A Piece of Chalk

By Joe Dotoli

A true story of racial and economic disparity set in America’s oldest
public high school in the 1970s is still shockingly relevant today.

Boston’s 1970’s busing crisis is a critical moments in America’s civil rights movement. Championes as a solution to segregation in northern city schools, forced busing became one of the most divisive and regrettable episodes in Boston’s long and distinguished history. What ensued was a firestorm of riots, heavy-handed police response, political ping-pong, disenfranchised students, and lawsuits.

Those who were on the ground—teachers, administrators, and students—recount these events with empathy and precision. Joe Dotoli, who at the time was a young science teacher at Boston English High School, narrates the events with all the cultural richness of Boston during the ‘70s. This was the oldest public high school in America—with a prestigious history going back to the historic moment in 1821 when it was established as the first public secondary school in America. It boasts alumni like J. P. Morgan, Samuel P. Langley, and General Matthew Ridgway. By the ‘70s it was the epicenter of desegregation, and crumbling under the pressure.

Today this story isn’t so much one of clear triumph as perseverance in a racial and economic struggle still making American headlines today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Apr 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781698714462

Joe Dotoli

Joe Dotoli is an author and retired science teacher. He began his teaching career at Boston English High School in 1967. His years at English spanned the court-ordered desegregation of the school system and subsequent busing crisis of the 1970s. This is his personal retrospective of those years and a compilation of interviews with many of his former colleagues and students.

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Copyright 2023 Joe Dotoli.

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system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-6987-1444-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6987-1445-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6987-1446-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023907377

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Cover photo: Courtesy of The Boston Herald

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CONTENTS

Dedication

Foreword

Preface

December 1971

1821 – 1969/70 School Year

1971/72 School Year

1972/73 And 1973/74 School Years

Summer 1974

1974/75 School Year Phase I

October 8

1975/76 School Year Phase II

The 1976 Yearbook

Bob Peterkin Leaves January 1978

The Layoffs 1981

The End Of The Tower

1991 The End

Acknowledgments

Chronology

DEDICATION

My brother was in the National Guard, and his baton was on my mother’s dining room table. I looked at my mom and said, ‘He and I are going to the same place tomorrow. They’re giving him a three-foot baton, and they’re giving me a piece of chalk!’

Dick Murphy

English High math teacher (1974–1984)

For all the teachers of Boston who performed valiantly on the front lines of school desegregation armed only with – a piece of chalk.

A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.

– Jackie Robinson #42

FOREWORD

By

Natalie Jacobson

Former Anchor/Reporter at WCVB-TV Boston

F orty years after the court-ordered busing in the city of Boston, the question remains: what was accomplished?

I covered the school committee on a regular basis during the early ’70s as a reporter for WCVB-TV. The committee laughed at the prospect of a lawsuit charging racial segregation.

The schools, then predominantly white, with a growing black population, had a problem. Schools in black districts didn’t have the same benefits, from books to teachers, that the white kids had. In addition, the school committee deliberately set policy that hurt black students. Facing an intransigent school committee, black parents filed suit: Morgan v. Hennigan.

The case was assigned to a federal judge: W. Arthur Garrity Jr. The word was he was going to order the busing of children among the city schools to achieve racial balance.

I called the judge and asked why he was going to bus kids rather than order the school committee to be fair with its policies and resources. He invited me to a brown-bag lunch in his chambers. As I remember, he had a small office outside the courtroom and took only twenty or thirty minutes for lunch. That day, he had a small sandwich and an apple.

So Natalie, what was your question?

Why bus kids around the city just to mix up blacks and whites. How is that going to make education better for anyone?

Education is not the issue before the court, he explained. Segregation is.

But no one would be arguing about race if the black schools weren’t being shortchanged, I argued. Black mothers wanted good schools, just like white mothers did. And given the choice, many if not most preferred neighborhood schools for all the practical reasons. I know because I asked them.

That may be, he acknowledged, but that is not the case before me.

I remember leaving his office feeling frustrated. It all seemed so senseless to me. Here we had a problem, a lesser-quality education for blacks, and the fix had nothing to do with solving it.

What followed was a nightmare. Precious children, white and black, being bused around the city in a crisis of epic proportions. Hatred, violence and fear dominated our city.

