Boston busing crisis - 18 October 1974

I mentioned last week the blessed relief from our troubles of the World Series, the play-off in seven games between the champions of the two national baseball leagues.

It came to a climax this weekend and it occurs to me quite seriously that in some cities, where the schoolchildren are back from their holidays and where they are under court order, to start mingling their blacks and whites by "busing", the World Series may have dampened, or at worst postponed, the defiance of white parents.

Not however, in Boston, where almost every day there have been menacing and bloody scenes reminiscent of Little Rock Arkansas, before President Eisenhower sent in federal troops. For a month now the country has looked uneasily at its television screens in the evening, to see and hear the latest news from South Boston. Northerners and southerners alike have goggled at their tellies, and made the same simple comment: this is not Georgia, this is not Alabama, this is the north, this is Boston, the old cradle of liberty.

Old Bostonians are very much on the defensive and hasten to point out that nine-tenths of Boston looks and goes about its daily business much as usual. But it’s difficult even for Bostonians to pretend that the bitter defiance of the whites is an accident of geography. It is in reality an incident of the peculiar national, what we now call the ethnic, composition of South Boston, and nowhere else.

South Boston is a broad finger of land fringed with docks and jutting out into the Atlantic. It’s practically divided, seen from the air, by a motor freeway going through. On one side is a poor section inhabited mostly by blacks. On the other side is an old compact, middle and lower middle-class neighbourhood originally settled by the English, and then the Irish, and later on swollen by Poles and Lithuanians.

It’s worth a moment’s reflection, I think, that when the central and eastern European immigrants came in over the turn of the century the Irish took a suspicious view of them, as the original English settlers had taken a poor view of the invading Irish. By now, indeed for the past three generations, the Irish have predominated and they get along well enough with the long-entrenched Poles and Lithuanians. Even if they were still disposed to quarrel you maybe sure they would close ranks today, for the visible fact is that they are all white, and the intruding schoolchildren, coming in from the other side of the freeway, are all black.

The hard facts of the turmoil are plain enough. A federal court ruled in the spring that, beginning with this school year in September, south Boston must achieve a racial balance in its public schools. Where there had been say, 90% whites and 10% blacks, black children must be bused in to achieve something like a 50:50 or 40:60 ratio. Of course, it’s never as pat at that. But the way the old south Bostonians see it is the way indignant whites have seen the busing experiment in Florida, and Virginia, and Ohio, and California.

An old character – a legendary bartender – said we just don’t see the sense of it, we are a tight community we know everybody, it’s a good place to go up and work. We are almost a town in ourselves and we can’t see why children should be bused in every day from six miles away when they could go to school across the street? To this, the blacks make the obvious retort that the school across their street tends to be run down and the teaching indifferent. Then why, say the angry white parents, should we send our kids from a good school to a bad one? The main grievance, the main fear, of the whites is, of course, the fear of familiarity with the blacks. The secondary fear, which is much more often mentioned, is that their children will be bused off to black neighbourhoods and find themselves slipping down to the level of the least educated blacks.

These are all elements in a very well-intentioned social experiment which, after initial outbreaks of violence, is working well in some places. In others, not. In Boston, it’s not working at all because the white parents and children are maintaining a furious boycott of the court order. So from the first day of school only the busy buses were the ones fetching black children into the tight old community of the Irish, the Poles and Lithuanians. And at once there were noisy parades, fights, bloodshed and beaten-up blacks.

As the busing has gone on there have been days when no teaching, no schooling, was possible, when the blacks have sat out their siege till they went out to take the bus home. Then the fights have started up again and we’ve had both whites and blacks brutally beaten up. Inevitably, there has been sporadic looting.

The mayor of Boston said through the difficult early days that the violence was inevitable, but it would, as it has done in other places, taper off and finally wither away, as the children themselves grew to know each other and were able to override the prejudice of their parents. But it hasn’t happened.

The riots grew worse and last week Mayor White went back to the court room of the judge, who had given out the original busing order. He asked for over a 100 federal marshals to help keep order. The judge turned him down, and asked him to exhaust the help of the local police and then perhaps, the national guard. Mayor White shuddered at that suggestion, and recalls the ineptness of the national guard – which in each state is a voluntary reserve of ordinary citizens – at handling racial violence, he recalled the horrors of Kent State University where those students were killed by panicky, or trigger-happy, national guardsmen.

