In this recording, former Boston student Sheila Wise Rowe speaks to her longtime friend Bill Mooney-McCoy about her memories of the transition from segregated to integrated public schools. Sheila recounts her involvement with the parent-led integration program Operation Exodus, which predated busing, and the consequences of educational inequity in society.
Twenty years after the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, most schools across the country hadn’t integrated. Then the courts stepped in, again.
In September 1974, Boston schools prepared to integrate via a court-mandated busing plan. The figures facing the moment - activists, agitators, politicians, and students - each had particular interests in mind, and were preparing for the worst.
On June 18, 1963, Boston Celtics star and Civil Rights activist Bill Russell addressed the thousands of students who gathered to protest educational inequality and segregation.