Over time, the whites who could afford it left the city, leaving the schools predominantly non-white. This was no way to achieve racial balance, then or now.

There was one school in Boston, America’s oldest public high school, English High School, that was racially balanced, perhaps even color-blind, before the court order. Competitive in sports and academics, English High attracted kids who wanted to learn.

Then the school committee began its most egregious racist rulings, instituting a middle school system that hurt black kids and then designating English High as an open-enrollment school, dropping the placement exam in the process. English became the school not of first choice but of last resort.

Joe Dotoli, a teacher at English during this time, has written a perspective of the crisis that is riveting. He interviewed dozens of students, teachers, and administrators who attended English to write A Piece of Chalk. It is a page-turner. Much has been written about these tumultuous times, often from an ideological, legal, political, or racist view. A Piece of Chalk takes us into the minds and hearts of the people at English High who lived it, survived it, and were changed by it.

It is rightly said that those who do not understand history are bound to repeat it. Forty years have proven this so.

I think back to the brown-bag lunch and wistfully wish that the judge had found another solution or that the plaintiffs had given him a suit dealing directly with educational balance rather than racial balance.

Maybe rather than talking about de jure segregation, we would have been talking about de facto opportunity for all children to succeed.

PREFACE

S eptember 12, 1974, began the most divisive and regrettable episode in Boston’s long and distinguished history. On that date, after years of defiance and egregious behavior by the all-white Boston School Committee, Federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity ordered the forced busing of 20,000 of the city’s 87,000 students to rectify decades of de facto segregation in the Boston school system. His order set off a firestorm of riots, protests, and lawsuits. Much to the city’s detriment, images of the violence were the lead story on the national news for months. Boston’s reputation as a racist city began then and has never recovered.

Most of the high schools involved in the desegregation order were at the epicenter of the violent backlash. I was a young science teacher at Boston English High School – the oldest public high school in America. English High was supposed to be the hottest of the hot, but because of the leadership of a twenty-nine-year-old African American headmaster and the determination of a young, talented faculty, we became the exception. Although English High had its share of violence, we showed that desegregation could work.

When I first thought about telling the story of what it was like being part of the school desegregation era in Boston in the mid-seventies, I thought it would be my story: how I lived through that difficult time, what I saw, and what it was like to be a teacher during such a historical and divisive event. When I began to put my memories down on paper, however, things changed. I wanted to be sure that the way I remembered events was close to reality, so I called a few of my former colleagues from those years to see how they remembered those same events. I soon realized that their experiences, while in many ways similar to mine, enhanced the story I was trying to tell. So if talking to a few teachers made it more interesting to me, I reasoned that I needed to reach out to more people who lived through those years with me. I wanted to speak to more teachers, and then administrators, and finally I wanted to find some of the kids. I decided that I wanted to tell the story through the eyes of the people in one building, my building, the oldest public high school in America – Boston English High School.

After almost forty years, it was getting a bit frustrating trying to find the people with whom I wanted to speak. Admittedly my computer skills are not what they should be, and it was becoming a losing battle trying to find people on websites like MyLife.com. The English High Alumni office had been dormant for many years, but I found out that fairly recently a former student of mine, Tom Dennehy (’91), had taken it over. I contacted Tom and met with him at his office at English. I was underway. He could not have been more helpful.

The most difficult part of finding the teachers and administrators with whom I wanted to speak was that by now many have moved to other parts of the country, and many others were in poor health or have died, but those who I was able to interview still had a passion for being teachers and still had great love for English High. It was remarkable how deep their feelings were for the school and especially the people they worked with.

The problem finding the kids was that not only had they also scattered all over the country, but many of the girls have also been married and no longer go by their maiden names. In addition, the records from that era were incomplete at best and often nonexistent. When English High moved into the old Boston Gas building in Jamaica Plain in 1989, a great deal was lost; yearbooks, records, statues, and others. With Tom Dennehy’s persistence, we sent out a number of letters asking former students to contact me if they would like to help with the project. From there the kids took over. Hey Mr. D, have you spoken to so-and-so? He would be great to talk to. Here’s his e-mail. So one after the other I had the pleasure of sitting down to a cup of coffee or a relaxed lunch with these wonderful kids (now in their fifties), some of whom I taught, and some I didn’t, and hearing their stories. What I was not prepared for was the forty-year love story still going on between these former students and the faculty who guided them through that incredibly difficult time.

