What's good everybody? You're listening to Code Switch. I'm Jean Demby. My partner in

crime, Cherine Marisol Maragi is out this week. But on this podcast, we want to talk about

school, desegregation, and busing. With our play cousin, Aldi Cornish, you probably know

she's the host of MPR's All Things Considered and she's going to join us in a moment. But

before we do all that, we want to rewind a little bit.

Boston today had one of its worst days since court ordered busing for school desegregation

began last September. It was the second straight day of trouble. Yesterday, white's stoned

to school bus carrying black students. And today, a white student was stabbed at South

Boston High School. He was later reported in good condition. A black student was arrested

for the stabbing.

That report we just heard is from December 11th, 1974. And American cities, just like

Boston, were in the middle of a heated, often very ugly fight over how or if they should

racially integrate their public schools. And in a lot of ways, Boston became the symbol

for the violent resistance to that idea. But even in Boston, there was this one school integration

program, a busing program as it turns out, that wasn't controversial at all. In fact,

that program is still around today. And it has support from Democrats and Republicans.

It's called Metco, which stands for the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity.

And as part of that program, black kids from Boston's inner city get on a bus every day

to go to schools and some of the richer, wider, and politically liberal towns in the city

suburbs. And the Metco program actually predates the court ordered desegregation of Boston

schools in 1974. It predates it by almost a decade. But the fact that that program is still

around tells us a lot about just how politically delicate the act of integrating schools, even

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