Blue Hill Blues

CAUTION, PLEASE! admonished a crudely painted sign across the store Window. I AM YOUR SOUL BROTHER.

A member of an unfraternal mob proceeded to hurl a brick through it, as others in the surging crowd had at a score of shops along Blue Hill Avenue in Boston's Roxbury Negro district during three straight nights of riots and looting. After three tense summers in which it had escaped the disturbances that plagued many other major U.S. cities, Boston finally succumbed to ghetto dementia.

Cars were overturned, bottles whizzed through the air, fires lighted the night for looters picking their way through the tawdry little stores along Roxbury's main street. Gangs of youths taunted firemen who responded to alarms, 50 of them false; one firefighter received a bullet in his hand for his pains. More than 30 policemen were injured, along with scores of rioters. At the height of the violence, 1,600 Boston bluecoats were sent in to saturate the five-block area. By the end of the third night, 63 people had been arrested.

Wrong Course. The trouble began quietly enough, with a sit-in at the district office of the Boston Welfare Department by a group styling itself MAW --Mothers for Adequate Welfare. Complaining of hostility on the part of welfare workers and arbitrariness on the part of the department, about 30 MAWs locked themselves inside, announcing that they would not move until they had talked with Welfare Director Daniel Cronin. When police came to remove them, one woman screamed, a window was broken, and the crowd outside went on its mindless rampage.

Many people in the city had believed that Boston would escape serious trouble altogether. Though Roxbury is not exactly Beacon Hill, Boston's black belt is far less dismal than most Negro ghettos. It has less than half (6.9%) the unemployment of Cleveland's Hough, 10.5% higher average family income ($4,200) than Los Angeles' Watts, and a relatively stable history, with many Negroes tracing their Roxbury roots back several generations. Yet obviously, as Negro Senator Edward Brooke pointed out, both the resentments and the problems were there in abundance. "The course they decided to follow is the wrong course," said Brooke, "but many of them can see no other."

The riots will doubtless be a factor in the September Democratic mayoral primary. Even as Roxbury quieted, Mayor John Collins, 47, an honest, efficient, if tough-fisted administrator, announced that he would not seek a third term. Though Edward Logue, the city's famed urban renewal director, will most likely be the favored candidate of the outgoing Collins administration and the city's business community, School Committee Member Mrs. Louise Day Hicks, a longtime foe of enforced school integration, will almost certainly cull some white votes as a result of the Blue Hill eruption, and has at least an outside chance of becoming the Honorable Mrs. Hicks.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.