Operation Exodus: Rebuff to Politicians

Every week for the past month, the parents of 327 Roxbury children have been shelling out $1,260 to get their kids to school in the morning. They are paying for school buses to carry their children out of overcrowded heavily Negro schools, threatened this fall with double sessions, to predominantly white schools outside of Roxbury.

It may be a measure of the frustration in the Boston civil rights movement that Negro parents have finally decided to bypass the conventional forms of protest and do the only thing that can get their children into decent schools. For the last two years de facto segregation has been a focus of the Hub's civil rights activity. There have been two school boycotts, one in 1963 and another in 1964, but the School Committee has refused to recognize the issue.

Finally, the parents got tired of waiting and, just as the School Committee won't recognize their problem, they seem to have resolved not to recognize the School Committee's own authority. They have simply told the School Committee where to get off.

Their defiance didn't develop over-night. It took a history of deliberate inaction and stubbornness to move these mothers. That history illustrates the messy consequences of political exploitation of racial tensions.

Busing isn't new to Boston. Last year, some 1000 children were transported to less crowded schools-at the city's expense. And Superintendent William Ohrenberger had proposed to add another 583 students this fall to ease overcrowding in three Roxbury schools.

The controversy was touched off two months ago when Thomas Eisenstadt, a member of the Boston School Committee, counter Ohrenberger's plan with a proposal to stop all busing designed to end school overcrowding. Later he revised his motion so as to apply only to new busing. The resolution passed 3-2. It looked as if double sessions was the only alternative for the three overcrowded schools.

Up until then, Ellen Jackson, a 31-year old Negro mother in Roxbury, had not been involved in the school disputes. She had been a parent counselor for the Northern Student Movement, but nothing more controversial than that. But Mrs. Jackson had four children in the three affected schools. And so she rose one evening in a Project Headstart meeting to ask that Negro parents mobilize against the threat of double sessions.

Complaining Is No Good

"The schools have always been overcrowded. Parents saw that their children weren't getting promoted and that it didn't do any good to complain to the Superintendent about it," she explained later.

Double sessions would reduce teaching time by 35 minutes a day. In addition, it would impose an extra burden on working mothers, who would have to find baby-sitters to watch the children for an entire halfday. For a mother with one child in the morning session and another in afternoon classes this would mean a full day of sitters.

Late in August Mrs. Jackson called an emergency meeting of Roxbury parents, who organized the Roxbury and North Dorchester Parents Committee. They discussed different possibilities for action, including private busing if the school committee held firm. Two days before school began in September, the RNDPC petitioned the School Committee to reconsider its ban on busing.

Mrs. Louise Day Hicks, the School Committee Chairman, who is noted for her refusal to admit the existence of de facto segregation, answered the parents group. She told them that the School Committee would not rehash the busing question, but promised that there would be no double sessions.

Nevertheless, the Committee had still not announced how it was planning to avoid having classes of 40 or 50 students in the three Roxbury schools.

Five Hundred Strong

The day before school opened, the RNDPC, now 500 strong, met again to set in motion their plans for private busing. Committees set up at the earlier meeting had compiled a list of vacant seats available in various Boston schools. According to a 15-year-old school department policy, any Boston child can enroll in any Boston school with vacancies, once he gets a transfer slip from his neighborhood principal. Since the urban white districts tend to have an older population than the Negro areas, they frequently have vacant places in their schools.

At that twelfth hour meeting, Miss Marguerite Sullivan, assistant Superintendent of Schools, appeared without warning, to present a new distribution plan which Ohrenberger had just drafted. The plan was to transport certain special classes and programs to other schools, thus relieving overcrowding in Roxbury without directly violating the School Committee's prohibition.

Ohrenberger's timing made it appear that he had thrown the plan hastily together at the last minute when it became clear that Operation Exodus would go into effect-with a good deal of publicity-the next day.

Mrs. Jackson, chairman of the parents meeting, refused to bring the plan up for discussion. "We didn't particularly feel as if we should give in to a last minute plan which they weren't even sure could be executed," she said.

That night about 275 families signed up for Operation Exodus, and the next day 400 children boarded buses for four white schools which had had vacancies last spring. At two of the schools, the principals refused to let the Negro children into the classrooms since they did not have transfer slips from their Roxbury principals. At one of these, all the schoolchildren, white and black alike, were locked out until an unsuspecting janitor opened a door and the Exodus children streamed inside.

Eventually they were allowed to sit in auditoriums and hallways in both schools, and the next day were admitted into classes, with a period of grace in which to obtain transfer slips.

Four new schools took in Exodus children the next day, and at present 327 kids are being bused to 13 schools outside Roxbury.

The central question which the Operation Exodus incident raises is, why did Eisenstadt introduce his resolution when he did? While he and Mrs. Hicks portray the ban on busing as a defense of the neighborhood school, over 1000 students had been bused last year, without raising a public objection from anyone on the School Committee. If Eisenstadt had not put the busing plan to a vote, it probably would not have become a partisan issue.

The answer lies in the two crucial differences between this year's busing proposal and that of last year. first, all the new students to be bused-50 per cent more than last year-are Negro.

Political Hobbyhorse

Second and even more important, the School Committee's biennial elections are coming up this November. Observers have speculated that Eisenstadt felt that he was losing votes because he had endorsed a motion for the School Committee to meet with the leaders of the school boycott of 1964. His new busing proposal, however, placed him solidly back in the Hicks camp, and provided both him and Mrs. Hicks with a political hobbyhorse for the coming campaign.

And, if the preliminary election vote is any indication (Mrs. Hicks ran way out in front and Eisenstadt was second), a large number of people were convinced. Mrs. Hicks' proportion of the vote increased substantially over the 1963 returns in atleast four of the precincts containing Exodus-receiving schools.

On the other hand, Operation Exodus has provided important lessons for the present and the future. For the present, it has demonstrated that busing large numbers of Negro children into white schools does not lead to riots and mass withdrawals. Despite the way they voted, few white parents went so far as to withdraw their children from the schools receiving Negro students.

Its implications for the future are even greater. Under Massachusetts' new Racial Imbalance Act, all school boards must submit a plan for eliminating de facto segregation, or face the loss of state aid. At present 42 of Boston's 195 schools have non-white majorities.

It is clear that as soon as Mrs. Hicks and company stop playing political football with the busing issue, the School Committee can settle down to concrete planning for better racial distribution and better education for Boston's students