From Segregation to Suspension: The Solidification of the Contemporary School-Prison Nexus in Boston,1963-1985

Criminalizing Dissent and Safeguarding Segregation

Black Bostonians had long sought to upend segregated schooling in the city. ¹⁹ In 1963, they mobilized a renewed campaign against it that became the focal point of a larger struggle against a racist political economy that structured inequality through segregation. ²⁰ White Bostonians, in response to this renewed social movement, pressured the city’s elected officials to mobilize police to suppress black protest. The city’s white elected officials not only complied, but they more explicitly defined who was dangerous (black youth) and who needed protection (white youth) along racial lines to sustain segregation. Their splitting of crime and safety determined police action as well as inaction. Moreover, Boston educators, more than 90 percent of whom were white, turned increasingly to school suspensions as means to suppress black student dissent. Schools’ increasing use of suspension and police in schools established a new intimacy in which schools reinforced police power and police reinforced schools’ disciplinary power.

On June 11, 1963, the Boston Branch of the National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), led by Ruth Batson, charged the School Committee with maintaining a segregated school system. Batson presented the ways BPS failed to serve black students and rooted those outcomes as consequences of segregation. However, the Committee rejected these charges and abruptly ended the meeting. ²¹ The following day, the Rev. James Breeden publicly announced a “Stay Out for Freedom” campaign to protest segregation in the city’s schools. In contrast to organizers’ descriptions of a non-violent protest, Louise Day Hicks and other Committee members waged a media blitz to deny segregation in the city’s schools and criminalize protesters. Hicks, other Committee members, and even a juvenile justice court judge threatened participants with arrest, fines, and incarceration. ²² Nevertheless, more than 8,000 young people participated in the stay out. When black students conducted another stay out the following year, the city again deployed its police force while Committee members called for protestors to be arrested and stationed truancy officers outside freedom schools to surveil them. ²³ The stay outs were a success, and they countered the false prophecies of violence imagined by Hicks and others. Nevertheless, Hicks and the School Committee wedded the rhetoric of “law and order” to segregated schools. ²⁴

The impact of this marriage became violently clear in the fall of 1968. That September, black students at English High School unleashed a new wave of student-led activism when they protested the school’s strict dress code and its white faculty and staff’s racism. Two students went to school wearing African dashikis, and administrators quickly suspended them. English’s issuance of suspensions to suppress dissent was indicative of the rising primacy of suspension in school discipline in which educators relied upon exclusion to address students they identified as “problems.” ²⁵ Peers of the suspended students soon organized a protest outside the school, demanding their classmates’ immediate reinstatement, changes in the dress code, and a voice in the disciplinary process. School administrators called police to disperse the spontaneous demonstration. As protests continued, the BPD mobilized 600 officers, detectives, clerks, and trainees for deployment at nine “trouble spots.” The superintendent called for patrolmen “to arrest any person who participate[d],” and the School Committee voted to put the National Guard on standby, stating that “force w[ould] be met with force.” The next day police incited violence. BPD patrolmen took off their shirt badges to prevent being identified and moved swiftly into the crowd, wielding their riot sticks to strike down demonstrators. Horrified by the brutality, a member of the Mayor’s Human Relations Task Force angrily cried out, “To hell with the job! I quit as of right now. When they start using clubs, they split a soul brother’s head, then I say the hell with ’em. I’m through.” ²⁶

From the first student stay out in 1963 onward, school administrators suspended black students for their activism, and city officials deployed the BPD to suppress their challenges to an unequal school system. City politicians and white parents criminalized these varying forms of dissent, then mobilized police to quell disorder, and, in the process, criminalized protest through state violence. ²⁷

The corollary to the criminalization of black youth was the securitization of white innocence, and white residents effectively mobilized it during a school 1971 school desegregation controversy involving the Lee, Marshall, Fifield, and O’Hearn schools in Dorchester. In 1965, the Massachusetts legislature passed the Racial Imbalance Act in response to the 1963 and 1964 student stay outs. The act declared any school with a student population over 50 percent “nonwhite” to be imbalanced and, therefore, illegal. The number of “imbalanced schools” in Boston increased following the law’s passage, and in 1971 the state threatened to withhold $21.3 million unless the School Committee made some effort to desegregate its schools. This pressure pushed the Committee to pass a modest redistricting plan involving the four schools. ²⁸

