As Siu Tip Lam boarded her school bus, a rock flew from the growing crowd surrounding Lam and her fellow elementary school students. The year was 1975 and these hostile scenes were playing out across the city in response to Boston Public Schools’ (BPS) desegregation efforts.
The Racial Imbalance Act was passed by the Massachusetts state legislature in 1965, making segregation in schools illegal. In 1974, after a decade of fraught desegregation efforts and accompanying opposition, a new busing policy was enforced. The policy required students to be bused to disparate neighborhoods in an effort to combine racially divided communities. This policy primarily affected the working class and populations of color, and its implementation sparked protests, violence, and harassment of the students involved.
Fifty years later, Lam and other former students, educators, and parent advocates from Chinatown are sharing their stories of the city’s desegregation.
Memories of the crisis still loom large in many communities, including in Dorchester Heights, the North End, and Charlestown. Another community impacted by the busing policy and following protests was Chinatown—though its stories are largely absent in Boston’s historical memory.
Unlike many other communities, Chinatown parents learned about the busing policy through word of mouth, primarily from their children. According to Howard Wong, who was a middle school student at the time, neither BPS nor the legislature offered Chinese-language resources about the situation.
The child of immigrants, Wong was bused from Chinatown to the North End’s Michelangelo School. “As students, we always read all the stuff that came from the school and then we had to interpret for our parents,” he said. “It was like, ‘We’ve got another letter.’”
The lack of accessible information impeded many parents in Chinatown from advocating for their children’s safety. Against these odds, a group of Chinese mothers formed the grassroots organization Boston Chinese Parents Association (BCPA). In collaboration with bilingual supporters, including Suzanne Lee—former principal of Josiah Quincy Elementary School, founder of the Chinese Progressive Association, and a member of several other activist organizations—the BCPA compiled a list of demands for the Boston School Committee (BSC).
But when the BSC met with the BCPA, the meeting quickly soured and the demands, which included bus stop security and Chinese-speaking bus monitors, were ignored. In response, the mothers successfully organized a three-day bus boycott, with more than ninety percent of Chinese students assigned to schools outside of Chinatown not attending the first day of 1975’s academic year.
Following the boycott, the BCPA agreed to meet with a representative from the US Department of Justice, who urged the parents to return their children to school.
“The unfortunate part was the Chinese kids, there weren’t enough of us,” Wong said. BPS typically categorized its students as Black, white, and other, according to Wong. “But we weren’t enough ‘others.’ As part of the negotiations, one of the [government representatives] literally told the parents, ‘We really need you to go back to school because you’re the buffer.’” The implication, Wong said, was that Chinese children were expected to blunt tensions between Black and white students, without regard to their own needs.
Artist and filmmaker Daphne Xu is now bringing these stories to life with support from the City of Boston’s Un-monument initiative, which seeks to highlight traditionally unrecognized histories through temporary public art installations throughout Boston. Xu has long been invested in Boston’s Chinatown, including coordinating the community process for the Chinatown Master Plan 2020 and working in collaboration with multiple community organizations, like the Chinatown Community Land Trust and the Chinese Progressive Association.
Xu is continuing this relationship with The Busing Boycott, an immersive outdoor installation bringing together archival photos, audio and video footage, and live events to supplement the Chinatown Immigrant History Trail. Xu is currently discussing installation options with the Greenway Conservancy, including an outdoor installation in Chin Park for a duration of several months, starting in January 2026.
On July 30, 2025, a few dozen former students, parents, and educators met at Tufts Community Common, where five decades ago Chinese mothers presented their list of demands during the exchange between BCPA and BSC.
“The Chinatown piece was always something that community members really think of as a monumental moment where immigrant women who didn’t speak English were able to come together and organize,” said Xu when I spoke with her. “In the neighborhood’s activism history and organizing history, this moment is really significant, so this was an opportunity to celebrate that moment.”
At a filming event this summer, Xu set up photography backdrops of buses and of a Josiah Quincy School classroom for attendees to recreate moments from the era. She was inspired by La Commune (Paris, 1871), a 2000 documentary directed by Peter Watkins that makes heavy use of historical reenactment.
“I was thinking about this reunion in Boston’s Chinatown—could people come together and have their memories be brought up in a more embodied way?” said Xu. She also hoped this activity would spark more interactions, engagement, and shared memory between the attendees, many of whom haven’t seen one another in years.
