Louise Day Hicks
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Anna Louise Day Hicks (October 16, 1916–October 21, 2003) was a United States Irish-American politician and lawyer of Catholic background from Boston, Massachusetts. She was elected to the Boston School Committee in 1961. In January 1963, she became chairperson and seemed likely to be endorsed by the leading reform group, when, in June, the Boston chapter of the NAACP demanded "an immediate public acknowledgment of de facto segregation in the Boston public school system".
At the time, thirteen city schools were at least 90% black — but the Committee refused to acknowledge the segregation. Hicks was recognized as the holdout, and within months she became Boston's most popular politician, but also the most controversial, requiring police bodyguards 24 hours a day. In 1967, she came within 12,000 votes of being elected mayor of Boston, running on the evasively coded slogan "You know where I stand." Hicks later served one term in the United States House of Representatives from 1971 to 1973.
Hicks became nationally known in 1965 when she opposed court-ordered busing of students into inner-city schools to achieve integration. By refusing to admit segregation existed in city schools and by declaring that children were the "pawns" of racial politics, she came to personify working class Irish-Catholic hatred of African-Americans. "Boston schools are a scapegoat for those who have failed to solve the housing, economic, and social problems of the black citizen," Hicks said. Her most notable campaign took place in autumn 1975, after a federal judge ordered Boston schools to expand their busing programs to comply with the 1971 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education decision. To counter the trend, Hicks started an organization called Restore Our Alienated Rights (ROAR) which actively engaged in incidents of massive resistance to school desegregation. In 1976, Hicks was elected the first woman president of the Boston City Council, largely on the strength of ROAR, which was then at its peak.
Hicks was conservative in racial matters but progressive in other ways. She was a member of the National Organization for Women, and while in Congress she lobbied for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.[citation needed]
Hicks claimed that while 13 Boston schools were at least 90% "Black," Chinatown schools were 100% Chinese, the Italian North End had schools that were 100% Italian American; and the diverse and multicultural neighborhood of South Boston contained schools that were a mixture of Irish American, Polish American, Lithuanian American, Latvian American, and Albanian American who had immigrated to Boston from their respective countries. The Boston Public Schools included a conglomerate of ethnic Caucasians with very few WASPs.
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| Preceded by John W. McCormack |
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts's 9th congressional district 1971–1973 |
Succeeded by Joe Moakley |
