Origin Story

How the anti-busing riots of the 1970s made me the writer I am today.

Fifty years ago, in June 1974, a federal judge ruled that the schools in Boston, Massachusetts were “unconstitutionally segregated” and ordered the city to undergo mandatory desegregation. That September, the first busloads of Black children rolled into Boston’s white neighborhoods and were greeted with stones, racist epithets, and a wholesale refusal b…