White parents, however, claimed the plan endangered the safety of their children and compelled the Committee to overturn it within weeks. They organized their campaign around their refusal to send their children to schools in what they called a “high crime area,” insisting that the predominantly black areas of Dorchester, where the Lee and Marshall schools were located, posed a deadly threat. Boston’s superintendent, the School Committee, and the BPD proactively responded to these concerns by establishing a separate transportation service for white children attending Lee and Marshall. But when the superintendent told white parents this, they rejected it. One parent, capturing the crowd’s hysteria, yelled, “Can you pay for a child who gets killed down there?” While the School Committee had concluded that desegregation did not pose any danger to white children, they did not challenge these alleged fears, and, in some instances, actively promoted them. ²⁹

Louise Day Hicks, then in the U.S. House of Representatives, and other political and religious leaders joined the protesting parents in a demonstration just prior to the start of the school year. Hicks roared before an excited crowd, “Tomorrow we are required to send our children to that far distant Lee School, where we know the hazards that are presented to them. Should we,” she asked rhetorically, “be forced to send children into an area where we know what harm can come upon them? I say no, a thousand times no!” Hicks’s allusion to “the hazards” at “that far distant Lee School,” which was less than eight-tenths of a mile from the affected white students’ homes, became the latest iteration in her almost decade-long connection between race, crime, and safety. ³⁰ With Hicks’s backing, the white parents resolved to boycott the two schools. The BPD, in contrast to its mobilization against black students and their allies, did not arrest resisting white students, nor did the city’s educators suspend those boycotting. Principals at Fifield and O’Hearn instead seated unregistered white students seeking admission. ³¹

By 1971, white Bostonians’ alleged concern for white students’ safety became the primary defense for segregation. White parents compelled the School Committee to overturn a modest desegregation plan and sacrifice millions in state funding to sustain segregation. The city only reclaimed the money after Boston mayor Kevin White successfully sued the State Board of Education on the grounds that the Committee had not defied the Racial Imbalance Act. The Committee did not discriminate against black students, his office claimed; it had only ensured white students’ safety. ³²

This controversy illustrated how concerns about white students’ safety and a lack of concern for black students’ well-being provided cover for segregation as well as the differing approaches adopted by law enforcement in response to those challenging segregation versus those seeking to sustain it. During the litigation of Morgan v. Hennigan (Boston’s desegregation suit brought by the NAACP in January 1972), the plaintiffs presented testimony that revealed the Committee had not believed desegregation imperiled students’ safety. It had overturned the plan based on “its belief that white parents did not want to send their children to black schools.” The plaintiffs’ lawyers further demonstrated that the Committee only used the issue of safety to prevent desegregation. “The horrors of distance,” they wrote, “[were] not felt when black students were sent out of their neighborhood,” nor when white students were reassigned to more distant segregated white schools, nor in the transportation of black students across metropolitan lines, nor when white students traveled long distances to attend the city’s “elite schools.” Only when Boston’s white students would be involved in desegregation did safety matter. ³³ This selective concern about student safety became a rhetorical cudgel against integration that extended into policy and shaped court-ordered desegregation in punitive ways.

For decades, the city’s politicians in response to their own and their constituents’ racism structured inequality through segregation. The fictions of racial categorization upon which Boston’s segregated schools operated required white residents and politicians to constantly remake and reinforce their attempted justifications for such divisions. The city’s white residents, educators, elected officials, and police responded to renewed challenges posed to this system by black Bostonians, particularly black youth, by punishing dissent with suspensions and deploying police to quell student protests. The black student protest of 1968 as well as subsequent ones demonstrated how the growing intimacy between police and schools strengthened this circuitous relationship in which schools’ criminalization of students reinforced police power and police reinforced schools’ disciplinary power. Of course, the city did not employ police for all student protests, boycotts, or public demonstrations regarding the city’s segregated school system. The city’s racialization of crime and safety dictated force and restraint that perpetuated a dual system of policing and punishment during court-ordered desegregation.