Not only did they remember the names of the teachers they had and the subjects they taught, but they also remembered very specific incidents and kind or unusual events that took place. A number of them got choked up and even openly sobbed as they recalled what faculty members had done for them.

The response was wonderful. It really is amazing how as a teacher you can affect kids’ lives, and then they move on with their lives, and you never know anything about how much you meant to them. Working on this book has been well worth doing if only to have gotten back in touch with so many terrific former English High students. One girl wrote to me and reminded me that she got pregnant at fifteen. She was terrified and didn’t know how to tell her mother. This girls’ best friend at the time told her to talk to Mr. D – he would know what to do. So together we told her mom. She wondered if I remembered – did I remember? I’m not sure which of us was more scared. I don’t think I was thirty yet. She thanked me for helping her through such a difficult time in her life. Another girl told me that my biology and chemistry classes put her on a life track that resulted in a wonderful career as a dietitian for the Boston school system. One I spoke with is a very successful biochemist, another is a lawyer, others successful businesspeople. Some of the women were stay-home moms; others have become grandmothers. They shared their stories; we talked and we laughed – oh did we laugh. It was incredibly uplifting.

Through the process, a number of things continued to be repeated over and over. Teachers talked about working in a haze and trying every day to just make it to the finish line, referring to the bell at the end of the day. The kids all spoke of how English was different from the other schools involved in busing because our teachers taught, and even though it was really rough at times – we learned. For the most part, the teachers at English High at that time really cared about the kids. In story after story, former students regaled me with their memories of teachers going far beyond what was expected to help them succeed. And both teachers and students spoke of the depth of the camaraderie. Most felt that they never encountered that closeness with any group before or since.

Another constant that struck me was how well our former students were doing in their adult lives. Now, it may be that only those who considered themselves successful responded when I reached out to them; nevertheless, it was definitely a theme. For the most, part these were not kids with a great deal of financial support. They were either very poor or came from very large families where, although their parents had good jobs, it took all the family resources to make it from week to week. There was definitely some kind of edge to these kids, a drive to succeed. Perhaps the steel framework of their character was hardened in the hearth of desegregation.

Of all the people I spoke with, there was only one who was hesitant to help me with this project. He is a former English student. I never taught him in class, but it was recommended that I find him, and I did. He sent me a few e-mails explaining his reluctance to be interviewed, and I, of course, respected his request. I still wish I had convinced him because it seemed as if he had a lot of vivid memories, and maybe some of those old feelings would have been better off expressed. He was certainly ready to dismiss the possibility that anything special happened at English High.

In one of his e-mails, he told me, What I really disliked about this time period was that it delayed my catching up to my peers, because they did not have to go through that crap. I eventually did catch up because that’s me, and not anyone else. He continued, I tried to bring my own kids up to understand that they have the power to decide what they want to accomplish in life and that they shouldn’t believe that others have this power over them. I think what you are discovering, his e-mail read, is simple probability or a statistical occurrence. I truly believe nothing special happened. Rather, it was just a nightmare for all of us and an ongoing bad rap, that my beloved Boston is a racist city.

I think it is worth mentioning that although this former student does not remember his time at English with the fondness that all the others I spoke with remember their time, he has nonetheless also been very successful in life. He is a supervising engineer and, obviously from what he said, has a family he loves very much. The toughness required to survive the situation we found ourselves in seems to have taken many forms.

Although it has been healing to see how well many of our kids have done in life, it doesn’t change the fact that living through desegregation was hell. It was hell for me and for my fellow faculty members, and mostly it was hell for the kids and their families.

One former faculty member whom I interviewed asked me, Do you think anyone still cares, Joe? Do you think anyone gives a shit about all this? He asked the question with great sadness in his voice. I suppose, at the end of the day, that is exactly why I wrote this book. I don’t want the world to forget what happened in Boston. I know I will never forget.

The fiftieth anniversary of the start of the busing crisis in Boston – September 12, 1974 – is fast approaching. It has been over seven years since I first published A Piece of Chalk. After a great deal of thought, I decided to release an updated version.