BHM: A History of METCO in Lexington
A shot rings out in the middle of Lexington in 1775, starting the nation’s fight for independence and democracy. Almost two hundred years later and only a quarter of a mile away, a cross burns with racial epithets on a church lawn. In the 1960s, 0.3% of the population in Lexington identified as African American—this lack of diversity led to acts of hatred like the St. Brigid Church cross burning on March 13th, 1965. These community upheavals, albeit rare, were largely reflected in the national climate, as the Civil Rights Movement of the fifties and sixties fought for equality under the law and within society. This era ended the Jim Crow segregation laws and emphasized black pride, galvanizing the nation’s political and legal institutions to protect civil rights. Public education was a large focus of the movement; landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education made public school segregation illegal in 1954, which the Little Rock Nine and hundreds of other black students tested out in the following years. Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination in public schools.
As the nation’s status quo was overturned by the civil rights movement, Lexington’s own attempt at desegregation through the METCO busing program saw tensions and pushback, but succeeded in providing better opportunities to disadvantaged students. The early years of METCO revealed the breadth of racism and xenophobia within the town, and in doing so, challenged Lexington’s homogeny and established a more culturally diverse presence within the community.
The Metropolitical Council for Educational Opportunities, or METCO, was created in 1966 by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as a voluntary busing integration program that provided a suburban public school education for non-white students living in Boston. A precursor to the program was “Operation Exodus,” which bused 400 Roxbury students to white Boston schools. It was started by Ellen Jackson and Elizabeth Johnson in 1965 upon Boston’s refusal to integrate schools. A group of African American parents in Boston, in conjunction with suburban residents and funded by the federal and state government as well as the Carnegie Corporation, later began the METCO program in order to “promote school diversity, close the achievement gap, and overcome racial barriers.” The program strove towards educational equity, emphasizing education as a means of social and economic advancement. Among the seven districts participating in the first year was Lexington.
Before Lexington began to volunteer in the METCO program, many of its organizations and citizens had already proven their commitment to promoting civil rights. The Lexington Human Rights Committee was created in 1962 and hosted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the auditorium of Lexington High School on March 11, 1963. Later that year, the Boston chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) held a series of nonviolent demonstrations on the Battle Green in protest of housing discrimination in Lexington. The march comprised mostly of wealthy white women holding signs such as “Birthplace of American Liberty?” and “Jim Crow Must Go.” Three years later, Lexington was busing in Boston children to attend the Lexington Public Schools in order to reduce racial isolation; the first class consisted of 25 high schoolers. All students had a host family, a volunteer Lexington family that provided support for them and helped to forge a stronger connection between the two communities. In the next few years, as METCO grew, the 1975 Annual Report on the METCO program reported that LHS expanded to include various tutor programs, art shows and science fairs, cultural events and exhibitions, and a discussion club to promote interracial discourse.
The METCO program certainly succeeded in providing its participants with more educational opportunities than they would have gotten in their districts; in a panel discussing the Civil Rights era in Lexington, Alan Booth, a graduate of the first METCO class in Lexington, recalled an instance when the community raise over a thousand dollars for him to travel across the country one summer. Booth has been working for General Electric for the past thirty-nine years, which he said he would not be doing if not for the education he received in Lexington. In an interview conducted by The Musket in 1969, a METCO participant declared that busing more inner-city students into Lexington “would change racial tension from what it is now so that people would really understand each other more than they do now.” Another black student agreed, reasoning “more black kids need a better education.”
The learning experience did not come easily. Students who were on the honor roll in Boston now got Cs and Ds in Lexington. Reading levels proved to be a major obstacle, as METCO students had to catch up to the level of Lexington students—which they worked hard to do. One aspiring future-doctor remarked he “started working and improved” because “you have to prove to yourself you can do it.” The idea that the Lexington Public Schools could provide a better education than the overcrowded, understaffed, and poorly supported schools in Boston was the primary motivator for the development of the busing program. Reducing racial tension was another goal; the METCO club began hosting a series of discussions between Lexington residents and METCO participants, the first of which was in Roxbury and required Lexington students to take buses to. White students commented to the Boston Globe that they “didn’t realize the depths of [the black students’] problems” and now “[understood] the way they feel more or less.” The METCO program and its initiatives facilitated important dialogues between Lexington’s impressionable young people and promoted cultural understanding.
