Why Southie Stands Fast

In its fifth week under a court integration order requiring the busing of white and black pupils into each other's neighborhoods, Boston was a mixture of calm and tension. A motorcade of white parents opposed to forced busing created noise but little more. A parade of blacks protesting the school boycott by whites went off quietly. Attendance at some schools was near normal, while elsewhere students stayed home; citywide school attendance last week averaged 72%, up 8% from opening week but down slightly from its high point.

FBI agents arrested two white men on a civil rights violation for their part in a mob attack on a lone black man the previous week. Three others, found with Molotov cocktails in their car, were charged by the agency with conspiracy to obstruct a federal court order. At Hyde Park High School, six white students were beaten and one stabbed in a clash among teenagers. That ugly incident prompted Republican Governor Francis Sargent to call up 450 National Guardsmen, who were stationed in armories in the event local and state police needed help. Democratic Mayor Kevin White was not consulted about the mini-mobilization. His office released a memo calling the Guard "inept, incompetent and ill-equipped." He feared another Kent State tragedy, even though the Massachusetts guardsmen were not issued firearms. The White House turned down a request from Sargent for federal troops, but later alerted regular Army paratroopers in Fort

Bragg, N.C. Two days later the alert was canceled, and their deployment to Boston seemed highly unlikely.

As authorities sought ways to make the integration plan work, South Boston, the white neighborhood that has resisted busing most fiercely, hunkered down in its defiance. TIME Correspondent David Wood last week examined why Southie stands fast. His report:

Surrounded on three sides by water and on the fourth by an eight-lane expressway, South Boston has long had a sense of isolation and special identity. There is nothing Yankee about the place; the fact that Boston was once a center for the abolitionist movement is irrelevant to Southie's history. For generations it has been the home of laboring Irish immigrant families and their descendants, an ethnic bedrock that has had layers of Poles, Lithuanians and Germans added to it. Southie's sons have worked Boston's docks, driven its trolleys and trucks, built its houses and walked its police beats.

Moral Order. The prevailing tone has always been fiercely, unmistakably Irish and Roman Catholic. Despite its insularity, the community used to feel that it had clout in the region's politics. But one of its most illustrious heroes, Mayor James Michael Curley, is long dead, and former House Speaker John McCormack is now retired. Ted Kennedy, another hero, is now seen as a traitor because he supports busing. Even the church seems in alien hands; where once there were Irish-American cardinals, now there is Humberto Cardinal Medeiros, who preaches that the integration order is moral and should be obeyed.

Loss of influence has been accompanied by loss of jobs. Once the booming heart of the city's shipping industry, the Southie waterfront became a depressed area in the 1950s. Employment and per capita income are lower there than in the rest of Boston. The community increasingly came to depend on the city's expanding trucking industry for its livelihood. Huge trucks began rumbling through the neighborhood, noisily disrupting games of street hockey. The neighborhood waged a bitter twelve-year battle to force the city to confine trucks to a single route that would skirt its residential streets. Though Southie eventually won, the law is only fitfully enforced, and youngsters still dodge giant semitrailers.

What Southie never lost was its sense of solidarity and tradition. Unlovely as most of Southie's streets have become, the blocks of mostly three-story wooden houses are the only place many of its residents have ever called home, or ever wish to. Two years ago, when four members of a family died in a fire, pleas for the survivors brought in $20,000 in a community of 37,000.

Go Home. Compared with Roxbury, Southie has a low crime rate. That is another source of pride--and fear. "If I sent my kids on the bus to Roxbury and anything happened to them, I'd shoot myself. It's that simple," says a father of two. Though Southie spokesmen deny that racism plays any part in their resistance, prejudice is evident in the "Nigger go home" graffiti.

Thus it was not surprising that when the antibusing South Boston Information Center was set up this fall, 200 residents volunteered the first day. In an hour, notices of marches or meetings can be printed and hand-distributed to every house and apartment in Southie. "When we get our mind on something, the whole community pitches in," explained one resident. Says Harvard Historian Stephan Thernstrom: "The solidarity in South Boston is one of a people trapped there." The bitterest irony in Southie's implacable determination to keep blacks out of South Boston High is that many residents frankly concede that the 71-year-old school is one of the city's worst. But it is theirs. "My father came here from Ireland to find freedom," says an angry Southie resident. "Now I have to take my child out of school for his own safety, and I can't afford private school. Where is that freedom my father came here to find?"

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