Not quite the same old song

Roxbury, Sept 10--This predominantly black neighborhood of Boston came to life peacefully and uneventfully in this, the third day of the third year under the city's court-ordered desegregation plan. As the familiar and unattractive yellow vehicles marked "School Bus" and the occasional roving police cars bounced along the hilly, pot-holed streets, black children gathered, chatting, to be picked up on designated corners.

The children were for the most part unaccompanied--an obvious change from last year and the year before, when anxious mothers, fathers, older brothers and sisters held their hands and told them to try not to be afraid if the white folks over where they were headed, in South Boston, Charlestown and Hyde Park, called them names, tried to barricade their buses, or, as grown adults did often and shamelessly in 1974 and 1975, heckled and threw rocks through bus windows at defenseless and orderly children.

"No, everything around here is pretty calm," a middle-aged black man leaning against the steep cement stairwell to his wooden apartment house said, sipping from a carton of Tropicana and taking in some of the already intense morning sun. "You see, we already had busing here, so it ain't nothing new to us. Yeh," he said again, nodding thoughtfully, "It's pretty calm, all right."

Around the corner from the subway stop at Dudley Station, at the District 2 city police headquarters, cops and secretaries lounged around, jingling the keys on their belt loops and shooting the bull. After joining state and federal police in what amounted to a war-time-like occupation of the troubled schools and streets last fall, they now have orders to keep a low profile, to "keep the lid on," from Robert J. DiGrazia, Boston's respected, reform-minded and very high profile police commissioner.

"You lookin' for violence? I got lots of guys in the dock who can give you violence," one of the sargeants responded when I asked if reports of any "incidents" had come in. "No, son," he said, shaking his head, "There ain't going to be much violence this year."

Not much violence, yet--and it seems that after two years of tinkering, the unwieldy components of the desegregation plan have fallen workably, if not neatly, into place. The troopers, the new administrators, the shuffled administrators, the elected parent and student councils, all have had a full summer to prepare. Still, imposing this "blanket" program citywide has been somewhat like pulling an actual blanket over the sheets to make a bed. Straighten a section and a wrinkle appears there; soothe a ten mile-square district here and a minor outburts erupts there. Wednesday, in Charlestown, white youths pelted troopers and new, bussed arrivals, then boycotted classes all day. Thursday night a Charlestown woman who sent her children past the boycott received a dreaded phone-call--beware of fire-bombs. Friday night, right here in Roxbury, police arrested a black youth, Henry Alexander Jr., at his home on Dudley St., and charged him with having been a "disorderly person" at school that morning. He attended historically black-dominated English High, and, as whites arrived in larger and larger numbers during the week, he landed in the headmaster's office and started to throw around "disorderly" threats.

But these ripples hardly rouse the water, or muss the bed, compared with the incidents of last year--the knifings, vigilante marches and the partially obliterated signs of "gger go home" painted on the walls of traditionally Irish and all-white South Boston High School. A picture of an overturned car in Charlestown made the national papers, and all three networks sent cameras and sound equipment to record fist-waving parents as they shouted "Never, never, never" along South Boston's streets. Over 900 citizens, mostly white and anti-busing, rode the paddy wagons to the local jails in the first two years after the court order took shape. Over 400 were prosecuted. And, as Commissioner DiGrazia so unproudly points out, none received sentences from mostly neighborhood courts. This show of laxness and reactionary unity in the city's neighborhoods, along with the angry words and deeds that it compounded, turned Boston into an object of fascination and irony as media and communities, both North and South, watched Boston sacrifice its civic-minded, Yankee reputation to racial hatred, or so it seemed, and over the practical answer of a mild-mannered judge to a 14-word mandate.