Preparing to Protect White Resistance

In the spring of 1974, federal district court Judge Wendell Arthur Garrity Jr. issued his ruling in Morgan v. Hennigan, which found Boston’s schools unconstitutionally segregated. The judge’s mammoth opinion detailed how the School Committee ensured segregation from the 1950s through the 1960s, including its selective concern for student safety. “When the defendants have emphasized considerations of distance and safety,” he wrote, “it has usually been when they could be used to maintain segregation; students have seldom been the benefactors of this concern when there was no prospect of integration.” In addition to the 1971 controversy, the judge described a situation in which the Committee granted a different set of white children transfers after their parents asserted that their children would be unsafe at Lewenberg (their assigned school) given the “high crime rate in the neighborhood.” In condemning this action, Garrity pointed out that “the same crime rate had to be endured by black students attending Lewenberg.” ³⁴ The judge thus exposed how the Committee’s selective concern for student safety blocked desegregation while partially accepting the same presumptions of black criminality. Against this backdrop, city officials planned desegregation with the same racist rationales they had weaponized to uphold segregation. ³⁵

The School Committee’s refusal to craft a desegregation plan and encourage its peaceful implementation following Garrity’s opinion impeded the entire process. Its intransigence delayed the opening of school and created the conditions for chaos. School Committee representatives alongside local politicians like Louise Day Hicks, then on the City Council, were vocal members of Boston’s most well-known anti-desegregation group ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights). ROAR’s campaign against the court order included public demonstrations, threats, and ultimately enactments of violence. They justified their actions by claiming Boston’s black youth were dangerous. While their campaign mobilized the mass violence that plagued the beginning of Boston’s court-ordered desegregation, it generated few arrests and fewer prosecutions. ³⁶

The sole elected official to modestly prepare Boston for desegregation was Mayor Kevin White. Yet his involvement only exacerbated fears about white student’s safety. While White had publicly condemned Garrity’s ruling, the judge still charged him with ensuring student and teacher safety. Despite vowing to be a “neutral broker,” White regularly deferred to those who opposed desegregation. ³⁷ “I brought my staff together,” White recalled in 1988,

and I decided that the first thing I had to do . . . was to reach out to the Whites. They were the ones who were going to feel threatened . . . I wanted to reach out to talk to them, not to threaten them, to explain. ³⁸

White’s portrayal of black Bostonians’ constitutional rights as a threat to white residents was indicative of how he governed during the period.

In coffee klatches, the mayor sought to comfort white families and invest them in keeping Boston an identifiably white city. When parents told him they intended to keep their children out of school, he responded sympathetically, letting them know—in contrast to the threatened incarceration of black student protestors in 1963, 1964, and 1968—that “the truant officer won’t come and take your child.” White parents routinely went on tirades about crime in black neighborhoods during these meetings—painting pictures of Ward 14 (Roxbury and North Dorchester) as scenes “of endless violence and depravity.” In these moments, White pleaded with them to stay in the city. “I don’t want the whites to leave,” he said. “If you leave, this place will become like Ward 14.” ³⁹

As the mayor shared this message, the BPPA, the BPD’s rank-and-file union, made its own preparations for the court order. The School Committee’s refusal to plan for desegregation created a leadership void, which the union sought to fill with its own form of massive resistance. Frank McGee, the BPPA’s legal counsel, sent a letter to Judge Garrity on August 30 questioning whether Boston patrolmen had the authority to enforce a federal order. ⁴⁰ Four days later, the BPPA held a “special meeting on busing.” Union leadership called the meeting because the city had not shared its desegregation plan, Garrity had not yet responded, and the city’s Office of Labor Relations had notified the union it would not defend officers accused of misconduct during desegregation. BPPA leaders informed the membership that “superior officers . . . do not have the legal authority” to order any patrolmen to make an arrest. “An arrest may be made . . . only by the individual police who believe[d] that reasonable grounds exist[ed],” and that “if a superior officer believe[d] . . . an arrest should be made that superior official should make the arrest.” ⁴¹ The BPPA’s declaration that they would not enforce the law demonstrated their hostility toward the court order and the black students whose safety they did not feel compelled to protect.

McGee denied in a press release that patrolmen were obligated to arrest persons “peacefully” blocking the entrance of a school building. In reference to white parents who would defy the court order by returning children to their former school, he added that “if a parent and child arrive at a school which the parent reasonably believes they belong in, I’m not satisfied that anybody can forbid them to enter that school building.” He tempered his statements the next day after Judge Garrity warned him that his inflammatory comments could lead to jail time. He then stated that in lieu of arrests patrolmen should take the name and address of demonstrators, obtain a complaint in court, then let them know when they were due in court. He opined that “Arresting parents and children will get you nowhere. That will cause more problems than anything else.” ⁴² The BPPA’s threatened inaction contrasted starkly with their previous violence against black students on school grounds.

