Lynell Hancock Re-Visits J. Anthony Lukas’s Powerful Book about Boston’s Busing
I have read hundreds of books on education, many of them about racial injustice and segregation. But I confess that I have never read J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground, the story of Boston’s violent and acrimonious fight from 1968 to 1978 about school desegregration and busing.
LynNell Hancock’s new review of Lukas’s book in the Columbia Journalism Review convinces me that I need to pull that 650 page book off my shelf as a reading project for this winter. “Court-ordered busing that was meant to reverse stubborn de facto school segregation nearly ripped apart the social fabric of that historic city. It exposed the raw residue of Yankee guilt, black anger, and Irish immigrant antipathy—the churning clash of cultures that defines America. The country’s racial enmity showed its ugliest face not on the steps of an Arkansas high school this time, but in genteel Boston, the intellectual capital of the abolitionist movement, the ‘cradle of liberty.’”
Hancock is director of the Columbia School of Journalism’s Spencer Fellowship in Education Journalism. She describes Lukas’s respect for nuance and complexity as he tracked three Boston families in the years after Boston’s buses began to roll and the book’s original publication in 1985.
Hancock describes her own experience re-reading the book all these years later: “Reading it