The judge in question is a blonde, unassuming and fearlessly literal-minded man named W. Arthur Garrity Jr., one of the five magistrates who handles cases before the United States District Court of the District of Massachusetts. The 14 words that impelled his forced busing mandate lie at the tail of the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, passed three years after the 13th amendment freed black and all other slaves. This vague and pivotal half-sentence, dubbed "The Equal Protection Clause," requires that "no State shall...deny to any person in its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

In March of 1972, a black mother, Mrs. Tallulah Morgan, her kids and co-defendents, acting under legal counsel from Boston's assertive National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, charged the state, and specifically the Boston School Committee, with doing just that--denying her "Equal protection of the laws"--by willfully and deviously maintaining a segregated school system. (Over half the city's blacks attended almost all-black schools at the time; 84 per cent of the whites went to even more exclusively white institutions.) Two legal precedents, and the quarter century of struggle for civil rights enlightment behind them, were working in Morgan's favor.

One, the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, finally served the death warrant to "separate but equal" facilities for black people, coming to the reasonable conclusion that separation is intrinsically unequal because it "generated a feeling of inferiority (among blacks) as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone."

In practical terms, that meant simply, desegregate, and quickly. Then, in 1972, the Court told the School Committee in Denver that even though it had never officially enacted any Jim Crow laws, blacks, whites and hispanics had drifted unacceptably to separate school districts anyway, and that, as they say in the courts, mandated redress. Garrity documented a similar situation in Boston, where, to boot, an in-state Racial Imbalance Act had ordered the city to clean up its act as far back as 1965. The School Committee had disobeyed that act. Garrity, in June 1973, said, briefly, obey it.

On paper, the city statutes charge the School Committee with making appointments, distributing students, ordering new construction and insuring quality education. In practice, the committee members do carry out at least the first three directives, but the job often is either a stepping stone to a higher, paid office, or, as one sometime-friend, sometime enemy of the board put it, "a nice something to do for a housewife who's bored and wouldn't mind riding around in taxis on an expense account all day." The members receive no salary, which excludes citizens without sufficient support elsewhere, while the committee is elected city-wide, preventing the city's 17 per cent black population from winning political strength equal to their 34 per cent representation among Boston students.

Largely in the interest of attaining one of the next stones in the local political pond, candidates for the School Committee have generally run against busing since 1965, because, as the past two years have made clear, nobody really likes to seek their kids bussed. So Garrity, one could say, accused the School Committee members with carrying out their campaign promises, and all too rigorously, too thoroughly, too well. Specifically, the court found that the committee had not capitalized on several chances to redistrict for greater racial balance in the schools, had insisted on building new schools at the center of heavily mono-ethnic areas, and had allowed students at least two bogus "options" set up in name for the sake of integration, but to which exception after exception was then made.

The committee, in appeal, claimed it had done its best, but that Boston has always been a city of neighborhoods that desired and cultivated a neighborhood school system--the "ethnic purity" argument, if you will. Given the board's past efforts, however, this claim sounded like Prime Minister Vorster of South Africa explaining today that, after segregating blacks in undersized, underdeveloped "tribal homelands" ten years ago, he simply could not eliminate apartheid because the blacks demanded and thrived on homelands.

Now as far as using the School Committee as a soap-box and the busing issue as a political whipping boy, former committeewoman and current City Council President Louise Day Hicks is a case in point. For a decade the slogan of this shrill, shrewd, triple-chinned rhetoritician--"The people of Boston know where I stand"--has served as a code-word for one idea and one idea only: no blacks in our schools. Hicks talks a great deal about our children and our schools for a woman who sent all her charges to private and parochial schools, and you will hear more, and more, from her. If the upcoming elections leave an opening, Hicks will probably run again for the School Committee, her first home and the home of her issue.

