Evelyn Morash Interview Index

Evelyn Morash was born on 20 June 1929 in East , , attending public schools there and eventually marrying and starting a family of her own. She became involved in her children’s schools and advocated for libraries and other improvements to public school facilities in in the 1960s. She served on the Massachusetts Board of Education and the Citywide Coordinating Council, which was set up to help implement court-ordered school desegregation in Boston in the 1970s. In this interview, she discusses her education reform efforts; the school choices she made for her children; resistance to school desegregation in East Boston; intimidation and harassment that she suffered because of her support for desegregation; the friendships she formed with like-minded people from across the city; and her thoughts on public education.

The interview was conducted by historian Greta de Jong as part of her research on parent activism and the tensions that emerged around family, community, and justice during the era of school desegregation. It took place on 14 May 2018 at Mrs. Morash’s home in East Boston, Massachusetts.

00:00:27 biography/career: born June 20, 1929; had two sisters and one brother; she was born 12 years after her brother parents were Italian immigrants with no formal schooling; they may have learned to read and write English when their children went to school; remembers mother wrote letters to relatives and father reading the Boston Globe and mother reading the Boston Post

00:01:53 went to school in East Boston and graduated from East Boston High School in 1946, when she was 17 years old she got married at 19 and had her first child at 20; she had five children in total, three at first (one boy and two girls), and then 12 years later had two more boys “Someone asked me once, did I have two marriages? I said no, I just had—I just rested in between.” she always worked, and was lucky to have a stepmother who babysat for her she was a permanent part-time employee for the Census Bureau from 1960 to 1970, but before that she was always doing one-day jobs for Manpower [a temp agency]; it was a way to keep current with technology and skills required for office jobs she went to work full time for the Census Bureau in 1960, when her three oldest children were in school; felt good about being back at work, and then three months later she was pregnant again; so it was good that the Census Bureau had permanent part time jobs and she was able to do that did a lot of traveling for job, going all around New England and as far west as Buffalo, New York

1 00:04:19 involvement in schools: being employed part time meant she was able to be involved in children’s schools tries to remember why she became involved; Stephen was her oldest child; all the (three older) children went to the Sheridan School, a block away from their house; it closed after her last child went there, and is now apartments children all went to public schools in East Boston; two older sons went to Boston Tech, which was at that time an exam school (she thinks it was replaced by Madison Park); Boston Tech, along with the two Latin schools and English [High School], were exam schools her two oldest boys went to Boston Tech, and her youngest son went to the [Mario] Umana School in East Boston

00:06:08 from 1968 parents were working on a new school to replace the [Joseph H.] Middle School; the city built the Umana School to replace the Barnes; Barnes had a bad reputation: “I don’t think it was the school. I think it was—it was a junior high school, and junior high schools and middle schools have a lot of problems that have nothing to do with the school. It’s the hormones! The hormones are raging, and they blame the schools. It’s the kids, right?” they were going to go to the new school, and then 1974 came, the first year of court-ordered desegregation [EM’s cat comes to say hello here] her son Eric went to the Umana School; at first it wasn’t going to be named after anyone, but as part of a political deal it got named after the senator in return for the Umana family giving support to [Mayor] Kevin White the Umana school is now K-8?; they closed the [Dante] Alighieri school and added K-5 into Umana “I was very involved with that school being built”

00:09:30 service on the Massachusetts Board of Education: by that time she had been appointed by the governor to the state Board of Education, just before desegregation began; thinking about why she was appointed, says, “I think they needed a white parent sending their kids to school in Boston.” because she worked, and a lot of people didn’t know her two youngest children, many people thought she didn’t have kids in the public school remembers being at a meeting at the high school and a friend was sitting in the audience; EM was on a panel responding to questions about the desegregation plan that was about to be implemented; her friend told her later that she overheard two women in the back talking about EM saying, “I don’t know why she’s sitting up there, she doesn’t have any kids in the school.” her friend told the women that EM had two sons in public school; then they said if EM had daughters she’d feel differently about desegregating the schools; it

2 didn’t make any sense to her: “You’re gonna love your sons less than you love your daughters?” her son Paul went to Boston Tech, the oldest of the two youngest sons, and Eric went to the [Charles E. Mackey] School in South End

00:11:58 desegregation and East Boston: desegregation was never going to affect East Boston, because the original plan ordered by Judge [W. Arthur] Garrity was the state plan, and it only had busing to contiguous neighborhoods, and East Boston was isolated the closest schools outside the neighborhood would be Charlestown, or South Boston, or North End, which were all-white communities like East Boston; so there was no way they were going to be affected “But I just felt, you know, part of the desegregation plan opened up a lot of opportunities for people if they would have availed themselves of it, because the different schools offered different things.”

