White for Mayor

Boston's mayorality race has taken on nation-wide importance with the ominous possibility that Louise Day Hicks might deliver a victory for the dark side of America's political character.

Her opponent, Kevin White has not staged a particularly distinguished campaign, never transcending the anonymity of being simply the good man running against Hicks. He has hedged on the question of racial busing, failing to match the implicit bigotry of Mrs. Hicks' adulation for the neighborhood school with an explicit promise of rapid racial balance for the Boston system.

But White is no parochialist. He recognizes how bad Boston public schools are, and has resolved to make them better. White has shown a sympathy for the problems of racial minorities with a series of sensible position papers asking for neighborhood social service centers and similar improvements. He has the confidence of the financial community which has helped rebuild Boston and whose help the city will have to enlist in taking on urban problems that still remain.

Mrs. Hicks on the other hand stands for Boston isolationism and the desperate politics of alienation. Her final campaign ad this week answered her critics with the empty, emotional, defensive tautology, "I am proud of Boston and all its citizens." Significantly her gaudiest campaign promise has been the fiscally impracticable pledge to raise salaries for firemen and policemen to $10,000--an appeal to those who see only the first line of defense against urban disorders. Mrs. Hicks' long and undistinguished record on the School Committee revealed the same timorous commitment to defending institutional stability at the cost of shamefully low educational standards.

Mrs. Hicks must be defeated; Kevin White should be elected mayor today.