The School Committee was charged with violating the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments as well as the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
At that point he ruled that the city defendants had contributed to the "establishment of a dual school system," one for each race.
[6] Following World War II a major civil rights movement swept the United States.
In Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, the Supreme Court found that public school segregation "denie[d] to Negro children the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.
"[8] The judges relied on sociological evidence which showed that separate educational facilities were detrimental to the development of black children.
[citation needed] In 1961, the Education Committee of the NAACP, led by Ruth Batson, began a series of meetings with Boston's School Committee in order to make the members admit that de facto segregation existed in Boston's schools.
As a result, the NAACP fought back with the traditional methods of the civil rights movement: boycotts and protests.
[14] After a decade of protests and arguments and evasions by the Boston School Committee the issue finally came to a head with the 1972 court case.
[citation needed] One of the reasons Judge Garrity took so long to deliver his decision in this case was because he wanted to make sure that what he decided was backed up by legal precedent.
The 1973 decision on this case, written by Justice William J. Brennan, was key in defining de facto segregation.
"[16] However, the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Chief Justice Warren Burger argued that the equal protection guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment gave federal judges a wide berth of authority in implementing desegregation.
[citation needed] Judge Garrity forbade the School Committee from violating the Racial Imbalance Act in any way, beginning construction of any new school or portable class room or transferring white or black teachers in order to increase racial imbalance.
[20] In a city heavily stratified into ethnic enclaves, the exchange of school children between communities was dangerous.
The climax of violence in South Boston came on December 11, when a white student, Michael Faith, was stabbed.
News of the stabbing spread through the community and by one o'clock 1,500 people surrounded the school waiting for the black students to leave.
It also included the partnering of public schools to twenty community colleges and universities to improve the quality of education in the former.
In May 1977, Garrity released Phase III, meant to shift control of implementation back to the Boston school system.
One member made a telling inquiry about the Committee's policy: "We are excluding the Latin Schools because the numbers of students are predominantly white, is that it?"