One member she wishes to push aside, ironically enough, is the other woman who stamped her distinctive name on the anti-busing campaign last year. Pixie Palladino. Last fall, Hicks and Palladino moved and shook together to form an initialed organization for busing foes, calling it ROAR, or Restore Our Alienated Rights, and selecting as its symbol a lion with one paw clamped to the head of a school bus. This year, however, a rift has opened in the organization and the two are engaged in a real cat fight, Palladino pulling about a quarter of their joint constituency away to start a new group, United ROAR. The factionalism may explain much of the calm this fall; certainly Palladino has lost much of her native support in Italian East Boston, and her and Hick's extremist tack may have seen its heyday. Palladino, at least, will probably go the usual route of politicians who have lost their local leg up to higher office and run for higher office anyway--speculation has it, for the Senate. It is clear now that Palladino doesn't have a chitling's chance in South Boston.

These petty squabbles take on significance beyond good gossip, though, if you consider the roots and the history of the immigrant, anti-Brahmin Boston from which they spring. Why, when parents from Southie, Eastie, Hyde Park and Charlestown hold a summit conference to discuss how to undermine the uppity "niggers" and, increasingly, "spics", are they also kicking each other under the table? Why, for example, does a once outspoken liberal like Mayor Kevin White have to uncommittedly walk a tightrope on the busing issue, protecting himself with a net of double-talking and triple-talking aides below? Why, in the city of the Adamses and co. is the City Council filled with the likes of Hicks and anti-everything councilman Albert "Dapper" O'Neil, a man who openly brags about the handgun he packs, whose reactionary voting record a native Bostonian friend of mine calls "one bizarre package," and who himself until recently referred to Hicks as his "steady girl"?

Witness their constituents in Southie. Racism pervades the life. The-Irish endured it from Yankees for decades after they fled the potato famine in their homeland, and by the 1950s, they had finally bought into the pie just enough to suspect that the new wave of blacks aimed to steal it from them. South Bostonians, as a community, furthermore, feel tight, proud, distinctively Irish and obsessively xenophobic. The sentiments, as The New York Times correspondent John Kifner says, added to the backlash when Judge Garrity placed South Boston High School in court "receivership"--under court jurisdiction--last January. Most of the citizens of South Boston hold the high school close to their hearts, Kifner says, because it was there that most of them spent the best years of their lives. But, as Harvard-affiliated writer Robert Coles has let us know, those years stand out largely because the headache of realizing that one is a working class "have-not" comes just afterward.

'Look who orders us around and buses our children,' they tell Coles, who in turn brings their case before the readers of The Boston Globe, The New York Review of Books and elsewhere. 'Garrity, who lives in ritzy suburban Wellesley; Mayor White, who sends his kids out to the private academies; the editors of The Globe, most of whom skipped town as quick as we would if we had the money.' No doubt they also take note that even Coles, their interpreter, if not spokesman, likes his safe, bucolic home in Concord to go home to.

The South Bostonians are not unique, however; many blacks in Roxbury and Dorchester, on the exploitation score, "know where they're coming from." Parents in the black sections of town don't relish busing either, but for them the school bus has become a symbol of mobility, not upward mobility, but just some kind of mobility--a foot in the door to society. For desegregation alone will not change the poor black's view of city politics and power; even when a black student can look a white teacher in the eye at South Boston High, he still knows where that teacher comes from and how she probably fits into the city's network of cronyism and nepotism, how her mother may hold a feather-bedded job in the School Department downtown, her husband on the Boston police force may swallow his pride and true opinions to protect black children, and how her brother-in-law might be assuring audiences in South Boston that he will never let those people take over our little city as he runs for the ninth congressional district seat (which, by an ironic districting fluke, contains parts of South Boston, Roxbury and suburban high mortgage, low-admission Dover).

The shared bitterness of parents all over Boston glares forth in the treatment a group of mothers at Charlestown High on Wednesday gave to reporters and cameramen, most of whom were there just because they "had to be" themselves. To publicize their anger and to be photographed, the demonstrators stood outside the high school and hurled bottles and bricks. But when press arrived, they jeered at them and cried. "You guys are vultures." Together, of course, these two actions make little sense. Yet the hecklers' sensibility comes through only in this characteristic illogic. People in Boston may no longer be sure who to lash out at, only that you have to lash out at somebody or else meekly and against your proud, cultural instincts, crawl back under the thumb of the "have-gots."