00:13:12 school choices for her children: so Eric went to the Mackey in South End, and then for high school went to the Umana, and Paul went to Boston Tech her girls went to East Boston High School she is not sure why the boys went to in-town schools and not East Boston; thinks with Eric it was because she wanted him to have the advantage of meeting kids outside of East Boston: “East Boston was a total white community. There were no minorities. There were no Latinos in East Boston. Everybody was home grown. So this was going to give him an exposure to other kids. And of course my Paul was going to Tech.” East Boston High School had a good secretarial program so her daughter Donna went there, [kitty interrupts again] and daughter Patty didn’t know what she wanted to do, so she went there because it was easy for her East Boston was a completely white school system, except for a couple of magnet schools Umana was a magnet school and Eric went there; Paul took the exam to go to Boston Tech, and that was integrated but the girls were happy at East Boston High there were 12 years between Patty and Paul Stephen graduated 1966, Donna in 1968 and Patty in 1971, so they were out of school already [before the court-ordered desegregation]

00:17:35 thoughts on civil rights and desegregation: couldn’t figure out why East Boston wasn’t being included in desegregation plans it had the Mackey School and Samuel Adams school, they were magnet schools before the court order came in, so there were children getting bused in from

3 other parts of the city, but those were the only schools that had minority kids in them; all the other schools were all white

nowadays there are a lot of Central Americans in East Boston her youngest grandchild Leah was at the [Patrick J.] Kennedy School, in second grade, she was one of only three or four students from an English-speaking household; all the others were from Central American immigrant families East Boston has changed completely, and there’s nothing wrong with that

00:19:12 involvement in parent organizations: Stephen had gone to kindergarten at the [Philip H.] Sheridan School; when he went to first grade she walked him down to the school, and they met Miss Reid, the principal, and she asked if EM could go and cover the first grade class until a substitute teacher arrived; Stephen walked in and saw her and wondered what she was doing there “I was always involved with the kids, because I was around.” working part time gave her time to be involved and kept her current

00:20:31 when Stephen got to junior high school it had a bad reputation, and the principal there was a “benevolent dictator”; he told parents he was going to need help to turn the school around and asked them (mostly mothers) to help; so she got involved in the junior high school the Boston School Department had a paid staff member in charge of Home and School Associations; at that time “You only had parent participation in the school if the principal wanted it. He gave the okay for there to be parents.” she knew this was happening, and the School Committee was dealing with parent involvement school by school, and people were getting different answers to their questions [depending on principals’ whims]

00:22:26 she called a meeting of all the presidents of the Home and School Associations in East Boston, and the paid staffer from the School Department was angry about it and told EM she had no right to do that; “I said wait a minute. I thought the Bill of Rights gave us freedom of assembly. I had every right to convene a meeting.” she formed an alternative group, East Boston Home and School Associations, and was told they had no right to use that name, so they renamed themselves Parents and Teachers Who Care the reason her group organized was because they wanted changes in the schools, and more parent involvement beyond what principals would allow [tells cat to stop scratching a chair] school administrators only used parents for fundraising; cake sales and field trips were fine, “But we never got involved in any educational issues.”

00:24:00 some teachers were talking with parents about changes they wanted as well; around this time the War on Poverty was happening, and the Elementary and

4 Secondary Education Act (ESEA) provided federal funds for education initiatives, so principals had been buying books with ESEA money but letting them stay in boxes in the basements

00:24:45 Jack (John) Daley was principal of the Barnes school; the school had a library that was being used as an evening typing school; “I had the worst job in the world to get those typewriters from the evening school out of the library. The library had bookshelves, it was beautiful”; but the books had to be processed (identified and coded, etc.), so she recruited parents to help, and decided to do it all in the principal’s office, which was one of the few spaces that was available they brought in cement blocks and pine boards, set up shop in his office; “Well, I got the library very quickly.” so the first library was at the Barnes, the high school had a library, but no other schools had libraries; they had bought all the books but they were sitting unused in boxes, “So we got libraries going in every school in East Boston. That to me was one of my biggest achievements.” the principals allowed it because they knew it was good for the kids her oldest son writes family eulogies; when she was hospitalized recently she gave him an outline for her eulogy and told him, “Be sure you talk about the school libraries. My biggest achievement.”

