People's History New Boston

A People’s History OF THE New Boston ---------------------<o>-------------------- Jim Vrabel University of Massachusetts Press AMHERST AND BOSTON CHAPTER I 7 to do, the coalition argued, but it would generate 80,000 construction jobs a year for residents and $1.6 billion in wages they could spend in the city.18 The Boston Residents Jobs Policy might have been just a good idea whose time had not come, except for one thing—1979 was a mayoral elec CHAPTER 18 tion year, and one of those running was Mel King, the first African Amer --------------------<o>-------------------- ican candidate for the job in Boston history. King made adoption of the jobs policy the centerpiece of his campaign. But Kevin White was also a candidate, running for reelection to a third term, and he knew a good issue The Battle over Busing when he saw one. White snatched it away from King, and on September n, 1979, less than two weeks before the preliminary election, signed an execu tive order making the Boston Residents Jobs Policy official city policy.19 Just as with welfare reform ten years earlier, it was a case where good politics helped make good policy. Contractors and labor unions subsequently challenged the jobs or dinance, and it was struck down by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. But that decision was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, and T h e s u c c e s s f u l c o a l it io n s f o r m e d to sto p construction eventually the Boston Residents Jobs Policy became law. Before it was im of the two proposed highways and to obtain a greater share of Boston jobs plemented, 80 percent of the workers on construction jobs in Boston came for Boston residents showed what the people of the New Boston could do from outside the city, and the percentages of those who were minorities if they worked together. “For a while there, it seemed like there was going and women were negligible. After being in effect for only one year, the to be an attempt to forge a city-wide activism movement,” Alan Lupo said percentage of jobs held by Boston residents doubled to 40 percent, and wistfully many years later, “but then busing came along and eliminated the percentages held by minorities and women increased dramatically.20 the possibility.” 1 A movement that began by dividing residents eventually united them, “Except for the violence and the bigotry—which is a very big except” — and the people of the city got a lot more jobs building the New Boston recalled the journalist Renee Loth, “the antibusing movement was very as a result. much like the other community movements of the time. It was a grassroots, neighborhood-based movement made up of people who were against an indifferent institution—in this case the court—telling them how to live their lives. A lot of their tactics and a lot of their inspiration came from what the Left was supporting. We didn’t happen to agree with their posi tion, but a lot of us agreed with the impulse completely.” 2 The violence was obvious and inexcusable. But how much of the oppo sition to busing was based on bigotry and how much on resentment by people at being told how to live their lives was then—and continues to be—a subject of debate. Unlike some of the other protest movements that took place during this era in Boston, busing has been the subject of many books. The best are Ron ald Formisano’s Boston against Busing, Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground, Alan Lupo’s Liberty's Chosen Home, and lone Malloy’s Southie Won’t Go: A Teacher’s Diary of the Desegregation of South Boston High School. CHAPTER I 8 The Battle over Busing Yet despite all that has been written, the story of the battle over busing A final fault in the law—in Boston at least—was that by the time it remains a difficult one to retell. Unlike those other protest movements, went into effect, complying with it would mean a massive disruption of this one wasn’t a case of a good, grassroots “us” and against a bad, mono the school system, of neighborhoods, and of families. In 1963, when the lithic “them.” And unlike those others, it didn’t unite the people of Boston. much more modest Atkins Plan was proposed, there were only 16 segre Instead, it divided them as nothing in the city’s history—with the possible gated schools in Boston and they could have been desegregated by redraw exceptions of the Revolution and abolition—had done before. ing a few school district boundaries and without resorting to any busing The battle over busing began in August 1965, where the fight for school at all. But by 1965, the state classified 45 schools in Boston as being “racially desegregation left off, with the signing of the Massachusetts Racial Imbal imbalanced,” and compliance meant that thousands of students would ance Law. Although the law’s ends—to reverse segregation in the state’s have to be bused. That prospect didn’t appeal to many parents, white or schools—couldn’t be faulted, the means it used certainly could be, and black. A few years after busing began, Ellen Jackson, one of the founders of they were. Operation Exodus, admitted, “If the schools in Roxbury were better, I have The biggest fault in the law was that it defined racial imbalance as occur a feeling the parents would want their children back here.”5 ring when more than 50 percent of a school’s enrollment was made up of While the antibusing movement might have been similar to other minority students. By doing that, the law focused on which students were protest movements in Boston at the time, it differed in one important re in a school rather than how they came to be there. By doing that, the law spect—its leadership didn’t come from the bottom up, but the top down. failed to respect the traditional practice of assigning students to the schools From the start, elected officials rushed to it, like the one in the French prov nearest their homes, something that parents had come to count on and erb, who ran alongside the crowd explaining, “I’m a politician. I must get around which neighborhoods were built. It was also a practice that the U.S. in front to lead them.” District Court of Appeals—in a case involving Springfield, Massachusetts, Louise Day Hicks, a Boston School Committee member at the time, handed down five weeks before the law was signed—ruled as not neces got there first, and in doing so attempted to revive the politics of division sarily constituting segregation. that had been practiced for so long in the Old Boston. But instead of at Defining racial imbalance this way also meant that the law would only tempting to divide the people over ethnicity and class, as James Michael apply to Boston and the two or three other cities in Massachusetts that had Curley and others had done, she tried to divide them based on race. “The a significant number of minorities among their predominantly poor and NAACP had given her a platform,” Tom Atkins noted years later. “She be working-class populations. Ronald Formisano likened the Racial Imbal came a symbol. We had created a monster.” 6 Hicks used that platform to ance Law to the Pentagon’s draft policies, in which “once again poor blacks launch a number of attempts—most of them unsuccessful —at higher of and lower-class whites were the foot soldiers for a war initiated and pur fice—and in the process prevented the New Boston from continuing to sued by liberal elites, and most of the affluent and college-educated were move to a higher plane. exempt.” As Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon wrote,“Rarely had a piece From the day the Racial Imbalance Law was signed, Hicks and the other of legislation so nakedly betrayed its class bias.” They likened its effect to elected officials who got in line just behind her did everything possible to that of the similarly flawed Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group minority keep it from succeeding. Every year, Hicks and the school committee sub loan program, which they described as “a tragedy of good intentions.” 3 mitted imbalance plans they knew wouldn’t satisfy the requirements of the Another fault in the law was that it required those few urban school law. And every year, the state Board of Education rejected those plans, and districts to which it did apply to develop mandatory student assignment eventually began withholding millions of dollars in education aid from plans to address the so-called imbalance, and rewarded those that did with Boston’s already financially struggling public school system. additional state funds, and punished those that didn’t by withholding aid.4 Not until 1970, when Hicks was no longer on the committee— having This enforcement mechanism not only proved ineffective at getting adults parlayed her “leadership” of the antibusing movement into a seat in the to comply with the law, but it also punished children in those districts U.S. Congress—did the school committee finally seem ready to comply when the adults did not. with the law by accepting state funds to build a new Lee School in a racially 170 171 CHAPTER I 8 The Battle over Busing diverse part of Dorchester, with the understanding that the school would In 1972., after 1,000 people demonstrated outside the State House, the be racially balanced.

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