Le Conseil Métropolitain pour l’Opportunité Éducative (METCO) à Boston : intégration raciale et libéralisme de banlieue, 1966-1996
This article focuses on the history of the oldest voluntary integration program in the United States, METCO. Founded in Boston in 1966, this program organized the transportation of mostly African-American schoolchildren to predominantly white suburban schools eager to enroll them to meet capacity. W...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Association Française d'Etudes Américaines
2024-12-01
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| Series: | Transatlantica |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/23517 |
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| Summary: | This article focuses on the history of the oldest voluntary integration program in the United States, METCO. Founded in Boston in 1966, this program organized the transportation of mostly African-American schoolchildren to predominantly white suburban schools eager to enroll them to meet capacity. While existing historiography has focused on white opposition to transportation strategies used to promote racial integration, the history of the suburbs which chose busing to diversify their schools remains to be written.In this sense, Boston presents a valuable case study in the 1970s, since it saw both the most virulent anti-busing urban revolt in the United States, and the expansion of the METCO busing program, now recognized as a national model of racial integration. Rather than seeing these two movements in opposition, this article finds a common trend in these two forms of busing (mandatory and voluntary; urban and suburban): the evolution of conservative ideas in the United States post-Brown v. Board of Education. By retracing the genesis of the program, and in particular its continuation through the anti-busing crisis of the 1970s, I analyze its success as the result of its strict obedience to the rules of suburban liberalism (Geismer): although publicly celebrated as grounded in mutual contribution, the choice of racial integration is in fact conceived as an act of charity.This article draws on METCO’s archives, quantitative US census data from the second half of the twentieth century and the historiography of the anti-busing crisis in Boston, as well as oral history interviews conducted with alumni who went to schools in the the suburbs affected by the program. |
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| ISSN: | 1765-2766 |