John J. Kerrigan

Last updated
John J. Kerrigan
Chairman of the Boston School Committee
In office
1969–1969
Preceded by Thomas Eisenstadt
Succeeded by Joseph Lee
In office
1974–1974
Preceded by Paul R. Tierney
Succeeded by John J. McDonough

John J. Kerrigan (1932-1996) was a member of the Boston School Committee from 1968 to 1975, and a member of the City Council from 1975 to 1977. [1] He was one of the leading opponents of the plan to integrate the Boston Public School through busing. [2] [3]

Kerrigan was chair of the school committee when, in December 1974, it voted to refuse to comply with the order of Federal District Judge Wendell Arthur Garrity Jr. to desegregate the Boston Public Schools. [4]

Kerrigan entered politics through the encouragement of future Mayor John F. Collins, who was a patient at the medical center where Kerrigan was working as an orderly. [5] Collins encouraged Kerrigan to get advanced schooling, which lead to him getting a law degree from Northeast Law School and later a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts.

Kerrigan argued that sending children on long bus rides from one neighborhood to another would not improve the quality of their education. [6] As a school committee member Kerrigan particularly criticized suburban support for busing, and in 1972 introduced a busing bill solely intended to bus students from inner-city schools into the suburban school district where the governor lived. [7] In 1974 he and two other committee members defied a court order to implement a busing plan to desegregate Boston schools, resulting in a contempt of court ruling that Kerrigan called "a gun that's held to the head of the people of Boston." [8] The Boston Globe later characterized Kerrigan's derogatory racial comments about a black reporter during this time as "the most ignominious moment in the stained history of the elected Boston School Committee." [9] After Kerrigan's election to the City Council, the School Committee resumed plans to desegregate the school system. [10]

Kerrigan joined the white flight to the suburbs caused by school busing, moving to Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1978. [6]

In 1994 Kerrigan ran unsuccessfully for the Governor's Council. [1] After a cancer diagnosis, he expressed public regret for being "more abusive than most." [11] Kerrigan died in 1996 at the age of 64. He was a practicing Catholic. [12]

Related Research Articles

<i>Milliken v. Bradley</i> United States Supreme Court case

Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974), was a significant United States Supreme Court case dealing with the planned desegregation busing of public school students across district lines among 53 school districts in metropolitan Detroit. It concerned the plans to integrate public schools in the United States following the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision.

Louise Day Hicks

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 John William McCormack.

Desegregation busing Effort to diversify the racial make-up of schools in the United States

Race-integration busing in the United States was the practice of assigning and transporting students to schools within or outside their local school districts in an effort to diversify the racial make-up of schools. While the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, many American schools continue to remain largely uni-racial due to housing inequality. In an effort to address the ongoing de facto segregation in schools, the 1971 Supreme Court decision, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, ruled that the federal courts could use busing as a further integration tool to achieve racial balance.

Francis Sargent Governor of Massachusetts

Francis Williams Sargent was an American politician who served as the 64th Governor of Massachusetts from 1969 to 1975.

Massive resistance was a strategy declared by U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. of Virginia along with his brother-in-law as the leader in the Virginia General Assembly, Democratic Delegate James M. Thomson of Alexandria, to unite white politicians and leaders in Virginia in a campaign of new state laws and policies to prevent public school desegregation, particularly after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954. Many schools, and even an entire school system, were shut down in 1958 and 1959 in attempts to block integration, before both the Virginia Supreme Court and a special three-judge panel of Federal District judges from the Eastern District of Virginia, sitting at Norfolk, declared those policies unconstitutional.

Kevin White (politician)

Kevin Hagan White was an American politician best known as the Mayor of Boston, an office to which he was first elected at the age of 38, and which he held for four terms, amounting to 16 years, from 1968 to 1984. 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. He was earlier elected Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth in 1960 at the age of 31, and resigned from that office after his election as Mayor.

Restore Our Alienated Rights

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.

Sandra Lea Lynch is a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. She is the first woman to serve on that court. Lynch served as chief judge of the First Circuit from 2008 to 2015.

