Anna Louise Day Hicks was an American politician and lawyer from Boston, Massachusetts, best known for her staunch opposition to desegregation in Boston public schools, and especially to court-ordered busing, in the 1960s and 1970s. A longtime member of Boston's school board and city council, she served one term in the United States House of Representatives, succeeding Speaker of the House John W. McCormack.
The Communist Party of Canada (Ontario) (French: Parti communiste du Canada (Ontario)) is the Ontario provincial wing of the Communist Party of Canada. Using the name Labor-Progressive Party from 1943 until 1959, the group won two seats in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario: A.A. MacLeod and J.B. Salsberg were elected in the 1943 provincial election as "Labour" candidates but took their seats as members of the Labor-Progressive Party, which the banned Communist Party launched as its public face in a convention held on August 21 and 22, 1943, shortly after both the August 4 provincial election and the August 7 election of Communist Fred Rose to the House of Commons in a Montreal by-election.
The U.S. Labor Party (USLP) was an American political party formed in 1973 by the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC). It served as a vehicle for Lyndon LaRouche to run for President of the United States in 1976, but it also sponsored many candidates for local offices as well as congressional and Senate seats between 1972 and 1979. After that the political arm of the NCLC was the National Democratic Policy Committee. The party was the subject of a number of controversies and lawsuits during its short existence.
Kevin Hagan White was an American politician best known for serving as the mayor of Boston for four terms from 1968 to 1984. He was first elected to the office at the age of 38. He presided as mayor during racially turbulent years in the late 1960s and 1970s, and the start of desegregation of schools via court-ordered busing of school children in Boston. White won the mayoral office in the 1967 general election in a hard-fought campaign opposing the anti-busing and anti-desegregation Boston School Committee member Louise Day Hicks. Earlier he had been elected Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth in 1960 at the age of 31, and he resigned from that office after his election as Mayor.
Mildred Fay Jefferson was an American physician and anti-abortion political activist. The first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School, the first woman to graduate in surgery from Harvard Medical School and the first woman to become a member of the Boston Surgical Society, she is known for her opposition to the legalization of abortion and her work as president of the National Right to Life Committee.
Restore Our Alienated Rights (ROAR) was an organization formed in Boston, Massachusetts by Louise Day Hicks in 1974. Opposed to desegregation busing of Boston's public school students, the group protested the federally-mandated order to integrate Boston Public Schools by staging formal, sometimes violent protests. It remained active from 1974 until 1976.
Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families is a nonfiction book by J. Anthony Lukas, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1985, that examines race relations in Boston, Massachusetts, through the prism of desegregation busing. It received the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
The Boston City Council is the legislative branch of government for the city of Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It is made up of 13 members: 9 district representatives and 4 at-large members. Councillors are elected to two-year terms and there is no limit on the number of terms an individual can serve. Boston uses a strong-mayor form of government in which the city council acts as a check against the power of the executive branch, the mayor. The council is responsible for approving the city budget; monitoring, creating, and abolishing city agencies; making land use decisions; and approving, amending, or rejecting other legislative proposals.
The United States Senate election of 1978 in Massachusetts was held on November 7, 1978, with the incumbent Republican Senator Edward Brooke being defeated by Democratic Congressman Paul Tsongas.
Gay Community News was an American weekly newspaper published in Boston, Massachusetts from 1973 to 1999. Designed as a resource for the LGBT community, the newspaper reported a wide variety of gay and lesbian-related news.
4 Days, 40 Hours is a 1971 book by Riva Poor reporting on a "revolution in work and leisure" from a rearranged work week with four days of 10 hours each. In some cases, the book claims, companies can increase production and profit while giving employees more time off.
May Stevens was an American feminist artist, political activist, educator, and writer.
Kathleen Sullivan Alioto is an American educator and politician who served on the Boston School Committee as a member (1974–79) and its president (1977). She played a role in the desegregation of the Boston public schools.
The desegregation of Boston public schools (1974–1988) was a period in which the Boston Public Schools were under court control to desegregate through a system of busing students. The call for desegregation and the first years of its implementation led to a series of racial protests and riots that brought national attention, particularly from 1974 to 1976. In response to the Massachusetts legislature's enactment of the 1965 Racial Imbalance Act, which ordered the state's public schools to desegregate, W. Arthur Garrity Jr. of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts laid out a plan for compulsory busing of students between predominantly white and black areas of the city. The hard control of the desegregation plan lasted for over a decade. It influenced Boston politics and contributed to demographic shifts of Boston's school-age population, leading to a decline of public-school enrollment and white flight to the suburbs. Full control of the desegregation plan was transferred to the Boston School Committee in 1988; in 2013 the busing system was replaced by one with dramatically reduced busing.
South Boston High School was a public high school located in South Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It was part of Boston Public Schools. The school closed in 2003, and its former facility is currently occupied by Excel High School.
Sara R. Ehrmann was a Boston civic leader who fought against capital punishment both city- and nationwide. Best known for her work establishing the 1951 "Mercy Law" in Massachusetts, which allowed juries to opt out of the death penalty on first-degree murder cases, Ehrmann was an influential leader of the Massachusetts Council for the Abolition of the Death Penalty (1928–1969) and the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment (1949–1969). She launched her career as a direct response to the internationally controversial Sacco and Vanzetti case, which her husband worked on as an assistant defense councilman.
From 1974 to 1976, the court-ordered busing of students to achieve school desegregation led to sporadic outbreaks of violence in Boston's schools and in the city's largely segregated neighborhoods. Although Boston was by no means the only American city to undertake a plan of school desegregation, the forced busing of students from some of the city's most impoverished and racially segregated neighborhoods led to an unprecedented level of violence and turmoil in the city's streets and classrooms and made national headlines.
Ursula Reilly Curtiss was an American writer of mystery novels.
Elvira "Pixie" Palladino was an American politician from Boston, Massachusetts, best known for her affiliation with Restore Our Alienated Rights (ROAR) and her opposition to court-ordered busing in the 1960s and 1970s. She was elected to the Boston School Committee several times in the 1970s, and served three two-year terms. Though she was cleared of bribery charges related to the Boston School Committee in 1981 this ultimately led to the loss of her Committee seat.