The BPPA’s public statements created a new hurdle for black families seeking integration since they demonstrated the BPD’s unwillingness to ensure black youth’s safety. Therefore, the plaintiffs’ lawyers issued a memorandum on September 9 to add the BPPA as a defendant in the case:

The chief danger against which the proposed order is directed is the possibility that police officers will disobey the orders of their superior [officer] . . . Evidence before the court indicates that actions have been taken and, unless enjoined, are likely to be taken which would tend to promote such disobedience. But even if no disobedience in fact takes place, events have already occurred and are likely to continue that would severely impair the peaceful implementation of Court orders . . . by intimidating and deterring students, parents and teachers from proceeding with confidence to assert their rights and perform their duties . . . by encouraging any persons who may be tempted to consider obstructive tactics, and by inducing superior police officers to refrain from the proper exercise of their power. ⁴³

The union’s public statements imperiled safely desegregating schools, and plaintiffs contended that, without court oversight, continued resistance only increased the potential danger for black youth.

Garrity granted their request but limited the BPPA’s role to the “safety aspects” of the plan. He declared that

police officers are legally required as instructed by their superior officers: to protect students, teachers, and staff . . . And to arrest persons obstructing school entrances, remaining on school property after having been directed to leave by school officials, interfering with school functions, unlawfully harassing students, teachers and staff.

He also emphasized that the order did not limit patrolmen’s first amendment rights. ⁴⁴ Although Garrity parsed out these legal boundaries, it remained unclear how the court could alter the patrolmen’s actions.

Police Commissioner Robert di Grazia had released guidelines for police conduct during desegregation on September 6. Anticipating white resistance and its likely turn to violence, di Grazia mobilized half of the entire department for the first day of desegregation. The BPD prepared the maximum use of patrol cars at each district station, the use of detectives and plainclothes officers outside of schools and in surrounding neighborhoods, and the establishment of police checkpoints for all buses transporting students. It assigned ten officers to the Emergency Service Unit to respond to bomb threats and readied 101 Tactical Patrol Force officers as backup. Recognizing that white residents posed the greatest threat to peaceful integration, the plan assigned three officers, rather than two, to patrol cars in the overwhelmingly white districts in Roslindale, South Boston, and Dorchester, and it stationed the largest concentration of BPD forces in white neighborhoods. ⁴⁵

Despite the BPD’s preparation for anticipated white violence, di Grazia identified the department’s two “primary missions” as preventing “personal injury and property damage (or loss)” and “protect[ing]” the rights of all citizens to peaceful assembly and dissent.” Remarkably, if unsurprisingly, the BPD’s preparations focused police attention on the protection of property and (white) citizens’ rights to assemble and dissent, rather than the affirmative protection of black residents’ constitutional rights. City Hall’s racialized conceptions of crime and safety rendered black student’s safety invisible and allowed (arguably encouraged) white violence. di Grazia emphasized this point by ordering officers to “exhaust all reasonable alternatives before making arrests or using, or threatening to use, physical force,” and, even then, limiting themselves to the “minimum use of force.” ⁴⁶

White residents threatened violence to block the order’s implementation because of the supposed criminality of black youth. Those threats pulled the planning process for desegregation in ways that emphasized white Bostonians’ safety even as the city identified them as the likeliest cause of violence. The mayor, School Committee, and BPD’s commitment to white residents not only enabled the violent assaults that defined Boston’s court-ordered desegregation. It also established the ideological and political grounds to decriminalize white Bostonians and target black youth in schools for criminalization.

Court-Ordered Desegregation and the Fusion of Police and Schools

The most famous images of Boston’s desegregation come from the streets of South Boston. ⁴⁷ While these pictures exhibit the violence of massive resistance in the North, local politicians and media as well as national reporters minimized its intensity on desegregation’s first day. ⁴⁸ Mayor White told reporters that since Judge Garrity issued his order, “the prospect for implementation was uniformly pessimistic, with pronouncements of confusion, even widespread violence,” before adding, “These prophecies never came to pass.” ⁴⁹ In truth, they had, and the BPD did little to stop them.

