Black Voices for Equal Education, and the White Response (1960–74)

Abstract

Ruth Batson, a young black parent, thought well of the Strayer Report, especially the recommendations that all Boston schools should have lunchrooms, libraries, and gyms. In the late 1940s she was invited to join the Parents Federation, a mostly white group committed to parent education. She learned that the black neighborhoods had the oldest schools and were often unsafe. She met with Mayor Hynes who “denied the validity” of the Strayer Report, defended the schools, and abruptly terminated the meeting. Hynes later proposed a new public school in Hyde Park to serve a growing population. The Parent Federation challenged Hynes, complaining that Boston’s busy South End was “hardly a ghost town.”¹ This was the beginning of Ruth Batson’s political education and the birth of her personal protest against racial discrimination toward black children in Boston. Her story is missing from the annals of the Boston desegregation story, as is the long struggle to achieve racial equality for Boston’s black students.