Seeing Your Enemy

In Washington the controversy over busing inspires rhetoric about a constitutional crisis. At the local level, segregated schools are a way of life. Boston provides a clear example:

Just below the brown brick fortress of South Boston High School, the spring sun glistens on the harbor, and across the bay rises the hazy profile of the Columbia Point housing project.

"Being able to stand on that hill and see the Point project in Dorchester is to these people like seeing your enemy before they attack," says Sally Collins, 40, mother of four. "These people have seen what's happened to parts of Dorchester, and they're scared of blacks."

"I was born here, and Southie is my alma mater," says one of "these people," a stocky truck driver who refuses to give his name. "My kids go to Southie, too. Why should I send them off to Amazonland? It's getting so the coloreds get everything."

"If you got 200 of them up here, they'd end up taking over the place," says Bernie O'Rourke, 19, one of a group of seniors at Southie. "They're taught to hate us," adds Corde Graul, 17. "How can you learn anything if you're afraid of being stabbed?"

Racism is pervasive in and around Southie. It is a simple faith, as simple as the patriotism in Cronin's bar or the bingo games at St. Augustine's. This is a blue-collar neighborhood, heavily Irish, made up of triple-decker wooden houses and smaller ones of brick. The district is only 1% black; Southie's 2,000 students include exactly one black, a West Indian girl who says she survives at the school "because I speak with a foreign accent." Students tell a story of some whites dangling a black youth out a third-floor window, and Bernie O'Rourke says, "I don't see why any colored in this district would want to come here. They'd be harassed."

Boston's record of de facto school segregation is as bad as any in the nation, and President Nixon's call for a moratorium on new busing will undoubtedly strengthen the resistance. Boston's school committee has used several means to avoid integration. One of its favorites was the rule of "open enrollment," which theoretically (but only theoretically) permitted any student to transfer to any school that had an empty seat. But the main tactic, and the main rallying cry of the school committee's then-Chairman Louise Day Hicks, was to argue that the "neighborhood school" must never be disturbed by busing. "The Boston school system is integrated, therefore it cannot be segregated," Mrs. Hicks liked to say. In fact, however, the way schools were located kept blacks as segregated as possible, and buses were used to maintain that segregation.

Deadline. In 1965 the state passed a Racial Imbalance Act, which decreed that no school could have more than 50% nonwhite students and therefore, by implication, that blacks must be spread out into white schools. The only result was that the number of predominantly black schools kept increasing (from 45 to 65 out of the total of 201). Nearly 80% of the city's black children go there. One reason is that the law failed to declare all-white schools "unbalanced" and thus did not force them to take in blacks; it also permitted parents to opt out of busing plans. Another reason is a complicated system of "middle schools" and "junior schools" that are supposed to feed children into the high schools. There are only four middle schools, all in the inner city, and only a few high schools are geared to take their students. As a result, most inner-city black children end by riding to black high schools.

In January, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare finally decided to impose a deadline. It gave the Boston school committee until Feb. 9 to draw up a plan for desegregation or face possible court action plus the loss of financial aid. "Why have they singled us out?" protested a committee member. Replied HEW's Civil Rights Director J. Stanley Pottinger: "Because we received a complaint 18 months ago, and our review has shown meat."

Although Boston stood to lose some $300 million in aid and construction money, the committee did nothing about producing a desegregation plan. "We cannot respond in the time they have given us," said Chairman James Hennigan (Mrs. Hicks had run unsuccessfully for mayor and then moved on to Congress). While HEW's legal machinery slowly turned, the N.A.A.C.P. sponsored a class action against the school authorities by 55 parents and children, demanding a prompt end to "racially discriminatory policies." At the same time, the state board of education voted to draw up its own desegregation plan in case the courts order one to go into effect.

Chairman Hennigan remained unmoved. "The people of this city do not want realignment of school districts," he said. "We are an elected board, and it would fly in the face of the voters for us to change the school lines." His judgment of the popular view was soon corroborated by George Wallace's victory in Florida and by President Nixon's speech against busing. Hennigan shifted to the offensive and challenged the racial-imbalance law itself.

"Fraudulent." Last week, before TV cameras and an overflow crowd of more than 1,500 spectators, the state legislature's education committee opened hearings on 19 proposals to alter the Imbalance Act. The lead speaker, fittingly enough, was Mrs. Hicks, who once again praised "neighborhood schools," denounced "intellectual bureaucrats," and tried to stake her case on busing: "How much longer do we have to listen to the fraudulent statements of those who say the schools can be balanced with massive cross-busing?" In actual fact, some 85% of Boston high school students already use buses or public transportation, and, as black State Representative Royal Boiling put it: "The question has always been where does the bus ride terminate?"

Mrs. Hicks had brought her followers with her, red-faced housewives from Hyde Park and Jamaica Plain. Some had signs pinned to their dresses: REPEAL THE RACIAL-IMBALANCE ACT. In

the corridors, the women began a chant: "Repeal! Repeal! Repeal!"

Repeal seems highly unlikely, however, and despite President Nixon's speech, pro-integration officials emphasize that HEW never asked for new busing. It asks a new plan, which could include new schools, new district boundaries, or new routes for present buses. As one official observes: "HEW can't legally not proceed against Boston." Among blacks, too, feelings are running high. Says Ruth Batson, a civil rights worker at Boston University: "Black people have got sick of this whole foolishness. We absolutely cannot continue to live the way we do."

Back in South Boston, however, the conflict looks different. Integration may come, says a white father of three students at Southie, "but they'll have to bring the militia into Southie to do it."

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