It is anger, in fact, that Lee Valenti, a former anti-busing parent now working within the desegregation program, believes has begun to nettle other disgruntled parents into abandoning ROAR, the secret meetings, the subversive threats, and turn, however begrudgingly, toward parent input councils established under the court order--the Racial-Ethnic Parents Councils and the higher level Citywide Parents Advisory Council (CPAC).

"Anger's the main reason," Valenti, an East Boston resident and member of CPAC, says. "The parents have wised up. They feel Pixie has betrayed them: they elected her to stop busing and she couldn't do it. They're angry over the lousy education their kids are getting. They feel cheated out of their tax dollars (Phase 2B will give rise to at least a $59 tax hike this year alone)..."

"These people are mad," she says, "but you just can't stay mad over one thing for three years--and there's really only the judge to rant about. You have to reach for new peaks to sustain the anger, so some of these parents--old ROAR people and the apathetic ones--have decided to move past heckling into something tougher, something more challenging. When they see how bad conditions in the schools are, how kids can be carrying home 'A's for grades and 'C's for conduct, they begin to realize that all the demonstrating, all the animosity, all the hollering is a luxury this city just can't afford."

Students as well, both black and white, may have finally made the selfish and encouraging decision to look after their narrow interests, to get on and get out with a diploma and at least get a respectable job. Or so the comments of Jerome S. Winegar, the former Minnesota-based school administrator who Judge Garrity approved for headmaster at South Boston High last year, seem to indicate. Monday, he says, so many students checked in for the fourth day of classes--300 blacks, and 500 whites--that they had to file up and wait outside the aged building while staff at the door read the newly-installed airport metal detectors.

"You had the bussed kids lining up in one line and the white kids arriving on foot in another, and I'll tell you if there had been one rock thrown or one racial slur escaped, we would have seen a fight they'd never stop talking about. But they stood silent, and it was calm, and the kids did it," Winegar says.

Leslie "Skip" Griffin '70, a black who Garrity lured from a job in the Cambridge schools to become assistant headmaster in South Boston, tells a similar story. "There was an incident that started up in the cafeteria, some insults exchanged. I went up to the black kid involved and told him, 'stay cool, man; go along with us.' He immediately moved to the back of the room and stayed there. Now there was nothing I could have done if that kid hadn't decided to do that. This was a big kid. But I guess this guy decided to trust me."

If the guy who trusted Griffin came from Roxbury, he might well have felt that he had enough problems to deal with without expulsion from school, problems that have continued through all the years that all the campaign stickers, now shreds of paper flying in the morning wind, have built up on the side of the Marcus Garvey House a few blocks up the hill from Dudley Station--"Vote White," "Vote Kennedy," "Let's Do It Again, Elect Bill Owens" (the state senator). Even with desegregation, Boston inner-city residents will have to cope with their version of the ills that have caused all races to flee Detroit, which has no desegregation, like a city gutted by steady bombing. James Coleman, the University of Chicago sociologist, attributed this "white flight" in other cities under desegregation to busing, but he neglected to ask the suburban refugees to itemize the reasons why they fled. Lee Valenti and others in Boston's neighborhoods spell out many more than one reason, and assert they have "wised up" to realize that they cannot even depend on the well-intending folks who have escaped--that those of them who cannot move out must take business into their owns hands and hopefully, someday, do it together.

Which brings us back to the Marcus Garvey House, and across the street to a bus pick-up corner, on Friday morning. A small kid, maybe a fourth grader, who I had noticed earlier holding his mother's hand in their doorway, whispering and pointing, suddenly broke loose and hustled up to the corner to join two other children waiting for their bus. "Hey, maybe we missed it," he was telling them before long, beginning to strut and lecture like a little headmaster himself. "We missed that bus, I'm telling you. It's gone," he kept repeating. And after 20 years, blacks and whites in the cities are still fussing over buses, it struck me