Pushkin.

Almost exactly 50 years ago, a federal judge ruled that Boston's public school system was unconstitutionally segregated by race.

The judge declared that due to actions taken by Boston school officials,

racial segregation, quote, permeates schools in all areas of the city, all grade levels, and all

types of schools. The only possible remedy, the judge wrote, was to affirmatively mix the city's

student population by taking kids from majority white

schools and reassigning them to majority black schools and vice versa.

This experiment in desegregation would come to be known as busing.

A shorthand premised on the idea that the yellow school buses used to enact desegregation

were the most important thing about it. The start of busing in 1974 set off a school year marked by

angry parents, anxious kids, and brutal violence. Newspapers across the country called the situation

in Boston a disaster, a mess,

a tragedy, and yes, a fiasco. Boston became a metonym for the whole idea of school desegregation,

and more specifically, for its failures. My name is Leon Nefok. I'm a journalist and producer, best known as the host of audio documentaries like Slow Burn, Watergate, Think Twice, Michael Jackson, and backfired The Vaping Wars.

My production company, Prologue Projects, makes long-form audio, typically in the form of multi-part narrative podcasts.

The audiobook you're about to hear was adapted from the third season of our flagship

history series Fiasco.

It's a show in which we excavate canonical events from the recent past, like the 2000

election and the Iran-Contra affair, and bring them back to life from a modern perspective.

I would be able to the world. back to life from a modern perspective. I'll admit I wasn't too familiar with the story of busing when it was pitched to me by

Sam Graham Thelson, a novelist who grew up in Boston and who ended up serving as a producer

on our project.

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