00:28:13 work with Citywide Coordinating Council (CCC): surprised she was appointed to it by Judge Garrity; not sure why he chose her, guess he went through a list of people who were involved in the schools, and she was on the Board of Education then; and probably because they needed a white parent with children in the most others on the board were political appointments by the governor, and they needed a parent voice, which was provided by “Myself and a young black father from Roxbury, who came on when I did. You know very symbolic: we have two parents, one black and one white.” that was in 1974; so she was on the state board and doing the libraries, and teachers who had never paid attention to her before now took notice because she was on the Board of Education; so it was logical for her to serve on the CCC she got to meet Moe Gillen from Charlestown through her work on the council, and Ellen Jackson, Louise Bonar from Allston-Brighton, and a woman named Cox from South Boston

00:32.00 working for Monsignor Pitaro: another thing that checkered her past was in 1970 they elected Monsignor Mimie Pitaro as state representative for East Boston he served from 1973 to 1974, and she worked for him (gave up her Census Bureau job to work for him), doing constituency work he separated his church position and legislative position and she took care of his legislative office

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00:33:00 harassment and intimidation for supporting desegregation: she was vilified and harassed for supporting desegregation; had a window broken one night by someone who threw a rock through it; “I remember I called the police to report the broken window, and there was paint smeared against the house. And my front garden was all trashed with papers and stuff. I called the police. You know what the police said to me when I showed them the rock that came through the window? He said ‘You’re lucky it wasn’t a firebomb.’ Really sympathetic.” many police officers were opposed to desegregation – remembers attending a rally at Boston Common to support peaceful desegregation of schools, “And on one of the little mounds on Boston Common there was a whole contingent of East Boston police sitting there. They glared at me like—they knew who I was, they glared at me, and then shortly after that I was in the bank and one of the police was in back of me in the bank, and he said to me, ‘Why are you doing what you’re doing? Why are you standing up for what you’re standing up for?’ I said ‘Let me tell you. I have green eyes, and only one of my sons has green eyes. People are opposing this because of the color of people’s skin. How do I know that at some time they’re going to be rallying against green eyed people? It’s stupid! People have no choice of what the color of their eyes or skin is.’”

00:36:30 her husband worked nights, and her oldest children had left home, so she was often alone in house with her two younger sons at night, and harassing phone calls that woke her up really made her angry; she didn’t mind being confronted during the day, but phone calls at night with children in the house seemed really low: “Don’t wake me up out of sound sleep, and threaten that you’re going to bomb my house.” [interview interrupted by phone call]

00:37:40 husband’s support for her work: thinking about how she became so involved in things; came from an ordinary family, had children, feels lucky she was married to a man who didn’t mind what she was doing; “Men of his ilk, from Southie living in East Boston, how many of them would have let their wife do the things, how many of them would’ve let their wife go to work like I went to work?” “I vowed that my husband would never work two jobs, and he worked nights and if I was out working and traveling, he was home. I was very lucky that I was married to him.”

00:39:06 connecting with other supporters of desegregation: house used to be crazy full of people sometimes, on Sunday afternoons she would host dinners for 20-25 people, has no idea how she fed them all; compares herself to flag bearers in in the Civil War, flags were carried by boys who weren’t going to fight but everyone was going to rally around them: “All I

6 was doing was holding up a symbol, and people of like mind found their way here.” people were from all over the city, “There was a coalition of people from across the city, and that got me into a lot of trouble with Pixie Palladino and company. . . . She was like an arch enemy.” after EM went to a meeting about desegregation and was quoted in the Boston Globe, Palladino raised such an uproar about the fact that she had gone representing Parents and Teachers Who Care; and she hadn’t gone representing them, the paper just mentioned she was a member it was a crazy time, and “Sometimes I think it was a diversion for people. People got used”; i.e., people were used by the politicians for their own ends she had been involved in Girl Scouts, and during the desegregation a lot of the girls she had known there had children in the lower grades; remembers going down to Kennedy School and talking to one of them; the woman told her “ ‘You know, Mrs. Morash, you’ve never lied to me; I’ve always listened to you, but I can’t listen to you on this.’ And I was so hurt.” she kept telling people there was no way their children would be bused out of East Boston; that they could choose to send them to a magnet school but no one was going to send them out “And that’s why my Eric went to the Mackey. He had a good experience there. And I met people from across the city.” (e.g., Moe Gillen, Louise Bonar, [Tracy] Amalfitano from South Boston) “You had to find people who were of a similar mindset that you were. The only way you could survive.”

