Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO): Solving Racial Imbalance in Boston Public Schools

The birth of METCO was an important chapter in the battle over school desegregation in Boston. In 1963 and 1964, Black parents boycotted Boston schools for failing to integrate.  After the Massachusetts Racial Imbalance Act passed (1965), a group of African-American parents took action again to end the educational inequality in Boston.  Laying the foundation for METCO, the mid-1960s program called “Operation Exodus” began with parents organizing to transport their children from overcrowded schools to better resourced city schools.  
 
METCO is a grassroots program that began officially in 1966 with funding from the Carnegie Foundation and enabled African American children to attend suburban schools in Arlington, Braintree, Brookline, Lexington, Lincoln, Newton and Wellesley.  it did not take long for the program to grow in popularity as the state began to provide grants to participating suburban districts.
 
METCO is the story of interracial coalition building and peaceful voluntary desegregation that has been largely overshadowed by the violent busing struggle of the 1970s.  METCO has been a vehicle for meeting the goals of Massachusetts Racial Imbalance Act, which promotes racial and ethnic diversity in public schools.

 The goal of this exhibit is to illustrate how METCO and its administrators worked to reach out to organizations making the transition easier for black students and how organizations were reacting to the role that METCO ultimately played in desegregation.

The exhibit highlights that while METCO was focused on monitoring and resolving racial imbalance issues in school placement, there were also problems that needed to be dealt with internally. Documents included in the exhibit range from letters of petition from different organizations to Boston officials that were monitored and sometimes filtered through METCO. Letters from executives in METCO to officials in the Boston School system imploring them to aid in making school desegregation an easier process for students and organizations helping in communities.  Some of these letters will show not only the frustrations of grassroots organizations and major organizations like the NAACP branch of Boston, but also the problems faced by METCO in regards to representation of their work with desegregation and student placement.

 

 

Credits

Content for this exhibit was created by Corinne Zaczek Bermon and Kristin Harris, graduate students at the University of Massachusetts, Boston (2015). This exhibit was made possible courtesy of Northeastern University Archives.