In looking over the photographs from the event, Xu found herself most drawn to those more candid in nature. “They’re not really typical reunion photographs, but there’s that sense of joy. There’s also the fact that it’s intergenerational and the sense of community is really portrayed in them. The event and what happened [during the busing crisis] was obviously a serious thing, but the photographs are fun. They’re really joyous and they’re funny.”
Wong credits desegregation efforts for the friendships he developed with other students from across the city, but also believes the outcomes of the busing crisis didn’t solve core inequities.
“It was all a numbers game; it was unfair to begin with. Ideally, it would have been nice if they just made the schools nicer,” he said. “If you bring all the schools up, then you don’t really need desegregation as much. And that was the issue: There were inequities in the system.”
Wong said Xu’s project helps to share the complex history of the busing crisis and its impact on Boston’s Chinese immigrant community, as well as acknowledges the contributions of the parents who organized and advocated for their children’s education.
“They were all women who actually organized to do this; it should be known by people that it actually occurred,” he said. “There was so much trauma that occurred during that time. But at the same time, I personally benefited from it—without desegregation, I wouldn’t have the diverse group of friends that I have now.”
During the July 30 gathering, Xu captured audio of informal conversations between attendees. The parents, many of whom are now in their eighties and nineties, spoke with each other exclusively in Chinese. Suzanne Lee is now going through the process of transcribing and translating so they can be shared with a wider audience.
Xu shared a compilation of what has been translated so far:
We were young, fearless. The men worked such long hours. If we didn’t come out, no one else could help. We didn’t have any choice at that time for the children. We had to rely on ourselves. No one could help us. Because there were young people supporting us, they gave us courage. We relied on their support and then we were not afraid of anything. We waited at the bus stops for the parents and told them we were boycotting schools because there were no bilingual bus monitors. We were afraid no one could help our children, so all the parents agreed. We met everyone at the bus stops, even though we didn’t know everyone.
A formal panel discussion took place in September, hosted by the Josiah Quincy Elementary School and featuring many of the Chinatown mothers who had organized and advocated for their children.
Xu said Chinatown’s community organizations have also become more open to working with artists and understand the value of socially engaged art. Choosing to present history in dynamic and interactive ways invites people to engage with not only the factual information, but also with the real people and resulting outcomes.
“As an artist, I’m interested in the complexities of different histories and by bringing in a creative process to this process of remembering; it allows for a little more openness and more perspectives to come in,” said Xu. “It adds a new layer to the memory. It’s an ongoing history, it’s a story that’s being told, so this process of uncovering is similar to the process of making [artistic] work.”
Xu hopes the project will not only honor the students, parents, and educators who spearheaded the movement in Chinatown, but also spark further reflection and discussion.
“[The busing crisis] continues to impact how working-class immigrant women in Chinatown organize and mobilize today,” Xu said. “I see this project as a monument to collective action and intergenerational knowledge-sharing—one that lives and breathes with the community rather than standing apart from it.”
Displaying the artwork on the Rose Kennedy Greenway will draw audiences from outside of Chinatown, hopefully encouraging additional nuance to conversations about Boston’s racial history, she added.
“I’ve always been interested in learning how to work with community organizations in a way that prioritizes the community as opposed to the artist,” Xu said. “Un-monument wants to support artists and it’s cool to have that support for socially engaged work, but for me as an artist, I just feel like it’s a continuous thing. There’s always work to be done.”
For Siu Tip Lam, attending the reunion event was like “walking down memory lane.” Not only did it remind her of experiences during that fraught school year, but it also helped reflect her own place in history as well.
“At my age, I feel like, ‘Oh, the Civil Rights Movement in the sixties, those people are the older generation,’” Lam said. “And then I’m like, ‘Wait, wait, I went through buses.’ So I have a little point in history, too, in the Civil Rights Movement in some ways.”
In the years to come, Xu said the photographs and documentation will become tools for ongoing education, such as planning high school field trip programs connecting students with Chinatown’s history of organizing. The project may also be used to inform current educators of strategies of community-led resistance and contemporary struggles in education equity.
“I actually feel really grateful that I’ve been able to maintain the really grounded connection with the community that supports me in my weirdness,” Xu said. “There’s openness that allowed me to create in my own way. We’re trying to create something together that didn’t previously exist in Chinatown.”
