Oral history interview with Barbara Faith (OH-063)

In this interview, Barbara Faith, a South Boston resident who worked at South Boston High School in the 1970s and whose brother Michael was stabbed in an altercation in a school corridor, discusses the impact on her neighborhood of the 1974 Garrity decision, which required some students to be bused to other neighborhoods with the goal of creating racial balance in the Boston Public Schools. Ms. Faith reflects on segregation and race issues in South Boston around the time that the Garrity decision was implemented; the impact of the decision on day-to-day school operations; violence on buses and in South Boston High School, including the stabbing of her brother by another student in December of 1974; the responses of local politicians and police forces to the tensions caused by the decision; how the decision affected neighborhood dynamics in South Boston and the way people view Boston in general. She concludes by discussing the impact that the decision has had on her family and asserting her hopes for the future of race relations in Boston.https://dc.suffolk.edu/moh/1058/thumbnail.jp