Epilogue: Always Working

Ruth M. Batson remained active in the community of Boston advocating for children and for African Americans her whole life.  In 1951, she highlighted her attributes for a School Committee campaign as “Mother – Educator – Civil Worker” and these are attributes she always retained.  She may not have known it at the time, but these characteristics became her driving force to make changes in Education and demand equal treatment for Boston’s African-American population.

It is important to note, in June of 1963 when Batson, as chairman of the Public Education Committee of the NAACP Boston Branch presented the list of fourteen demands, busing students to desegregate the schools was not one of them.  In fact, there was no mention of desegregating the schools.  It was not until September of 1963 that the Public Education Committee began to mention an integration plan, which was to build new schools on the edges of neighborhoods, and to redraw the school boundary lines for better integration.  After eleven years of filibustering, Judge Garrity had reached the end of his patience with the Boston School Committee. During these years the school committee had filed appeal after appeal, they created programs and policies that would appear to address the NAACP’s concerns, but these programs and policies never amounted to anything.  But mostly, this committee seemed to fan the flames of anger.  Busing was Judge Garrity’s best plan to desegregate the schools.  People like Ruth Batson, who worked for almost thirty years to achieve integration of the Boston school system, inherited the fallout from the Judge’s court order, but it was mostly the children of Boston who got stuck having to deal with this situation.  Ruth Batson was there all along the way.

“Twenty years later, six years before the 21^st century, the citizens of Boston must turn their sights on restoring Boston’s tarnished image.  We must ask ourselves: How do we want history to record us?”  Ruth M. Batson, (Boston Globe; May 1, 1994)