The Utter Inadequacy of America’s Efforts to Desegregate Schools
My best friend in kindergarten, Eddie Linton, did not live in one of the spacious houses on the hill in the Boston suburb where I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, Belmont, which is best known for its stellar schools and abundance of Harvard professors. Eddie, who is black, lived instead in a brownstone in the South End of Boston, alongside his two American-born sisters, plus grandparents and aunts and godparents from Barbados, the country where his parents were born.
Every morning, Eddie would get up at 6 a.m. and get on a yellow school bus that took him and dozens of other black kids from Boston to Belmont. He’d spend his school day in Belmont, surrounded by kids who did live in those spacious mansions, and then, at the end of the day, he’d get on the bus and go home. “It was a long day, but my parents wanted me to have exposure to a better education system,” he told me recently. While he was gazing out the bus window, watching the scenery change from suburban to urban, wealthy to middle- and low-income, thousands of other black kids across Boston were sitting on similar buses that took them to and from schools in other predominantly white suburbs, such as Newton, Sharon, and Wellesley, areas that white families had embraced to escape the city in the 1960s and 1970s.
Eddie was a participant in the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity program, one of the longest-running voluntary school-integration programs in the country. Started in 1966, METCO has bused thousands of students in Massachusetts—at least 200 in the first decade to 3,000 since the 1970s—from predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods in the city of Boston and later Springfield to white, wealthy neighborhoods in the suburbs.
The original idea behind the program was to help black kids access better educational opportunities than those available in Boston, and to give white students in suburbia the opportunity to “share a learning experience with students with differing social, economic, and racial backgrounds,” as program backers put it at the time. Its founders assumed that it wouldn’t be necessary for long—soon, they hoped, housing segregation would dissipate and schools would be places where black and white students were educated alongside one another, without any busing necessary.
I don’t know why Eddie and I became such fast friends. Perhaps I recognized in Eddie, with his wiry frame, oversize glasses, and ears that stuck out a little, a fellow nerd like me. Teachers said we were inseparable and joked that we would someday get married. I remember venturing into Boston to see the rerelease of E.T. in a theater with his family, but the movie proved so terrifying to me that I demanded we leave, and his mother had to wait with me outside the theater until the movie ended.
I spent time in his Boston home, too, though I don’t remember much aside from a linoleum kitchen floor and the smells of home-cooked food. Eddie says my father wrapped a multicolored afghan around him one winter evening on our couch, and he remembers feeling warmed by the evidence that someone who looked different from him cared about him.
Today, Eddie lives in France, where he’s married to a French woman and works as an account manager for a French airline. Eddie’s experiences with “code-switching” as a kid—moving back and forth between his Barbadian family and neighborhood friends in Boston and the WASPy suburb of Belmont—prepared him for a life and career in which he needs to easily transition among languages and cultures, he told me. Going to school in Belmont, where kids would casually talk about skiing in the Rockies over winter break or traveling
