About this Event
525 Washington Street, Boston, MA 02111
JOIN US FOR A FREE FILM SCREENING FOLLOWED BY A BOOK TALK
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Screening of the GBH News documentary Never Cried: Boston’s Busing Legacy and a talkback with the filmmaker Emily Judem
Two sisters confront their trauma from Boston’s busing crisis in a powerful new GBH documentary produced by GBH News’ Emily Judem and Stephanie Leydon.
In September 1974, just two days after her 14th birthday, Leola Hampton boarded a school bus that would launch her into the heart of one of the most divisive and defining moments in Boston history: court-ordered school desegregation. Hampton and her older sister, Linda Stark, were bused from their home in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Roxbury into the white, working-class neighborhood of South Boston. They navigated a violent and virulently racist high school experience so scarring that a half-century later, they are only now beginning to discuss it with each other.
Susan E. Eaton, in conversation about her book, The Other Boston Busing Story: What’s Won and Lost Across the Boundary Line
METCO, America’s longest-running voluntary school desegregation program, buses children of color from Boston’s city neighborhoods to predominantly white suburban schools. In contrast to the infamous violence and rage that greeted forced school busing within the city in the 1970s, the work of METCO has quietly and calmly promoted school integration. But how has this program affected the lives of its graduates? Would they choose to participate if they had it to do over again? Would they place their own children on the bus to suburbia? In The Other Boston Busing Story, sixty-five METCO graduates who are now adults answer those questions and more, vividly recalling their own stories and assessing the benefits and hardships of crossing racial and class lines on their way to school.
The evening’s moderator is Stephanie Leydon, executive producer of digital video, GBH News.
If you would like to attend virtually rather than in person, please register to receive the Zoom link. Zoom registrants will receive the link to attend via email.