Clarence Teague, a sixteen-year-old black student traveling to South Boston High School, shared in an affidavit how he arrived at school facing a large crowd throwing whatever they could find. “As I approached the school,” he recounted, “I was struck with a can. I heard what I thought were bottles crashing around us. There were police at the school when we arrived, but there didn’t seem to be enough to control the crowd.” ⁵⁰ Frances Jackson, fourteen years old, testified that a mob of 200 white people “started throwing big stones at the bus hitting its sides and breaking windows,” while police, who were on the other side of the bus, stood still. ⁵¹

Two local news reporters corroborated the students’ testimony, but only shared their stories through impounded affidavits because they feared the “release of their names could single them out for harassment.” ⁵² One reporter who traveled behind a bus leaving a school in South Boston saw that it was forced to stop at a potentially malfunctioning traffic light. “A group of angry shouting whites” surrounded the stopped bus and battered its sides. She recalled a uniformed police officer twenty feet away who saw the attack but did not “move to operate the traffic light manually, direct the school bus traffic through the intersection, or to calm the crowd. Instead,” she noted, “he turned his back and began walking away.” The reporter also observed that the patrolmen gathered two blocks away from the attacking mob were positioned “to observe this incident but did not come to [its] assistance.” The bus arrived at the checkpoint clearly damaged, but the officers did not “insure the safety of those additional school buses” traveling to the checkpoint. ⁵³

City Hall’s racialization of crime and safety shaped how the BPD policed the city, prepared for desegregation, and oversaw the implementation of the court order. City Hall anticipated the violence that came to pass and therefore prepared the greatest level of police force for white neighborhoods like South Boston. The BPD’s refusal to protect black students underscored the irony of a state institution that had historically maintained segregation being responsible for ensuring desegregation’s peaceful implementation. The BPD resolved this tension by using its protective authority to safeguard white residents and their vested interest in segregation while increasingly applying its punitive power to black students. Over the next ten years, black Bostonians continued to push for equality and safety against the pressure imposed by the city’s white residents whose commitments to segregation and inequality found voice and political power in the criminalization of black neighborhoods and youth.

On Monday, September 16, 1974, two statements—one from black residents at the Columbia Point housing project and the other from white, South Boston politicians—captured the duality of these competing demands. Parents at Columbia Point, whose children attended school in South Boston demanded that Governor Francis Sargent and Judge Garrity enlist the United States Marshal’s Office for assistance. “We have reached our decision to make our request,” they wrote,

because of the continued assaults . . . and threats of continued physical violence in and around the South Boston area . . . we also feel that there is an obvious inability and lack of commitment by the Boston Police Department, under the leadership of Mayor Kevin H. White, in assuring the safety of black children and their parents within the city of Boston. ⁵⁴

White marauders had regularly attacked project’s residents since the 1950s, but even those inured to the BPD’s failure to prevent racist violence saw greater threats imposed by its new manifestations outside schools.

That same day, City Councilor Louise Day Hicks, State Senator William Bulger, and State Representative Michael Flaherty published in local papers their statement, “A Declaration of Clarification.” It began with a rhetorical question, “Why is there resistance in South Boston?,” to which they answered, “Simply stated it is because it is against our children’s interest to send them to school in crime-infested Roxbury.” In a repeat of ROAR’s propaganda campaign the previous summer, the authors challenged “the Globe and Herald to print on its front page the following facts: (1) Crime statistics and (2) School assignments of South Boston children into Roxbury.” They continued,

We are proud of South Boston. We urge its citizens to remain peaceful in the face of the tremendous pressure that has been so unjustly placed upon this community . . . We call upon the Roxbury leadership to face its responsibility and find the means to end the routine everyday violence which ravages the black community.

Their characterization of protest during the beginning of desegregation as “peaceful” seemed quaint compared with their later unfounded assertion that “there are at least one hundred black people walking around in the black community who have killed white people during the past two years. They have gone unapprehended.” The brashness of the lie, especially in the wake of two days of unrestrained and unpoliced white violence, made clear how Hicks and others’ claims of white students’ safety infected the implementation of court-ordered desegregation. Stating that “our very lives and the safety of our children are at stake,” the authors closed with a warning to white residents throughout the city and country.

If communities such as our own are systematically dismantled simply because federal judges are unwilling or unable to recognize the value of such commodities then all who live in this City are the losers. We will be a Newark or a Detroit—a tragic result for all people, white or black. ⁵⁵

Hicks, Bulger, and Flaherty penned their declaration to inflame presumptions of black criminality in Boston’s white community and to justify the brutality of white resistance. They leveraged crime statistics as disconnected from the social, economic, and political conditions that produced them to imagine black people as inferior and fundamentally different in ways that threatened white youth. The fact that Bulger’s brother, James “Whitey” Bulger, was a leader of organized crime in South Boston only accentuated the manipulation of such statistics to render white crime invisible. ⁵⁶ Their warning of the city’s demise into a “Newark” or “Detroit,” the locations of the deadliest uprisings in the summer of 1967, was an attempt to fuse together crime and race in ways that legitimized and exonerated white violence enacted to preserve the city’s racial hierarchy. ⁵⁷

