Busing

THE NEWS from Boston's schools in the last two weeks--fraught though it has been with angry crowds' assaults on schoolchildren and racial brawls and infighting--is in the end a reason for hope. For it means that, perhaps for the first time in this country's history, the public school system of a large Northern city is going to be racially integrated in fact as well as in name. And it seems likely that the last two weeks' violence and terror will subside, as the violence and terror that accompanied the integration of Southern schools ten years ago did, to be replaced by at least acquiescence in a society at least a little more egalitarian.

There are other lessons in a comparison with earlier struggles over integration, too. One is that the importance of each step can't be measured in isolation, without reference to a continuing process of history. Integrating Boston's schools won't bring racial justice to Boston, any more than integrating Montgomery's bus lines brought racial justice to Alabama. In a society where black and white people were truly equal, no one would need to consider busing, because housing would be integrated or people from all neighborhoods would enjoy the same rights. But that is not the kind of society we have now. The issue now is not integrated housing--an obvious goal, though one difficult to achieve without deep change in the structure of American government or society. The issue right now isn't even extending integration to suburban school districts. The Supreme Court threw that out for most of the country a few months ago, in its ruling that suburbs of Detroit need not take part in court-ordered plans for integrating that city's schools. Our choice isn't between busing and perfect justice, but between busing and the kind of unequal education documented in the books of people like Jonathan Kozol '58. And just as black people's boycott of Montgomery's bus lines took on a symbolic importance in addition to its real one, so that victory helped spark new militance on other, even more important issues, so the integration of Boston's schools has become a symbol in the eyes of the country and the world.

Another similarity between the South of 15 years ago and the Boston of today is that in each case, when people with power decided it was time to integrate things, people without much power had to do most of the integrating. Much of the passion of the resistance to integration derived from this pattern. The pattern included the Northern liberals, some of them oblivious to the racism in their home towns, who went South to impose a new sensibility on white people in America's least developed section. And it includes suburban liberals willing to fight for integration to the last South Bostoner. Partly the pattern depends upon the special importance some people with little access to real power attach to those advantages they enjoy. Partly it grows from the unwillingness of people with more real power to sacrifice some of it, however they may compromise, when it comes to their working-class cohorts.

After the Detroit decision, why shouldn't South Boston be angry? Its grievance against the suburbs--like the South's grievance against the North--is real, despite its usefulness to the people who throw rocks at schoolbuses. But the redress of that grievance will be likelier when education is better and when black and white people unite to obtain it. The integration of Boston's schools should hasten that day, too.