A Harvard Law School professor examines the impact that Brown v. Board of Education has had on his family, citing historical figures, while revealing how the reforms promised by the case were systematically undermined.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and the American Book Award, the bestselling Common Ground is much more than the story of the busing crisis in Boston as told through the experiences of three families. As Studs Terkel remarked, it's "gripping, indelible...a truth about all large American cities." "An epic of American city life...a story of such hypnotic specificity that we re-experience all the shades of hope and anger, pity and fear that living anywhere in late 20th-century America has inevitably provoked." —Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

"Busing, in which students were transported by school buses to achieve court-ordered or voluntary school desegregation, became one of the nation's most controversial civil rights issues in the decades after Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Examining battles over school desegregation in cities like Boston, Chicago, New York, and Pontiac, [this book posits that] school officials, politicians, courts, and the news media valued the desires of white parents more than the rights of black students, and how antibusing parents and politicians borrowed media strategies from the civil rights movement to thwart busing for school desegregation"--Provided by publisher.

Perhaps the most spectacular reaction to court-ordered busing in the 1970s occurred in Boston, where there was intense and protracted protest. Ron Formisano explores the sources of white opposition to school desegregation. Racism was a key factor, Formisano argues, but racial prejudice alone cannot explain the movement. Class resentment, ethnic rivalries, and the defense of neighborhood turf all played powerful roles in the protest. In a new epilogue, Formisano brings the story up to the present day, describing the end of desegregation orders in Boston and other cities. He also examines the nationwide trend toward the resegregation of schools, which he explains is the result of Supreme Court decisions, attacks on affirmative action, white flight, and other factors. He closes with a brief look at the few school districts that have attempted to base school assignment policies on class or economic status.

"METCO, America's longest-running voluntary school desegregation program, has for 34 years bused black children from Boston's city neighborhoods to predominantly white suburban schools. Sixty-five METCO graduates vividly recall their own stories in this revealing book. Susan E. Eaton interviewed program participants who are now adults, asking them to assess the benefits and hardships of crossing racial and class lines on their way to school. Their answers poignantly show that this type of racial integration is not easy-they struggled to negotiate both black and white worlds, often feeling fully accepted in neither. Even so, nearly all the participants believe the long-term gains outweighed the costs and would choose a similar program for their own children-though not without conditions and apprehensions"--

In many histories of Boston, African Americans have remained almost invisible. Partly as a result, when the 1972 crisis over school desegregation and busing erupted, many observers professed shock at the overt racism on display in the "cradle of liberty." Yet the city has long been divided over matters of race, and it was also home to a far older Black organizing tradition than many realize. A community of Black activists had fought segregated education since the origins of public schooling and racial inequality since the end of northern slavery. Before Busing tells the story of the men and women who struggled and demonstrated to make school desegregation a reality in Boston. It reveals the legal efforts and battles over tactics that played out locally and influenced the national Black freedom struggle. And the book gives credit to the Black organizers, parents, and children who fought long and hard battles for justice that have been left out of the standard narratives of the civil rights movement. What emerges is a clear picture of the long and hard-fought campaigns to break the back of Jim Crow education in the North and make Boston into a better, more democratic city—a fight that continues to this day.

The never-before-told story of the African-American child who started the fight for desegregation in America's public schoolsIn 1847, on windswept Beacon Hill in Boston, a five-year-old girl named Sarah Roberts was forced to walk past five white schools to attend the poor and densely crowded black school. Incensed that his daughter had been turned away at each white school, her father, Benjamin, sued the city of Boston on her behalf. He turned to twenty-four-year-old Robert Morris, the first black attorney ever to win a jury case in America. Together with young Brahmin lawyer Charles Sumner, this legal team forged a powerful argument against school desegregation that has reverberated down through American history, in a direct legal line to Brown v. Board of Education. When the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled against Sarah Roberts, Chief Justice Shaw created the concept of "separate but equal," an idea that affected every aspect of American life until it was overturned one hundred years later by Thurgood Marshall.Today, few have heard of the Roberts case or of the three thousand free blacks in Boston who fought valiantly and successfully-long before the civil rights movement of the 1960s-to integrate schools, theaters, and railway cars; to legalize interracial marriage; and to form the first black army regiment. Now, Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick tell the inspiring story of the remarkable activist community of which Sarah and her family were a part, bringing to light the human side of this crucial struggle. Sarah's Long Walk recovers stories of black and white Boston, of Beacon Hill in the nineteenth century, and of all the concerned citizens, both white and black, who participated in the early struggles for equal rights. The result is a rich historical tapestry, a fascinating story of the courage and conviction of ordinary people who achieved extraordinary things.