Southie Fights On

Dodging raw eggs and ripe tomatoes, Senator Edward Kennedy dashed into an office building in Boston just before a mob of irate white parents smashed one of its plate-glass windows. The crowd had booed him off the speaker's platform at an antibusing rally outside city hall because of his past statements urging them to stop the fight against the court order that desegregated Boston schools last week. At another rally, whites cheered a speaker who nominated the Senator for "bus driver of the year--if he ever gets his driver's license back."

That Bostonians would so rudely treat a Kennedy was a measure of the depth of their bitterness. For nearly a decade, the predominantly white city school committee had disobeyed a state law prohibiting schools from having student bodies that are more than 50% nonwhite. Boston's public school population of 94,000 is 40% nonwhite, but 80 of the city's 200 public schools exceeded the 50% nonwhite limit. Rather than desegregate schools, the committee had even willingly given up $65 million in state and federal funds in 1973. But last June Federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity ordered the city to balance the racial composition of those 80 schools by transferring about 45,000 students. The plan required forced busing of 18,235 pupils, 8,5 10 of them white.

Outraged Parents. In dozens of meetings in the living rooms of white parents, Mayor Kevin White urged peaceful compliance with the order. "It's a lousy, rotten law," he said. "We fought the thing. We lost. Now we have to go along with it." But White was unable to quell the outrage of white parents in South Boston. Isolated from the rest of the city by canals, railroads and express ways, Southie is a tightly knit, working-class Irish community that has produced many of the city's leading politicians. Among them: former House Speaker John W. McCormack and Louise Day Hicks, the mother of two and champion of neighborhood schools, first as head of the school committee and lately as city councilwoman. Her white constituents organized a two-week boycott of schools, justifying their opposition to busing on grounds of racism and fear for their children's safety. Explained Thomas O'Connell, father of seven: "The question is: Am I going to send my young daughter, who is budding into the flower of womanhood, into Roxbury on a bus?"

In most of the city, the boycott largely failed, and some 66% of the city's public students showed up for Thursday's school opening. But in South Boston, 90% of the white children stayed away from school. So did similarly large numbers of the black children, most from Roxbury, who had been reassigned to Southie's schools. Outside the brown-brick fortress of South Boston High School, which had a projected enrollment of 1,539 (797 black), a jeering, mostly teen-aged crowd of whites threw stones and bottles at two yellow buses that carried the 56 black students who showed up for opening day. As school was dismissed that afternoon, the whites brandished lengths of rubber hose and clubs and again threw bottles at the buses. Nine black students and a bus monitor were slightly injured by shattering glass. At the 79 other schools that were desegregated, there was no violence.

Next day, nearly 400 police officers kept demonstrators away from South Boston High, where attendance dropped to 136 students, including 86 blacks. But a dozen blocks away, the black students were met by several dozen white mothers, who chanted, "Southie won't go!" and by some 200 stone-throwing white youths. A black student and a policeman received minor injuries. In response to the violence, Boston Civil Rights Leader Thomas Atkins urged black parents to keep their children home from the high school. The white parents vowed to keep up their boycott this week, and even talked of extending it while they try again to challenge the desegregation order in court.

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