Note: This report contains some harsh language.

BOSTON — On June 21, 1974 — 40 years ago Saturday — Judge W. Arthur Garrity ordered that Boston students be bused to desegregate schools. His decision ignited a firestorm of controversy and violence.

"Busing was one of the biggest events in the history of Boston," said Jim Vrabel, author of the soon-to-be released book, “A People’s History of the New Boston.” The historian puts busing right up there with the American Revolution — though busing in Boston was more a civil war, the battlefield the city, the fight between neighborhoods and neighbors.

"It was so disruptive to the city at the time because it caused so much hard feeling among people and because it has a lasting, I think negative, impact to this day," Vrabel said.

It took Garrity 15 months to decide the case. A third generation Irish-American who lived in suburban Wellesley, Garrity was known as a meticulous, methodical man. His desegregation ruling in the lawsuit Morgan v. Hennigan ran 152 pages.

Some facts are not in dispute. Boston schools were segregated. Some schools in Roxbury were 90 percent black. In South Boston, nearly 100 percent of the students were white.

The Boston School Committee said that was just the way it was; it's where people chose to live. But black parents in the city wanted more for their kids.

"This all started in the black community," Vrabel said, "because although the schools were not providing a good education for anyone, they were providing a particularly bad one for students in the black community."

Some white schools lacked libraries and cafeterias. Some black schools lacked classrooms, books, even teachers. In the mid 1960s, just one Boston school teacher in 200 was black.

Among them was Jean McGuire. "My son went all the way through school 'til he was a senior and never saw a black man — not a custodian, not a teacher, not a counselor," she said. "Can you imagine your kids going all the way through school and never seeing a white teacher?"

At the time there wasn’t a single black principal in the entire Boston school system.

"The reason Boston schools began to deteriorate was that the school system became less of an educational system and more a patronage system," Vrabel said. "Teachers and administrators were hired based on who they knew rather than what they knew."

Members of the Boston School Committee in session on Dec. 23, 1974, when they voted unanimously to appeal a federal desegregation court order to the U.S. Supreme Court. (AP)

In 1965 the Massachusetts Legislature passed the Racial Imbalance Act, requiring schools with more than 50 percent of students of one race to desegregate.

Boston's school committee refused to comply. All five members, elected at large, were white.

"It was clear to me when I was hired in 1972 that the day was going to come when the chickens would come home to roost," said Bob Schwartz, who was Boston Mayor Kevin White’s adviser on education when the civil rights lawsuit was filed against the school committee.

Schwartz is now a professor emeritus of education at Harvard University. "At every point where the school committee had a choice," he said, "the school committee opted for segregation."

In 1965 — more than a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that separate but equal schools were unconstitutional — a black parent confronted Boston School Committee member Louise Day Hicks, a staunch opponent of school desegregation:

Johnson: Any school that is predominantly Negro in Boston is an inadequate school. Hicks: Mrs. Johnson, the superintendent of schools has stated as his policy that a racially imbalanced school is not educationally harmful. Johnson: Mrs. Hicks, madame chairman, may I say this: Superintendent Ohrenberger and yourself and other committee members do not have children in a racially imbalanced school, so you do not know what the effect is on our children.

"People were tired of fighting and not winning," McGuire said.