The BPPA aided this effort with its own criminalizing campaign. On September 20, its chairman, Chester Broderick, issued a statement asserting that the mayor had ordered “a news blackout” regarding “many incidents of violence in connection with school busing.” While the mayor and the press diluted reports of violence, they often did so to portray white “antibusers” in a more sympathetic light. ⁵⁸ Broderick claimed that a journalist had been told by his editor, at the mayor’s request, to not report on “the stoning and disabling of a school bus by blacks that was to carry white kindergarten students” outside the Tileston school in Mattapan. “What ma[de] this incident so disturbing,” he added, “[was] that it [was] not an isolated one” as “dozens of violent incidents” remained unreported. ⁵⁹ He used this startling example to suggest the “news blackout” hid the alleged violence of black Bostonians. During this period, the BPD maintained records of all incidents reported to police, even if only rumors. An examination of these reports shows that numerous stonings and assaults—many of them initiated by white residents—went unreported. However, nowhere is there a documented incident of violence (even an unconfirmed rumor) outside of the Tileston school. ⁶⁰ Broderick’s comments, in light of this absence, illustrate the BPPA’s intentional effort to criminalize black youth amid the unrestrained white violence that its members were, in law, required to police.

As white residents employed violence, the city’s elected leaders and those in the police department continued to criminalize black youth as they faced daily assaults to and from school while decriminalizing white residents engaged in violent resistance. The city’s political leaders, white residents, and patrolmen recast the chaos during the early weeks of court-ordered desegregation as the product of black youth, and their racist recapitulations reflected the same view held by the city’s educators who started suspending black students at unprecedented rates.

Suspending Integration

Boston’s schools reinforced the criminalization of black youth through a disciplinary system predicated upon educator discretion. During the 1971-1972 school year, BPS issued just under 2,000 suspensions, and in 1973-1974, that number increased to roughly 3,000. During the first year of court-ordered desegregation, the number of suspensions skyrocketed. ⁶¹ By the end of the 1974-1975 school year, BPS issued more than 8,000 suspensions, and black students, roughly 38 percent of BPS’ student population, received more than 60 percent of them. ⁶² Juxtaposed against the backdrop of violent white resistance, black families saw a new weaponization of student discipline to remake segregation’s inequalities. ⁶³

Boston was not alone. The previous year, the Southern Regional Council and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Fund published a work entitled The Student Pushout, which demonstrated how “suspension and expulsion ha[d] been used as weapons of discrimination, especially in resisting increased desegregation and in some instances during protests for more general students’ rights.” The report found these suspensions were largely for ambiguous offenses which hinged on educator discretion. ⁶⁴ Disciplinary policies, like those in the Boston Code of Discipline that authorized suspension for “the disruption of classes,” “the use of profane or obscene language,” and pupil conduct that was a “persistently detrimental influence to the conduct of the school,” undergirded the weaponization of punishment. ⁶⁵ According to an analysis of available data by Paul Smith, a graduate student at Harvard and employee of the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), BPS issued most suspensions to black students for “profanity, insolence, unacceptable language, refusal to provide name, defian[ce], and many other less significant kinds of offenses” during that first year. ⁶⁶

In the crucible of court-ordered desegregation, school officials increasingly used their discretion to blur distinctions between adolescent behavior and crimes through the issuance of suspensions. By enhancing educators’ discretionary authority, open-ended disciplinary policy lowered the threshold of what constituted a suspendible offense and, by extension, a crime. ⁶⁷ Discriminatory school discipline amplified and abetted the growing presence of the BPD in and around schools.

For instance, one black student who had stayed late after school to secure a letter of recommendation to participate in a college preparatory program was arrested and suspended for failure to leave school grounds quickly enough. The student, who had to use crutches following a football injury, stopped just beyond the school’s front door after talking with his teacher when he saw two other students engaged in a fight. A police officer came up to the student and told him “to move along.” According to the student, the patrolman “then pushed me out into the street” and “I fell down.” He told the patrolmen, “Don’t put your hands on me. I can move by myself,” and the officer responded, “I’ll put my hands on you anytime.” As the hobbling student attempted to pick up his crutch, the patrolmen sneered, “Don’t be cute,” grabbed the youth, and “twist[ed] [his] arm behind [his] back.” Another officer came over and “grabbed [him] around the neck from the front. They put [him] into the police wagon” and charged him with “disorderly conduct.” The next day, the school’s administrators informed the student he was suspended for five days because he had been arrested, even though the judge, who described the events as “a case of flared tempers,” continued the case without a finding. ⁶⁸

