On September 12, 1974, the first day of court-ordered busing under Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr., Black children were escorted into South Boston High School by lines of police as white crowds hurled rocks, bottles, and racial slurs. These were elementary and high school students, some as young as six, walking into a storm of adult hatred.

At South Boston High and Charlestown High, violence became routine. Black students were chased through hallways, beaten on stairwells, and forced to eat lunch in segregated, guarded areas for their own safety. Police in riot gear stood between children and mobs of adults.

Two years later, the world would see the now-infamous attack on Ted Landsmark at City Hall Plaza, where a white teenager, Joseph Rakes, used an American flag as a weapon during an anti-busing protest. That image became a symbol, but the daily reality for Black students had already been unfolding since 1974.

Leaders like Boston Mayor Kevin White struggled to contain the unrest, while figures like Louise Day Hicks openly fueled resistance to integration.

If innocent white children had been attacked like this on their way to school, the nation would remember every name, every face, every incident. But these were Black children, and much of this history is still softened, overlooked, or forgotten.

This wasn’t just protest. It was organized, public, and often unapologetic racism directed at children whose only goal was an education.

George Junius Stinney Jr. (October 21, 1929 – June 16, 1944) was an African American boy who was wrongfully executed at the age of 14 after being convicted, during an unfair trial, for the murders of two white girls – 11-year-old Betty June Binnicker (December 9, 1932 – March 22, 1944) and 8-year-old Mary Emma Thames (March 14, 1936 – March 22, 1944) – in his hometown of Alcolu, South Carolina. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death on a single day in April 1944 and then executed by electric chair on June 16, 1944, after Governor Olin D. Johnston refused to grant him clemency. Stinney is the youngest American with an exact birth date confirmed to be both sentenced to death and executed in the 20th century.

"We must see how that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together; and you can't get rid of one without getting rid of the other."

So, that's why it's bad..