***

Batson was on the front lines of the school-desegregation battles in Boston. Born and raised in Roxbury, Batson recalled being exposed to politics at an early age by her Jamaican parents, who supported Marcus Garvey. “We heard racial issues constantly being discussed” at regular Sunday community meetings at Toussaint L’Ouverture Hall, Batson remembered. “I knew that there were flaws in the cradle of liberty.” As a former Boston public-schools student herself and the mother of three school-age daughters, Batson knew Boston’s schools were resolutely segregated, with vast differentials in funding, school resources, and teacher quality. Batson ran for the Boston School Committee in 1951, and her campaign fliers urged voters, “For your children’s sake, elect a mother.” Though she lost the election, Batson nonetheless dedicated herself to showing people how Boston school officials used subtle techniques to maintain school segregation. She was dismayed to see Boston’s schools grow more segregated in the decades after Brown, as the district bused white children to white schools with more resources and more experienced teachers.

“What black parents wanted was to get their children to schools where there were the best resources for educational growth—smaller class sizes, up-to-date-books,” Batson recalled. “They wanted their children in a good school building, where there was an allocation of funds which exceeded those in the black schools; where there were sufficient books and equipment for all students.” In short, Batson understood that school integration was about more than having black students sit next to white students. As she knew, more than 80 percent of Boston’s black elementary-school students attended majority-black schools, most of which were overcrowded. Across Boston’s public schools in the 1950s, per-pupil spending averaged $340 for white students compared with only $240 for blacks students. Over the years, data of this sort failed to persuade the Boston School Committee, which steadfastly denied the charge that school segregation even existed in Boston.

In the 1960s, Boston School Committee chairwoman Louise Day Hicks, who became a local and national symbol of the “white backlash” to school desegregation, consistently resisted the demands of civil-rights advocates. Describing a particularly contentious meeting in August 1963, The Boston Globe reported, “Hicks gaveled the last meeting with Negro leaders to a close in something short of three minutes when the speaker mentioned the words, de facto segregation—just mentioned the words.” For Hicks, acknowledging segregation at all might lead to having to do something about it. “We’re not quibbling about a word,” Batson told the Globe. “It is not the word. It is the fact that it exists. Our whole quarrel is with their refusing to admit that the situation exists.”

Ruth Batson, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University

Batson and other civil-rights activists, parents, and students in Boston were organized and creative in their protests against school segregation. In June 1963, for example, Batson and other NAACP members met with the Boston School Committee while 300 black Bostonians demonstrated outside of City Hall. “We make this charge: that there is segregation in fact in our Boston public-school system,” Batson told the School Committee. “The injustices present in our school system hurt our pride, rob us of our dignity, and produce results which are injurious not only to our future but to those of the city, state, and nation.” In a hearing room crowded with press, the School Committee did not respond positively to these charges. “We made our presentation and everything broke loose,” Batson recalled. “We were insulted. We were told … our kids were stupid, and this was why they didn’t learn. We were completely rejected that night.” A week later, Batson and other civil-rights advocates organized a “Stay Out for Freedom” protest, with nearly 3,000 black junior and senior high-school students staying away from public school. Organizers preferred “stay out” to “boycott” because students were staying away from public school to attend community-organized “Freedom Schools.” “I feel that the Stay Out for Freedom Day was a success,” Batson told the Globe. “It demonstrated to the Boston community that the Negro community is concerned and that they want action.”