But declaring “separate was not equal” and integrating schools did not make being a black student any less unequal. Although black and white students were now in the same institution, theoretically receiving the same education and benefits, there was still an ideological separation that proved harder to get rid of. On April 5, 1968, the day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Tennessee, the METCO club played the following announcement over the loudspeaker in Lexington High School: “When we got off the bus this morning, we felt a sense of fear and curiosity on the part of you students. Why are you afraid? We have been here for almost two years and many of you still act as if we were complete strangers. If you are curious about us and our feelings, why don’t you try to find out about them?” The announcement highlighted the inability of white students to fully accept the METCO participants as their own. Not only did this show the unwillingness of the majority of the school to reach social acceptance, it emphasizes the idea that perceived separations lead to further divisions and inequality, that “unless we get out and try to understand each other, we will make the same mistakes as our fathers and grandfathers.”
It is important to note that not all white students were unable to fully embrace their fellow black students, and that the announcement itself shows how those in METCO were given a platform to share their voice and use it to reach out to the LHS community. Even in the face of being treated as Other, many METCO students were reaching out to try to bridge the divide. The distrust black students faced, however, was not one-sided. One METCO participant expressed feelings of animosity and distrust towards the white students in an interview with The Musket, commenting that “no white can really be trusted.” METCO students also iterated the harmful effects of assimilation. “Living out here you lose your blackness,” another anonymous student said. Even as these students benefited from the education Lexington provided, culture erasure and constant code-switching proved to be weighty consequences.
Lexington’s reputation as the “birthplace of American liberty” did not shield it from perpetuating anti-blackness and discriminating against the METCO students. Tensions between white and black students culminated in February of 1969, when 125 of the 800 students in LHS walked out in protest of the presence of METCO students in the wake of two fights earlier that week. According to Principal Charles C. Johnson, rumors of weapons at school propelled student fear of violence, causing many to call their parents to pick them up. The students participating in the walkout marched to the school administrative building to present “concerns about the apparent deterioration of communications within the school.” This moment stands out as a profound show of intolerance and a stain upon Lexington’s reputation as a progressive town.
One black student in the post-walkout Musket interview asserted that “Lexington as a community does not do a single thing for the METCO kids,” that the presence of black students has not educated the Lexington townspeople on how to be more culturally sensitive, and moreover that the white folks “only saw people like Aunt Jemima” and “teach their kids that everything black is bad, like black people are always having riots and are drunk and poor.” While Lexington did provide a better education for the METCO children, it did not provide its own residents with the tools to be culturally aware and responsive. Lexington, despite its liberal leanings (which would be highlighted even more in the coming years), still perpetuated harmful stereotypes about the African American community.
On Patriot’s Day in 1968, a METCO student stayed the night at his friend’s house to watch the parade. The next morning, tired and groggy, he walked to Lexington Center, where he was picked up by the police on suspicion of being on drugs. A member of the Board of Selectman declared after some investigation that what the policemen acted on was “not racism but an extreme degree of zealousness toward young people.” However, repeated instances like this one show that this was not an isolated incident, but in fact a continuation of the community expressing racial biases against people of color, a problem certainly not unique to Lexington and not contained within the 20th century. Even as the official narrative of Lexington purported to welcome the diversity with open arms, profiling and other instances of discrimination were still pertinent issues these METCO students faced.
In examining the extent to which Lexington welcomed the METCO students, it is important to understand the town’s motivations in joining the one-way busing program. Claremont McKenna Professor of History Lily Geismer reasons that suburban Americans, many of whom were liberal, believed in the principle of educational and racial equality so long as it did not negatively affect their own lives, like through increasing local taxes or decreasing the quality of their own children’s education. Thus the state-funded and relatively small METCO program fit Lexington’s agenda perfectly—people were able to support a cause they believed in without it hurting them. This is perhaps why the inclusion was so shallow, why black students could sit at the same tables as white students but not necessarily engage in the same conversation—at the fundamental level, white residents would always look out for themselves more, so the busing program could never bring absolute equality.
Still, METCO students believed in the program and its ability to bring change; one student declared when talking to the Boston Globe in 1969 that “right now the only reason I go to school here is so I can be a leader. I want to do something for the cause.” Now in its 52nd year and considered a hallmark of the Lexington education system, the METCO program has clearly made headway in its mission to provide students “with a strong academic foundation rich in cultural, educational, ethnic, socioeconomic, and racial diversity.” Nonetheless, the problem of segregation in schools and in the community has not been solved. Fifty years after a METCO student proposed a black history course in a Musket interview, Lexington has yet to add anything of the sort to its course catalog. This is not to say Lexington High School has not been taking strides to promote diversity. This last year, members of the African American and Latino Scholars created a petition for more diverse hiring within LHS, and the English department has made efforts to diversify its curriculum by adding more intersectional texts. As the Lexington Police Department investigates recent acts of hate within the school, it is important to look back at this period of progress and pushback but also to look towards what can be done to further METCO’s vision.
by KELLY HUI