Morgan v. Hennigan: The Boston Desegregation Ruling and Busing Remedy

Morgan v. Hennigan is the 1974 federal court decision in which Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. ruled that the Boston School Committee had deliberately segregated the city’s public schools in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and ordered the dual system dismantled. The remedy that followed — a court-supervised desegregation plan built around mandatory busing — reshaped Boston’s schools and set off years of upheaval in the city.

Who Brought the Case and Against Whom

On March 15, 1972, a group of Black parents filed a class-action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.¹ The suit was brought on behalf of fifteen parents and their forty-three children.² Tallulah Morgan was the lead plaintiff. The defendants were the Boston School Committee and its chairman, James Hennigan.

The plaintiffs argued that Boston’s segregated schools were not an accident of housing patterns but the product of deliberate government policy. They invoked the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments and federal civil rights statutes, including Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The suit followed nearly a decade of conflict over the state’s 1965 Racial Imbalance Act, which the School Committee had responded to with lawsuits, lobbying to repeal, and inadequate compliance plans.³

What the Court Found

Judge Garrity issued his decision on June 21, 1974. In a 150-page opinion, he concluded that the committee had “knowingly carried out a systematic program of segregation affecting all of the city’s students, teachers and school facilities and [had] intentionally brought about and maintained a dual school system.”³ He examined the committee’s conduct across six categories: student assignment, feeder patterns, school capacity management, transfer policies, faculty assignments, and facilities decisions.¹

Feeder Patterns

The court found that racial composition was the only consistent explanation for how students were routed from elementary and middle schools into high schools. Distance between schools, building capacity, transportation logistics, and natural boundaries did not account for the pattern. The committee had also converted four junior high schools in Black neighborhoods into middle schools, so that Black students generally entered high school after eighth grade and white students after ninth. Black students were channeled into citywide schools; white students attended district schools near home. The court described the result as “a dual system of secondary education, one for each race.”³

Capacity and Overcrowding

Schools in Black neighborhoods were packed to overflowing and used portable classrooms while schools in nearby white neighborhoods sat half-empty. During the 1971–72 school year, South Boston High School, which was entirely white, was over capacity by 676 students, while Girls High School, which was 92% Black, was under-enrolled by 532 seats.³ The committee had the authority to reassign students and chose not to.

Transfer Policies

Open enrollment operated as a one-way valve. White students were allowed to transfer out of schools that were becoming more racially mixed, while Black students faced barriers to transferring into predominantly white schools that had space available.

Faculty Assignments

Segregation extended to the staff. In 1972–73, only 231 of the system’s 4,243 permanent teachers were Black, roughly 5.4%. Counting provisional teachers, the system employed 356 Black educators, and 244 of them were assigned to just 59 majority-Black schools out of the city’s 201. The court found a presumptive discriminatory intent behind that concentration.³

The Legal Framework

Garrity’s ruling drew heavily on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Keyes v. School District No. 1, the Denver desegregation case. Keyes held that in cities without a history of legally mandated segregation, plaintiffs could still prove an unconstitutional violation by showing that school officials acted with the purpose of segregating. If intentional segregation was found in a substantial portion of a system, a court could presume it infected the whole. Garrity found that standard met in Boston. For student assignment, feeder patterns, capacity management, and transfers, he found direct intentional segregation; for faculty assignments, presumptive discriminatory intent.¹

He ordered the committee to “eliminate every form of racial segregation in the public schools of Boston, including all consequences and vestiges of segregation previously practiced by the defendants.”¹

The Remedy and the Busing Plan

The School Committee refused to produce a workable desegregation plan. The court described its conduct as “formalistic compliance followed by procrastination and evasion on technical grounds” and found that the state Board of Education had been “frustrated by their intransigence and frequent bad faith.”³ With no committee plan to work from, Garrity ordered implementation of a plan the state Board of Education had already developed and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court had imposed.

Phase one took effect in September 1974. It required mandatory busing of students between racially segregated neighborhoods and focused on the most isolated areas of the city, pairing students from predominantly white South Boston with students from predominantly Black Roxbury.⁴ The opening of schools under that plan was met with organized resistance and violence, including crowds throwing rocks, bottles, and eggs at buses carrying Black students into South Boston.

For the 1975–76 school year, Garrity replaced phase one with the McCormack Plan, which expanded desegregation from a few neighborhoods to the entire city.⁴

Appeals

The School Committee appealed to the First Circuit Court of Appeals. In December 1974, the First Circuit affirmed, with Judge Frank Coffin writing that “the defendants’ failures to act are probative evidence of intent.”¹ The committee petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case in 1975. Garrity’s order stood.

How Long Court Oversight Lasted

Judge Garrity kept federal oversight of Boston’s schools for more than a decade. On September 4, 1985, he issued a final order relinquishing federal control. The order permanently prohibited school officials from “discriminating on the basis of race in the operation of the public schools of the city of Boston.” The system was declared desegregated in 1987, ending thirteen years of federal supervision.

What Changed in Boston

The order transformed the district’s demographics. Thousands of white families left the city for the suburbs during the 1970s and 1980s. By 1987, a system that had been majority-white before the ruling was 48% Black and 19% Latino.

Morgan v. Hennigan became one of the most significant school desegregation cases outside the South. It confirmed that Northern cities could be held to the same constitutional standard as Southern ones when school officials engaged in intentional segregation, and that federal courts would impose system-wide remedies when local authorities refused to act. It also showed the limits of what a court order can do: a judge can require integration inside the schools but cannot control the demographic and political changes that follow.

1
Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse. Morgan v. Hennigan – Boston School Desegregation Case
2
City of Boston. Boston City Archives – Morgan vs. Hennigan Working Files
3
Justia. Morgan v. Hennigan, 379 F. Supp. 410 (D. Mass. 1974)
4
National Park Service. The Fight for Equal Education Continues: Morgan v. Hennigan