Moving Beyond "Common Ground"
Lukas’s book examined Boston’s “busing crisis” by tracing the experiences of three local Boston families—the working-class black Twymons, the working-class Irish McGoffs, and the middle-class Yankee Divers—from 1968 to 1978. These family stories are woven together with profiles of five white public figures—politicians Louise Day Hicks and Kevin White, Judge Arthur Garrity, Boston Globe editor Thomas Winship, and archbishop of Boston Humberto Cardinal Medeiros. “Busing,” in Lukas’s telling, was a foolhardy plan that was destined to fail. Despite their demographic differences, each of the families in his story shared a dislike of “busing,” a “common ground” shared, the book suggests, by millions of other Americans. David Halberstam described Common Ground as “a bittersweet book on the end of an American dream.” In his New York Times review, sociologist Kai Erickson praised the book as a “huge and marvelous work. . . . Every family in the book has its genealogy, every community its history, every event its context—and Mr. Lukas seems to trace all of them back as far as his data will permit.” Sociologist Robert Dentler, a court-appointed expert who worked on desegregation plans for Boston and over a dozen other cities, was much more critical of Common Ground. “Dramatically engaging as the story of each family may be, no evidence from them explains at all adequately the story of school desegregation,” Dentler argued. “The thousands of filings in Morgan v. Hennigan go unexamined. . . . There is no review, and there are no quotations from the public records of the litigation except for a sentence or two from the federal court’s liability opinion. . . . Lukas serves as the chronicling outsider who collects, sifts, and weaves a more complete fabric of exculpation out of the stuff of . . . local legends.”
Black civil rights activists in Boston greeted Common Ground with anger and frustration akin to Mississippi civil rights activists’ criticisms of Mississippi Burning (1988) (a film that ignored the role of black activists while glorifying the FBI’s role in the civil rights movement in Mississippi). Black Bostonians disputed Lukas’s favorable presentation of white resistance to school desegregation, his emphasis on black family dysfunction, and his selection of a black family with no ties to the decades-long campaign to secure educational equality for black children (he found the black family he profiled through a social worker). Describing Lukas as a “faulty historian,” longtime Boston civil rights activist Ruth Batson lamented the seduction of Lukas’s narrative and the difficulty of dislodging it. It’s “like swimming against a strong tide,” Batson wrote, “like being in a large crowd, trying to reach a destination, advancing twenty steps and being pushed back forty steps.” Batson and other black Boston community members organized a conference in 1994 at Northeastern University to document the history of community struggle for racial equality and educational justice. Batson researched, solicited questionnaires and primary documents from conference participants, and subsequently published a nine-hundred-page memoir/chronology of the black educational movement in Boston from 1638 to 1975, to ensure that black activism would be part of the historical record. Batson, like other civil rights advocates, understood that how we remember the history of “busing” for school desegregation matters.
Lukas’ Common Ground is still praised and widely taught in colleges and high schools, in Boston and across the country, as the definitive history of school desegregation in the North. In Lukas’ telling, busing was a foolhardy plan that was destined to fail. The problem is that “busing” is so routinely described as having failed that we have lost sight of what this equation—“busing failed”—asks us to believe about the history of civil rights. Agreeing “busing failed” makes it possible to dismiss the educational goals that were a pillar of the civil rights movement and the constitutional promise of equality endorsed by, but was never fully realized after, Brown. The “busing failed” narrative is comforting because it authorizes people to accept the continuing racial and socioeconomic segregation of schools in Boston and elsewhere as inevitable and unchangeable. It is time for us to move beyond Common Ground and deal more honestly with the history of civil rights in Boston and nationally.
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