This article began as a research paper eight years ago during my final year of graduate school, when I was studying to become a teacher at the University of Massachussetts, Boston. Since then, I\u2019ve left Boston, where I grew up, and moved to Brooklyn, New York, where I currently teach high school social studies and am active with the Movement of Rank and File Educators,<\/a> the left-wing opposition caucus of the United Federation of Teachers<\/a>.<\/p>\n Growing up in Boston, Irish Catholic students are taught that busing, at best, was a well-intentioned but ill-conceived plan to address racial inequality that trampled the rights of white families in the city\u2019s poor and working-class Irish neighborhoods. But as a teenager who became politically active in socialist organizing through the Iraq anti-war movement and the racial horrors of Hurricane Katrina in the early 2000s, this narrative never sat right with me. I knew the corporate media often lied, and conventional political wisdom, especially in a city with such a long and ugly history of racism as Boston, is seldom to be trusted. As a then soon-to-be radical teacher and union militant, I wanted to uncover the history and lessons of past class-based struggles for educational justice and Black liberation, as a guide for navigating the political terrain of today.<\/p>\n On the contemporary socialist Left, the history of busing and desegregation in Boston doesn’t get much attention. It is considered a chapter of the 1960s and 1970s Black freedom struggle that is localized; as a result, it is often overlooked in comparison to the movement’s national high points. If it is discussed, what\u2019s focused on is of a negative character: the violent backlash, busing\u2019s limitations, or the outcome of white flight that followed.<\/p>\n