00:43:10 role of parent councils: parent councils had little to do; their main goal was peaceful opening of schools, and mostly it was; [interview interrupted by granddaughter Amanda, who came over to do laundry] in East Boston nothing very dramatic happened, it was not like Southie her friend Paula was down at the Mackey, and they had coffee and donuts at the church near there for the parents who came with the kids on the buses (magnet school); there were some people who availed themselves of opportunities at the magnet school, but not many her children had good experiences in integrated schools

00:45:00 impact of court order on parent involvement: [Home and School Associations] didn’t have much impact; Kay Savini was coordinator for council; but things only worked if principals allowed them to; Jack Daley at the Barnes school allowed parents to do things, “We took the kids to New York – that was unheard of. . . . One of the things we tried to do was to get the kids out of East Boston. East Boston was so insular. There were people who never went into town. They related to the North Shore. They went this way,

7 just like Southie navigates to the South Shore. There were kids that never went into town.” one of the big influences on whether things happened or didn’t happen were the district superintendents; they had one that was so bad, not a nice man, Peter Ingeneri, used to call women “dear” because he couldn’t be bothered learning their names “He was a deterrent to things happening.” but if principals saw an advantage to having parents working in the school, they let them, and if they didn’t, they made it difficult

00:48:00 somewhere there is an article that Jim Fraser wrote about how it all started with warm milk; her son Stephen was going to the Kennedy School and came home and told her they had warm milk every day with lunch, because the milkman brings milk to school early in the morning and leaves it outside with ice over it; by the time the janitor gets the milk in, ice is melted and milk is warm; “So I complained. We got a refrigerator at the Kennedy School. That was my first battle, it was getting a refrigerator so the kids would have cold milk.” maybe Miss Reid had heard about this when she had her cover the class on first day of school EM had a good relationship with teachers; they were concerned about improving schools and knew things like the fridge were a way to do that, and parents weren’t a threat then “But we could do more than bake cakes for a cake sale, but that’s when the principals started getting nervous, when you moved over from wanting to be their fundraiser to being concerned about what was going on in the classrooms.”

00:50:36 when they were building the Umana School, she was going to Home and School meetings, and around to elementary schools with a model of the new school, but “You couldn’t get people to buy into a dream when they’re busy working, keeping house, big families, and here I am trying to sell a dream of a school that’s not even here yet,” and depending on the benevolence of the city and the mayor but the boxes of books wasn’t a dream feels lucky she had the time to do what she was doing; her job allowed it and she had support at home after children left school she began working full time at Mt Albert hospital

00:53:39 doesn’t recall many conflicts on the parent/community councils or many non- parents who served; remembers Jim Bretta, a priest at Sacred Heart, has left the priesthood and lives in Somerville, still in touch every day but even the church was not supportive; when the court order came out cardinal said church would not be a refuge for parents using parochial schools [to avoid desegregation], but many families that left went to parochial schools outside of East Boston, such as St. Rose’s in Chelsea, and Pope John in Everett

8 Jim Bretta and Tom Corrigan were the only two priests in East Boston who were supportive of desegregation

00:56:30 the only nonwhite person on her council was Zenia Porter, who ended up working for the school; the school coopted a lot of people by hiring them as paraprofessionals, and then they had divided loyalties; her niece was a paraprofessional in schools, heart in right place [mentions her grandchild Amanda, who used to live with her and had come in earlier during the interview to do laundry]

00:58:00 thoughts on public schools: “I think the public schools are a great equalizer.” people who could afford it were getting their kids into parochial schools, leaving public schools to poor people, including poor whites in the city some of her friends took their kids out, sent them to St. Rose or St. John’s in Everett; not that many though, and people were doing that before desegregation as well—girls went to Fitton, which was a girls’ high school and the boys went to Christopher Columbus, or Don Savio, an all-male parochial school never considered sending her kids to parochial school because “I really believed in public education. I mean public education did me well. I have good memories.” not sure what role parents or community people should play in schools; thinks they should represent the community that the school is in to the administration

in Latino families that now make up a large part of the population in East Boston, they’re all working two jobs, but she can remember going to a meeting at the [Theodore] Lyman School with a father from a Central American country and his daughter; went with John White of Area Planning Action Committee (APAC), the community action program, still alive in East Boston, and Margaret Pierce from APAC; the man’s daughters were in lower grades than they should have been in because they didn’t speak the language; EM and the others acted as advocates for the father who was appealing to principal to put his daughters in the right grade; he told principal his consulate was waiting to hear results of meeting, and told her his country had reciprocity with the US in their school system, and principal changed her mind “You have to be an advocate. . . . If you can’t be the advocate for your child, who’s going to be the advocate for your child?”

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