From the Schools To the Streets

The front-page picture showed a terrified black man clinging to a railing as whites clawed at his shirt. Headlines summarized the sorry situation: SCHOOL SITUATION WORSENS, VIOLENCE SPREADS, BLACKS URGE FEDERAL ACTION. It might have been Birmingham or Biloxi in the 1960s--but it was Boston, last week.

As the court-ordered desegregation of Boston's public schools went into its fourth week, an explosion seemed imminent. "We can no longer maintain either the appearance or the reality of public safety," Mayor Kevin H. White said in a letter to Federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity, who had issued the desegregation ruling last June 21. Added White, who asked Garrity to send in federal marshals to help enforce the ruling: "Violence which once focused on the schools and buses is now engulfing the entire community in racial confrontation."

Much of the violence took place along Dorchester Street, a four-lane thoroughfare that is the main artery of South Boston, the center of opposition to forced busing. With feelings running high over the busing order, "Southie" swarmed with police, including 300 members of the elite Tactical Patrol Force brought in to disperse crowds and protect the buses bringing black students to the area's previously all-white schools.

The heavy police presence increased tension among Southie's resentful Irish residents, and one evening a brick was heaved through the windshield of a cruising T.P.F. squad car. When the officers tried to arrest a suspect, two dozen Southie toughs set upon them, and the police lost the man in the crowd. The next night two dozen T.P.F. officers burst into the jampacked Rabbit Inn on Dorchester Street. As many as eight patrons were reported injured. Some Southies are convinced that the T.P.F.

raid was an outright reprisal for the previous night's incident; the police claim that they were merely answering a distress call.

Warning Shots. When school resumed last week, Southie was in an even uglier mood; buses carrying black students were greeted with jeers and rocks.

At one point, a Haitian immigrant named Jean-Louis Andre Yvon, 33, turned unwittingly onto Dorchester Street. Some 35 people surrounded Yvon's car, smashed his windshield and pulled him out. Someone shouted, "Get the nigger!" Yvon fled for the porch of a nearby house and clung to the railing as youths battered him with clubs. Only after a white policeman drew his pistol and fired some warning shots was a dazed and bleeding Yvon finally rescued. "He would have been dead if I hadn't fired," the policeman said later.

Trouble broke out the next day in predominantly black Roxbury. Black students roamed the streets, stoning cars and throwing rocks at the few white pedestrians. A white cab driver was hospitalized. Police let only black drivers into the area. "We just don't have enough men to protect you," a deputy police superintendent told white reporters. "Don't look left or right. Just keep driving until you get to the suburbs."

The violence was dismaying, but to those who know Boston, it should not have been surprising. The city's image as the Athens of America is a rosy distortion. Boston's renowned academic and cultural institutions seldom touch the lives of most of its 624,900 residents, who are mainly lower-middle class in income and outlook, fiercely loyal to their own ethnic backgrounds and neighborhoods. "Boston is a racist city and always has been," says Boston College Law Professor Leonard Strickman.

Lay Waste. For residents of Southie, a physically and psychologically isolated "town," Garrity's integration ruling was like an order to lay their community to waste. As one anguished Southie mother put it last week, "If they can tell you where to send your kids to school, they can tell you where to work, they can tell you anything, they can take anything away from you."

The basic intent of Garrity's ruling was to improve the racial balance of the 80 city schools (out of 200) that were more than 50% black. This was also the intent of the state's Elimination of Racial Imbalance Law. Passed in 1965 but blocked through nine years of litigation and defiance by the largely Irish Catholic Boston school committee, the law was finally repealed this spring, but by then the issue was in the hands of the federal court. Judge Garrity ordered desegregation to begin under a plan drawn up by the state board of education.

About 45,000 of Boston's 94,000 pupils have now been assigned to schools they would not normally have attended. This involves busing more than 18,000 students, including 8,510 whites. Under the plan, the South Boston and Roxbury school districts have been combined; 1,271 white pupils from South Boston have been assigned to Roxbury or other neighborhoods and 1,746 nonwhites have been assigned to Southie's schools.

When school started this fall, Southie swiftly developed what some residents call a "Belfast mentality," the attitude of a beleaguered and persecuted minority. Southie parents argue that forced busing not only will destroy the concept of community schools but also compel their own children to travel into high-crime neighborhoods. Many Southie Irish Catholics feel betrayed by their own leaders: Humberto Cardinal Medeiros, who has given strong moral support to the busing plan and refuses to let parents enroll their children in parochial schools just to avoid it; Senator Edward Kennedy, whose probusing stand made him a target for curses and raw eggs at a recent antibusing rally; and Mayor White, who is often referred to in Southie as Mayor Black.

Southie was heartened by President Ford's statement at his press conference last week that "the court decision ... was not the best solution to quality education in Boston ... I respectfully disagree with the judge's order." But elsewhere in Boston, the remark was widely attacked as insensitive and irresponsible. The mayor accused the President of trying to "taunt this city into becoming another Little Rock."

Harvard Social Psychologist Thomas Pettigrew believes Southie turned to violence partly because it still believes integration can be prevented. "When a community senses that change is going to take place come hell or high water," he says, "you don't get the violence. In Boston more than in Little Rock, you have had people who have been told for years that busing is not inevitable, that it will not happen here." Last week most Southie parents were still keeping their children out of public schools.

High Tensions. Despite White's plea for marshals, none were ordered into Boston, and the mayor's critics suspected that pure politics was behind his appeal to Garrity. White backed his request with the claim that city resources had been strained to the breaking point. A police force with only 2,000 active officers cannot indefinitely station one-half of them in just one area of the city. But why not ask for state police or National Guardsmen rather than federal marshals? Possibly because the state lawmen could only be mobilized by Republican Governor Francis Sargent, one of Democrat White's chief rivals.

Though Garrity denied the mayor's request, he did accede to a black demand for additional protection. By the tune 300 riot-helmeted state troopers and 125 other state lawmen moved into Southie to relieve the overworked T.P.F., however, the violence seemed to be subsiding. "It must be hard guarding against all us women with shopping bags," a gray-haired housewife needled a trooper outside South Boston High.

At week's end, as the first full month of busing ended, Boston could count itself lucky that so far no lives had been lost. But tensions remained high as still another Northern city wrestled with a problem that was once regarded as peculiarly Southern.

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