Public Schools: Boston’s Busing Battle

“I believe that little children should go to schools in their own neighbor hoods with the children with whom they play — it’s as simple as that.”

So says Mrs. Louise Day Hicks 46 chairman of the five-man Boston School Committee, which sets policy for Boston’s public schools. For months she has been waging a determined fight to keep Negroes from busing their children out of the black districts into white neighborhood schools, even though the city has an “open enrollment” policy that permits any child to transfer to any school where there is room.

Despite that policy, and thanks partly to Mrs. Hicks, Boston’s schools remain racially unbalanced. At least 25 schools have enrollments that are less than 20% white. A new state law (TIME, Aug 27) requires schools to correct imbalance or forfeit state funds; Boston has until October to complete a pupil census, and then must submit plans to redress the balance. And U.S. Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel has begun an investigation to see if Boston’s schools can continue to qualify for $2,000,000 in federal aid.

Boos & Catcalls. Notwithstanding the imminent consequences, Louise Hicks last week fought on. On the opening day of school, she journeyed out to Blue Hill Avenue, where a group of Negro mothers and their children were waiting for privately hired buses to take the kids into predominantly white schools. “Yellow slips! Yellow slips!” she yelled, referring to certificates that are required for school transfers. “Without those yellow slips your children will be turned away!” In response, the Negroes shot back boos and catcalls. As it happened, a few dozen Negro kids were turned back until they could pick up their slips, but by last week about 300 had been successfully transferred.

As far as Mrs. Hicks is concerned, yellow slips are not the answer to the Negroes’ education problems in Boston. Her solution is to help Negro children with “compensatory education,” by which teaching teams give students more individual attention and remedial instruction. Such work has already been begun in some schools, and the results are encouraging.

Says Mrs. Hicks: “I defy any of the civil rights leaders to prove that any of our neighborhood schools are inferior.” When Negroes protest that this is the old “separate but equal” argument, she retorts: “Stop banging on our door—the real problem is housing.” She feels misunderstood. “In every one of the major cities the civil rights leaders have found a scapegoat. If it has to be me, so be it. My conscience is clear.”

Death Threats. As far as Boston’s Negroes are concerned, Mrs. Hicks’s activities on behalf of neighborhood schools mask an out-and-out segregationist attitude. N.A.A.C.P. Leader Paul Parks contends that despite her “motherly image,” she is “tyrannical to the Negro community.” Others apparently feel even more strongly than that. Mrs Hicks says that she and her family—her husband, an engineer, and two sons, 18 and 20—have been repeatedly terrorized with death threats. She has taken out a permit to carry a pistol.

She seems like the sort who can take care of herself. A onetime suburban Boston schoolteacher, she served as law clerk for ten years to her father District Judge William J. Day, and got her own law degree from Boston University in 1955. She now runs a law practice with her brother—when she is not running the schools and her household.

Though she has been severely criticized for her militancy on the Negro-school question, it is not Mrs. Hicks herself who stands in the way of the Negro. Most of white Boston is quite content with the neighborhoods. When Mrs. Hicks ran for a second term on the school committee in 1963, she got a bigger vote than the mayor.