In 1976, U.S. Department of Justice officials asked Larry Burgan, Chief of School Security in Baltimore, to assess the BPD’s efficacy in schools. He condemned the expansive surveillance around Boston’s schools and the conduct of individual officers within them. After spending time at Hyde Park High School, he wrote, “I was stunned by the massive ‘security’ precautions being taken . . . Over the years I have wondered what sociologists meant when they spoke of the ‘dehumanizing’ segments of our society. After visiting Hyde Park, I now think I understand.” He described how “students arrive[d] and depart[ed] under the watchful eyes of a contingent of uniformed police,” after which they were “subjected to a ‘shake-down’ procedure as stringent as one required at a good moderate-security penal institution.” He also shared his amazement that “after submitting to the metal detectors and search of belongings, the students then pass[ed] through halls lined with police, eat in a cafeteria controlled by police, and go to the lavatory practically under police surveillance.” He remained incredulous that “even being late for class results in a police-backed referral to the main office.” ⁶⁹

After the first publication of the explosion in suspensions during the fall of 1974, the CDF, the Boston branch of the NAACP, the Massachusetts Advocacy Center (MAC), and other local groups sought an immediate change to the prevailing system by convincing the judge to include the issue of discriminatory discipline under Morgan. At first, they tried to work with the defendants and Judge Garrity to implement a new disciplinary system, one that abolished the use of suspension and fostered new forms of justice and accountability. However, Judge Garrity spurned those proposed measures. ⁷⁰

The plaintiffs then assembled volumes of quantitative and qualitative evidence documenting the unequal application of school disciplinary policy to compel a new Code. The plaintiffs argued that

City defendants have done everything in their power to keep black children from attending school with white children. Prevented by this court from locking the door, they have, through the suspension device, created a revolving door that sends black children home almost as fast as they arrive at a “desegregated” school. ⁷¹

By the end of the first year of court-ordered desegregation, Boston’s suspension rate more than doubled the national average, and Boston high schools issued more than 60 suspensions to black students per 100 black students in average daily attendance. For two high schools, that rate exceeded 200. Meanwhile, the city’s middle schools suspended 43 black students per 100 black students in average daily attendance. ⁷² The combined efforts of the Massachusetts State Police and BPD reinforced the growing use of suspensions. During the first three months of the second year of court-ordered desegregation, state troopers arrested 105 black youth and 103 white youth while the BPD reported arresting 63 black youth and 37 white youth in what was still a majority white school system. ⁷³ Police presence remained most intense in white neighborhoods, while suspension and arrest data illuminated the targeted criminalization of black youth.

Throughout the court hearings evaluating whether the current Code was discriminatory, the lawyers for the various defendants, including the mayor and School Committee, made their own argument. In their view, the disparities in suspension were not the product of discrimination but student behavior: “disproportionate suspension statistics . . . might be explained by increased ‘suspendable conduct’ on the part of black students.” ⁷⁴ Ignoring that schools issued many suspensions for vague offenses like “disruption,” the defendants cited their belief black students were inherently criminal to preserve educator discretion in disciplinary policy and practice. One School Committee member, eventually indicted for corruption, wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe claiming that “any decisions in favor of those arguing that black students are being suspended disproportionately could lead to chaos . . . the schools would become an exercise in the survival of the most violent, the most vicious.” ⁷⁵ Refuting these racist assertions, the plaintiffs proposed in January 1976 an alternative Code of Discipline that eliminated suspension for vague offenses, only allowing them for criminal conduct such as the possession or use of narcotics. ⁷⁶

The defendants responded to this proposal in disbelief and decried the new Code on the grounds that it “place[d] inordinate amount of stress on the rights of the wrongdoer” and disregarded “the protection of the rights of the vast majority of students whose education is being effected [sic] by the acts of the wrongdoers.” Within the context of a legal battle alleging (and documenting) racial discrimination in school discipline, the city’s concern about “wrongdoers” having too many rights alongside demands for suspension as a response to supposed “crimes” was a thinly-veiled call for punitive measures to suppress black students. Indeed, the defendants challenged the new Code’s implementation because “a number of the acts which are not suspendible acts under this Code are defined as crimes under the state statutes.” ⁷⁷ This false claim evidenced the school system’s punitive impulses and the city’s continued support for the current Code’s power to transform adolescent behaviors into crimes through suspension.

