The 1960s

The Firing of Six Teachers

On September 6, 1968, the Boston Globe reported that six teachers – Connie Egan, Sandra Fenton, Charna Heiko, Mary Ellen Smith, Anne DeCanio, and Mary McDonough – had walked out of Christopher Gibson Elementary School in Dorchester, taking their young students with them. The final destination was seven blocks away, at Robert Gould Shaw House: a liberation school. The teachers were immediately suspended and dismissed. They did not receive a hearing from the Boston School Committee. The community, in support of the fired teachers, protested and rallied for the Gibson school to become community controlled.

Why did the teachers and students walk out of Christopher Gibson Elementary School?

[We chose] between the building and the children. Our responsibility can be placed nowhere else but with the child."

The Christopher Gibson Elementary School was a predominantly Black school. The building was in disrepair, the textbooks and curriculum were outdated, and the children were widely profiled and stereotyped by select staff. A few years before the firing of the six teachers, another teacher was fired for "curriculum deviation": reading his fourth-grade students Langston Hughes' poems. His name was Jonathan Kozol.

After his firing in 1965, Kozol later wrote and published Death at an Early Age, a memoir that described the horrible conditions Black students faced at the Christopher Gibson Elementary School. Below is a video of Jonathan Kozol reading an excerpt from his critically acclaimed book.

BTU's Response

In late 1967, then BTU President, Fred Reilly wrote about Jonathan Kozol's firing and book in the Boston Union Teacher. Reilly stated that,

The reader should bear in mind that the Boston Public Schools encompass about two hundred schools, almost 4,500 teachers, and about 93,000 pupils. How valid are the judgments of one who has served for 160 days in about four schools in the capacity of a temporary teacher, and came into reasonably constant contact with about fifteen teachers?”

Headline in the Boston Globe. Dec. 12, 1968.

On December 11, 1968, Boston Teachers Union voted not to support the six fired teachers – even fellow union member Mary Ellen Smith. The union believed that if it supported the teachers, then it would signify that it supported community-controlled schools; something the union (and its parent, the AFT) was wholly against. That very same fall, teachers in New York City spent 42 days on strike in a struggle over the rights of a community-controlled school board to select teachers, one of the longest and most divisive strikes in the history of teacher unionism.

There was some pushback by the six teachers and their supporters against the union's decision, but ultimately the union held firm. Below are two letters to the Boston Globe, offering opposing perspectives – one written by the fired six teachers and one by Fred Reilly.

Exterior photo of Christopher Gibson Elementary School. The school was located on Bowdoin Ave. in Dorchester, MA, before it caught fire in the 1970s and was later torn down. Photograph date unknown. Photo courtesy of Boston City Archives.

The 1980s

The Layoffs of 710 Teachers

Judge Garrity's order to create diverse schools through integration did not just apply to students. Garrity directed all public schools in the Boston area to hire Black teachers until the school system as a whole reached a 20% Black teaching staff. Hundreds of Black teachers joined BPS in the mid to late 1970s.

Headline in the Boston Globe. May 29, 1981.

All the tensions surrounding diversity and integration in the Boston Public Schools contributed to the phenomenon known as "White flight": many White families against busing pulled their children out of school and enrolled them in schools in the suburbs. This, combined with long-running trends in suburbanization fueled by federal funds and policies, ultimately led to low enrollment in the Boston Public Schools. As city revenues declined in the late 1970s, Boston was hit with a surprise lawsuit in 1980, which ordered the city to pay back taxes to businesses the court deemed had been assessed wrongly. At the state level, Massachusetts voters approved Proposition 2 1/2, which required municipalities to aggressively lower their property tax rates, starving school districts of their principal source of funding. In the resulting fiscal crisis, the School Committee ordered the layoff of 710 teachers and the closure of dozens of schools in 1981.

Below is an 1987 article from the Associated Press that details Leslie Bornstein's 1981 layoff experience and her return to teaching six years later.

BTU's Response

In typical circumstances, layoffs in a unionized workplace function on the principle of seniority, with the most recently-hired educators the first to leave. However, Judge Garrity ruled that no Black teachers could be fired, as doing so would undermine the affirmative action he had written into his desegregation order. As a consequence, all 710 teachers laid off were White.

...and in 1981, we ran into a fiscal wall that we had to have layoffs, and it culminated in the BTU calling for a teachers strike and had a big meeting at the World Trade Center off of – I forget the place downtown. And a group of us, only about 50 Black teachers showed up, and we said, 'You all didn’t care for us. You really don’t care about our kids by and large. So therefore, if you call a strike, we’re going in to work. And if you don’t like it, too bad.' So what happened was, the senior white teachers voted against the younger white teachers, and the strike was squashed. And I’ll never forget, they had these partitions. If you know where the World Trade Center area was, it’s huge. And they formed a line. You had to walk – it was like a gauntlet you had to walk through that to get to the parking lot. And we were called scabs, niggers, it was ugly. I will never forget that. So for a long time, there was a schism between Black teachers and the administrative staff at the BTU. It was ugly. And because every time the union would go into court and hire lawyers to try to do away with affirmative action and other issues like that around hiring, and then layoffs, you just alienated more Black teachers. It was unbelievable." ––Bob Marshall, retired BPS teacher and BTU member.

As it played out, the firings pitted many Black and White teachers against one another, particularly when the union considered the possibility of appealing Judge Garrity’s ruling (BTU eventually did, but was denied a hearing at the Supreme Court). BTU, having won major contract gains through two strikes in the 1970s, was now internally divided and unable to rally allies from school communities to address this devastating austerity budget. Many educators and union members – some of whom are sharing their stories with the ongoing BTU Oral History Project – cite this era as one of the union’s lowest points.

Below is an 1983 article from the Boston Globe that details BTU's next steps to appeal to educators after court ordered desegregation and the 1981 layoffs.

One of the many pages that list the names of the 710 teachers laid off under Judge Garrity's order by the Boston School Committee, 1981. Photo courtesy of University of Massachusetts-Boston, University Archives & Special Collections.