The courts come through again!

Now we know. The buses will roll in September. Federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity ruled last Friday that Boston’s schools are unconstitutionally segregated. He ordered that the racial imbalance plan, designed by the state board of education and scheduled to begin when the school opens in the fall, will be enforced.

Politicians can scream and yell about the Garrity opinion but they are powerless to oppose it. They can appeal the opinion, but desegregation will proceed pending the outcome of the appeal. And it is unlikely that such an appeal would be successful anyway. Garrity’s carefully worded 152-page opinion leaves very little hope of reversible error.

The state legislature, the governor, the state courts or the state department of education have no power to frustrate Garrity’s order. His opinion was based upon the U.S. Constitution which gives his ruling preeminence over the state and local government.

Garrity’s ruling adjudicated a discrimination suit brought by a group of black parents with the NAACP against The Boston School Committee in March of 1972.

The state Racial Imbalance Law was not directly involved in the suit.

The parents argued, essentially, that parts of the Boston public school system are racially segregated, and that this segregation was intentionally caused and maintained by the School Committee. The School Committee responded with the argument that whatever racial segregation may exist is the result of segregated housing patterns.

The court found little dispute on whether racial segregation exists in Boston Public schools. Garrity said, “In reading this conclusion we have taken into consideration the racial composition of school enrollments and faculties and staff community and administration attitudes toward the schools and factors of geography and demography…”

He also found that schools were intentionally segregated at all levels. The Boston School Committee, he found, had created segregated schools by:

(a) destroying the controlled transfer system by creating exceptions,

(b) permitting a crisis to grow to provide an excuse for opening the Lee school imbalanced;

(c) opening one wing of the Hennigan on a segregated basis;

(d) permitting overcrowding in white schools while space was available in black schools. And there was much more evidence to establish the intent of the School Committee.

The busing plan for September is expected to reduce the number of imbalanced schools from 68 to 44. The number of black children attending imbalanced schools will drop from 30,000 to 10,000. This will require the busing of an estimated 17,377 pupils, 18 percent of the school population This will require about 350 buses.

The plan for September is just the beginning. Now that the court has ruled that the segregationist intent of the Boston School Committee is legally of the same effect as segregation statutes in the South, the court has the power to supervise complete desegregation.

Judge Garrity has struck a blow for justice.