The next day, the President of the United States opened his mouth and, in Mayor White's anguished opinion, planted his foot solidly in it. President Ford said he didn’t agree with the original court order, and had always thought that forced busing was not the best solution to quality education. Having given, by these remarks, a boost to the defiance of the most militant south Boston whites, the president then added, rather limply, that still and all it was very important that the citizens of Boston respect the law.

By the way, this intrusion of the president into the affair has given many people an insight into the way he thinks and works which greatly disturbs them. In the short two months or more he has been in an office, he has time and again made a decision on his own – the Nixon pardon for instance – and only during the subsequent outcry has he consulted the interested people who might have tempered his impulsiveness if they had been consulted in the first place. On the Nixon pardon he never talked to the special prosecutor or the attorney general, or his top advisers. On the south Boston business, he never called up Mayor White or the judge in the case, or the governor of Massachusetts.

Understandably Mayor White was livid. He was now denied federal marshals, the police were overwhelmed by the rioters, and the mayor found himself with no reserves to handle the white protestors who had now been invigorated by the president's opinion. President Ford then tried to make up for his unintended encouragement by broadcasting a message urging the rejection of violence – it did no good.

So now, the governor of Massachusetts got in to the act. He requested federal troops and meanwhile mobilised 400 national guardsmen. The White House said the troops would be made available only when the governor could prove that he had exhausted the full policing resources of the city and the state. Well, after that, seven white students were injured; one was put in the hospital with multiple stab wounds and later in the day, a black girl was stabbed.

Mayor White, who was not consulted by the governor before the national guard was alerted, was by now a very ragged and angry man. By Wednesday morning it appeared that the White House might have repented yet again – four divisions of paratroopers were put at the ready to go into Boston if things got intolerable.

Boston, of course, is not unique either in being subjected to a federal court's ordering forced busing, or in experiencing precisely the sequence of violent events that has happened. What suggests a bloodier outcome there is the fact that the boycott has never broken down, that south Boston regards itself as an ethnic enclave that may not be broke up, and more than anything the fact that the blacks come in as a body from their own tight community across the tracks, so to speak.

The busing experiment, has worked best in cities so large, and so diffuse in their national and racial origins, that what is achieved is another sort of mixture. New blacks, to be sure, but also new whites from the other end of town. South Boston, on the contrary, is like a miniature of one section of Detroit in 1943, a working-class neighbourhood entirely white, compact, long settled where suddenly, armies of Negros – who had come up from the south to work at the huge, aeroplane factory of Willow Run – armies of Negros moved into the housing of the poor whites. It produced the worst and most truly race riot in modern times, not excluding the burning of Detroit a quarter-century later.

All we can say now, I think, is that if federal troops are used and the streets rumble with tanks to protect the black children on the way to school, it will take a long time for the races to mingle in goodwill without tanks and troops. And if the protection fails, if the defiance of the south Bostonians wins out, then the prospect elsewhere for forced busing will be very dim. It comes down in the end – and the end maybe nearer than we think – to the growing question of whether any body of whites can be forced, in an democracy, to do something that rouses all their most belligerent instincts.

Last weekend there was another distraction from our troubles that after that may be seen incredibly frivolous even to mention. One man, an old crooner, appeared before 20,000 people in a trance in Madison Square Garden. But he drew a television audience of astonishing size – 50-odd million Americans looked in on him, better than one in four.

He was Frank Sinatra. Chubbier now, but no less cocky, the voice a memory of its great days but the artfulness of pretending that you are his favourite companion in a neighbourhood bar was so beguiling that you would have thought the audience at Madison Square Garden was an Indian multitude in the old days listening to Ghandi.

Mostly, I noticed, as the camera roved around, they were middle-aged and once-fetching females, swooning in a day of memory for America during the second war, when their world was young and uncomplicated and Sinatra was their troubadour. The way they sat and worshipped set back women’s lib, I should guess, by at least one generation.

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