Judge Garrity drafted an order in the spring of 1976 that would have implemented a new Code of Discipline, but he never issued it. For reasons unexplained, he instead ordered Boston’s schools to continue operating under the previous code that, in his words, “impeded desegregation.” The School Committee replaced that Code in the 1980-1981 school year when it adopted a more punitive version. ⁷⁸ Over the next three years, the suspension rate of black students remained more than double that of white students. The suspension numbers, like BPS’ student population, did decrease, but those monitoring the city’s discipline practices found documentation of suspensions uneven and unreliable, concluding that the number of suspensions was likely higher. ⁷⁹ Recorded suspension numbers showed that by 1984 BPS suspended roughly 10 percent of its entire student population, and researchers found that students suspended were roughly three times more likely to drop out of school than those who had never been suspended. ⁸⁰ Schools, empowered by a disciplinary system predicated upon educator discretion, pushed students out through the regular and recurring issuance of suspension.

The legal contestation over the Code of Discipline represented more than the creation of a new set of rules; it was a portal into schools’ daily workings and how presumptions of black criminality shaped school discipline policy and practice. The widespread use of suspension in BPS denied students educational opportunities—a denial that exacerbated the difficulties in accessing an already depressed and racist labor market—and it strengthened the bonds between the city’s police and schools. Moreover, school and city officials upheld racial disparities in suspension statistics as evidence of individual behavior (not structural racism) to reproduce and rationalize inequality as a logical outcome of supposed racial difference.

Schools’ production of criminality through the discriminatory issuance of suspensions had far-reaching consequences. Throughout the 1970s, policymakers and politicians weaponized suspension statistics to provoke new fears about school violence and crime. In Boston, they crafted new narratives about the dangers of schooling to establish the Boston School Police Force. BPS’ Department of Safety and Security, which oversaw school police, grew from a staff of 10 security officers, forty-five non-uniformed security aides, and a $700,000 budget in 1979 to 86 uniformed security officers and a $2,000,000 budget in 1985. Even as enrollment declined and overall school expenditures decreased by 15 percent between 1980 and 1985, resources dedicated to school police rose dramatically. ⁸¹ City policymakers also used suspension statistics and narratives of school disorder as justifications for expanding policing beyond school walls and into “high crime areas.” ⁸²

By the mid-1980s, politicians and journalists identified a new “dropout crisis” that, they claimed, drove crime and rising incarceration rates. “In some states,” a Christian Science Monitor reporter found, “fully 70 percent of the prison inmate population consists of former dropouts,” suggesting that “dropouts, having few job skills and often unable to read or fill out a job application, turn to crime.” ⁸³ Boston’s municipal, educational, and business leaders developed a variety of plans to address the dropout crisis, but they never sought to divest educators’ discretionary power. They continued to view the products of structural racism as the result of the failings of individual students, rationalizing rising incarceration rates as a logical outcome of breakdowns in school discipline. The school-prison nexus had solidified into its present form, and policymakers and educators articulated its legitimacy through the racial disparities in suspension statistics.

Conclusion

In contrast to prevailing narratives that the “zero-tolerance” policies of the 1990s formed the contemporary school-prison nexus, this history demonstrates how the preservation of educator discretion during the contested era of desegregation defined its form. Policies that automated suspensions for fighting as well as possession and/or use of weapons or drugs did not drive the rise in suspensions. Policymakers, residents, police, and educators’ efforts to preserve educator discretion in discipline did. As educators pushed students out of school for a variety of “offenses,” city and school officials repurposed statistics documenting discrimination as quantitative evidence of black youth’s predisposition to criminality to justify carceral expansion and rising incarceration rates. Historicizing the intensification of schools’ disciplinary power sheds light on the place of schools within the carceral state as institutions active in criminalizing youth and spurring mass incarceration.

Court-ordered desegregation posed a challenge and opportunity to undo the racist political system that structured inequality through segregation and thereby forge new educational possibilities and social relations. White resistance to these efforts, channeled through the city’s white political establishment and institutions, however, intensified school’s carceral capacities, fusing together schools and police, inaugurating a new, more punitive era of school discipline with far-reaching consequences that foreshortened students’ educational journeys, expanded policing in and beyond schools, and provided statistical ammunition for policymakers to renew racist ideas as they sought to rationalize rising incarceration rates.