1978 United States Senate election in Massachusetts

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 then Democratic Congressman Paul Tsongas.

Freedom House is a nonprofit community-based organization in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Freedom House is located in an area sometimes referred to as Grove Hall that lies along Blue Hill Ave. at the border between the Roxbury and Dorchester neighborhoods of Boston. Although it was historically identified with Roxbury, Freedom House currently refers to itself as being located either in Dorchester or in Grove Hall.

The Old Harbor Housing Project, later renamed the Mary Ellen McCormack Project, is a 27-acre housing project opposite Joe Moakley Park in South Boston, Massachusetts.

W. Arthur Garrity Jr. American judge

Wendell Arthur Garrity Jr. was a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts notable for issuing the 1974 order in Morgan v. Hennigan which mandated that Boston schools be desegregated by means of busing.

Morgan v. Hennigan was the case that defined the school busing controversy in Boston, Massachusetts during the 1970s. On March 14, 1972, the Boston chapter of the NAACP filed a class action lawsuit against the Boston School Committee on behalf of 14 black parents and 44 children. Tallulah Morgan headed the list of plaintiffs and James Hennigan then chair of the School Committee, was listed as the main defendant.

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.

Paul Parks was an American civil engineer. Parks became the first African American Secretary of Education for Massachusetts, and was appointed by Governor Michael Dukakis to serve from 1975 until 1979. Mayor Raymond Flynn appointed Parks to the Boston School Committee, where he was also the first African American.

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.

Elvira "Pixie" Palladino American politician

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.

Jamaica Plain High School Public high school in the United States

Jamaica Plain High School is a defunct four-year public high school that served students in ninth through twelfth grades in the Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, United States. The school held its first classes in 1849 and was last located at 144 McBride Street from 1979 until its closure in 1989.

References

  1. 1 2 Sullivan, Paul (August 15, 1996). "OBITUARY - John J. Kerrigan, 64, outspoken busing foe". Boston Herald . p. 65.
  2. ↑ Kifner, John (October 31, 1973). "Boston School Board to Ask for High Court Ruling on State Order to Seek Racial Balance". The New York Times . Retrieved September 12, 2018.
  3. ↑ Reinhold, Robert (September 30, 1973). "Boston 8 years ago integrated schools intelligently". The New York Times . Retrieved September 12, 2018.
  4. ↑ Kifner, John (17 December 1974). "JUDGE IN BOSTON DEFIED ON BUSING: School Committee Refuses, 3-2, to Approve Staff Plan for City Desegregation Judge in Boston Is Defied on Busing Plan". New York Times. ProQuest   120154694.
  5. ↑ Lukas, J. Anthony (1985). Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. Knopf. ISBN   9780394411507.
  6. 1 2 Rezendes, Michael (7 September 1992). "Antibusing crusader returns, unhorsed A changed John Kerrigan seeks elective office". Boston Globe. ProQuest   294719517.
  7. ↑ Formisano, Ronald P. (2012). Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN   9780807869703.
  8. ↑ Kifner, John (December 31, 1974). "3 on Boston School Panel Fined Over Busing Order". The New York Times . Retrieved September 12, 2018.
  9. ↑ Rezendes, Michael (July 22, 1991). "Boston School Committee: uneven past, uncertain future". Boston Globe .
  10. ↑ Williams, Preston N.; Lovin, Robin W. (1978). "Rights and Remedies: A Study of Desegregation in Boston". The Journal of Religious Ethics. 6 (2): 137–163. JSTOR   40014910.
  11. ↑ Editorial Board (August 19, 1996). "John J. Kerrigan: 1932-1996". Boston Globe . p. A22.
  12. ↑ Gribble, Richard (2006). "Cardinal Humberto Medeiros and the Desegregation of Boston's Public Schools, 1974-1976". Journal of Church and State. 48 (2): 327–353. doi:10.1093/jcs/48.2.327. JSTOR   23922334.

Sources

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.