in decades-long battles to define freedom for Black people in America. By then linking these battles through time and space, Miletsky deftly captures a web of ideas and leaders spinning new world visions for Black self-determination. But he misses an important opportunity to highlight the crucial role of prominent women of this era including the journalist, data scientist, and newspaper publisher Ida B. Wells Barnett, educator Maria Baldwin, and religious leader Eliza Ann Gardner, to name a few. The writing and political analyses of contemporary women who collaborated with, debated and chastised Miletsky's main actors are largely absent except for occasional footnote citations. This is, perhaps, a critical invitation to present a more balanced scholarship for this period. Miletsky does provide an important synthesis that recasts Boston's school desegregation movement of the 1970s as a key chapter in the long struggle for freedom and civil rights in the United States.By zooming in on Boston's school desegregation narrative, Miletsky gives renewed attention to the legal significance and force of the Sarah C. Roberts case. Five-year-old Sarah was forced to walk past five schools closest to her home because white school leaders refused to enroll her on the basis of her African-American race. Sarah's father Benjamin Roberts demanded redress. He hired a talented Black lawyer named Robert Morris, who later tapped Charles Sumner to join the case. The team argued that the school officials’ rejection of Sarah's enrollment in nearby white schools denied her the legal right to education. By demanding that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court recognize Sarah's “equality before the law,” Sumner introduced a legal logic that would have lasting national implications.19 Though this phrase pinpoints what was at stake for Sarah and the larger Black freedom struggle itself, her petition was ultimately rejected by the courts. Sarah was directed to attend the all-Black Abiel Smith School on Beacon Hill. Boston's segregationist school leaders were emboldened by their new, legally recognized “right” to separate and sort students according to race.Multiple efforts to fasten public attention to the nation's constitutional obligation to ensure the rights of Black citizens is the fundamental struggle that Miletsky unmasks. In reminding readers of the U.S. Supreme Court's reliance on the Roberts case as precedent for Plessy v. Ferguson's 1896 codification of “separate but equal,” Miletsky highlights Boston's paradoxical history as both abolitionist stronghold and birthplace for the legal foundation of Jim Crow. He deals a decisive blow to the arbitrary contrivance of north-south political distinctions. For Miletsky, “up south” describes the practice “of racial deep north discrimination and segregation in public bodies such as the Boston Public Schools, the Boston Housing Authority, and the Boston Police and Fire Departments” (105). With this description, he tips his hat to scholars like Ronald P. Formisano and Matthew Countryman, who have persuasively argued for the geographic category of “up south” to disrupt idealized caricatures of northern cities like Boston and Philadelphia as arguably less racist than cities of the American south.20In Before Busing's final chapter, Miletsky dives into Boston's school segregation history like a fast-moving train. More than two decades of events are covered in just over thirty pages, so brace yourself, but the dazzling ride is worth it. Combining archival research, leading scholarship and original interviews with trail-blazing education leaders, Miletsky makes good on his promise to write a new Boston history. He rightly assails J. Anthony Lukas’ Pulitzer Prize-winning book Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (1985) and everything it left out, namely, the real story of how the historical battle for educational access in Boston was organized, fought, and experienced. By winding back the historical timeline of Black parents actively planning and strategizing for the constitutional rights of their children, Miletsky repairs a broken history and restores notable luminaries to their rightful place at center stage. These freedom fighters include Ruth Batson, Jean McGuire, Hubie and Kathy Jones, Mary Gunn, Tom Atkins, Judge Leslie Harris, Mel and Joyce King, Peggy and Noel Day, Jim Breeden, Paul Parks, Melnea Cass, Sarah-Ann Shaw, Ken Guscott, Ken and Juanita Wade, Tallulah Morgan, Ellen Jackson, Reverend Vigil Wood, Joe and Angela Cook, and many more. Before Busing represents a homecoming, a reunion, and a call for nimble scholarship and storytelling that confronts historical complexity yet does not shrink from its demands. Miletsky delivers this and more. Before Busing is the book that we have needed to point the way for restorative historical scholarship that not only disproves any notion of Boston's racial exceptionalism but also brings the heat, fire, and light to fight freedom's continuous call

Political science · Sociology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Race, History, and American Society