Boston S Shocking Secret: It S Mostly Landfill!

Article 1:

Boston’s Shocking Secret: It’s Mostly Landfill!

Anyone who has visited modern day Boston might be a little confused to hear it was once a small hilly peninsula less than 1.2 miles across. The city is now a wide, flat landmass consisting of 89 square miles. It took close to 100 years, but settlers managed to forever transform the landscape using nothing but primitive tools. The creation of this city is one of the great engineering feats of American History.

How did the creators of Boston’s landfill do it? In the years after 1630, settlers cut down the hills that made up the Trimountain by 60 feet or more to fill in swamp and water and create the land that is now much of Back Bay, South Bay, and East Boston. The next time you stroll down Newbury Street or visit Logan Airport, know that a few hundred years ago, that “land” used to be water! This map, below, reveals just how much of Boston is artificially created from the dirt taken from cutting down hills:

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Article 2:

“Racial Busing” of 1974-88 across Boston Neighborhoods to Desegregate Schools

The Boston busing crisis (1974–1988) was a series of protests and riots that occurred in Boston, Massachusetts in response to the passing of the 1965 Racial Imbalance Act, which ordered public schools in the state to desegregate. Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. laid out a plan for compulsory busing of students from predominantly white areas of Boston to schools with predominantly black student populations. The legislation provoked outrage from white Bostonians and led to widespread protests and violent public disturbances. The conflict lasted for over a decade and contributed to a demographic shift in Boston public schools, with dramatically fewer students enrolling in public schools.

In one part of the plan, Judge Garrity decided that the entire junior class from the mostly poor white South Boston High School would be bused to Roxbury High School, a black high school. For three years after the plan commenced, Massachusetts state troopers were stationed at South Boston High in an attempt to quell the resulting violence. The first day of the plan, only 100 of 1,300 students came to school at South Boston. Only 13 of the 550 South Boston juniors ordered to attend Roxbury showed up. Parents appeared every day to protest, and football season was cancelled. Whites and blacks began entering through different doors. In a string of violent incidents, a white teenager was stabbed nearly to death by a black teenager at South Boston High School, and the community's white residents retaliated by mobbing the school, trapping the black students inside.

An anti-busing mass movement developed, and more violence erupted. In a high-profile case, Theodore Landsmark, a black Yale-educated attorney, was attacked and bloodied by a group of white teenagers as he exited Boston City Hall. One of the youths, Joseph Rakes, attacked Landsmark with an American flag. (See the famous photo of it to the right.)

Opponents became furious at Judge Garrity, claiming that because he lived in Wellesley, a white suburb outside of Boston, his own children were not affected by his ruling.

Race-based busing of schoolchildren in Boston was phased out starting in 1988 and completely ended in 2000. 2014 marked the 40-year anniversary of when this tumultuous experiment first began. Though schools in Boston are now more racially integrated than before busing, many still remain segregated by race and neighborhood. Boston Latin Academy is the treasure of BPS, as it is one of the only high schools in the state with a true balance of students from all different neighborhoods, and a true balance of races. According to Department of Education records, BLA is 27% Black, 21% Asian, 21% Hispanic, 28% White, and 3% Multi-Race. For this reason and many others, BLA won the national Blue Ribbon award in 2010 for the academic success students of all backgrounds achieve at the school thanks to its positive embrace of diversity.