Boston: Preparing for the Worst

Would it be the battle of Boston? Last year, the streets echoed to the sounds of jeers and curses, the crash of bottles and bricks and the clatter of hoofbeats as mounted police charged the rioters. Down the hill from South Boston High School, whites had menaced black students in angry confrontation. Would the scene be repeated? That was the fear of officials in Boston as they completed plans for this week's school opening. "This year we intend to be tough," said Boston Police Commissioner Robert di Grazia. "We don't want that one instance which will set off the rest of the city."

Indeed it would not take much to ignite Boston's racial tensions. Last year 18,200 of the city's 94,000 public school pupils were bused for desegregation to 80 schools; this week 26,000 will be bused to desegregate 162 schools in almost all parts of the city. White resistance to busing, which boiled over into street battles last year, threatens to be even more organized and volatile this fall.

Show of Force. City, state and federal officials plan to counter the threat of violence with a massive show of force, including 1,000 city police, 350 state troopers, 250 state park police and 600 National Guardsmen. Assistant U.S. Attorney General Stanley Pottinger moved his office to Boston last week, bringing with him 100 federal marshals.

To avoid giving Boston's schools the appearance of armed camps, uniformed police are being stationed inside South Boston High School, at least at first. Plainclothesmen are assigned to patrol the corridors there, at Charlestown High and several other schools (see map). In addition, Boston's school administration has bought 15 weapons detectors -similar to those used in airports -which were placed inside high schools to prevent students from carrying knives, chains and guns to class. Students are being issued identification cards at Southie and several other schools where trouble is expected.

Aside from the threat of violence, Boston school officials are concerned about how many white students will actually attend public schools this year. Last year almost one-fourth of the enrolled students, virtually all of them white, stayed out the entire year.

Leaders of the boycott movement have threatened to expand it this year and to enlarge some storefront "academies" -similar to those that whites established in the South to avoid desegregation -in South Boston, East Boston and Hyde Park. The academies, designed to accommodate 800 students, will charge $575 tuition. Other white parents are trying to enroll their children in parochial and private schools, most of which are already full, or in suburbs and other school districts where they have relatives.

Boston's stubborn resistance to busing is largely based in Irish-Catholic working-class neighborhoods such as South Boston and Charlestown, where whites want little to do with what they perceive as the alien and threatening culture of inner-city blacks. Says Maurice Gillen, a meter reader for Boston Edison and a community leader in

Charlestown: "We are not violent and racist. But we are fiercely loyal to our community, and we believe in protecting our culture, our people and the quality of education. Now we've got to give it all up, everything we've worked years for. They want to bus our kids out of Charlestown to the crummy schools that nobody ever worked to change. We don't anticipate that a lot of our kids will be on those buses."

Angry blacks would reply that Boston is indeed more racist than most Northern cities and that in the past blacks have not been able to gain much control over their schools. But as Psychologist Robert Coles has pointed out, the blue-collar population of Boston now feels that it has lost control not only of its schools but also of an important part of its life. The white neighborhoods, once highly influential in both the church and city hall, feel abandoned by city leaders. South Boston lost much of its political clout with the death of Cardinal Cushing in 1970. South Boston whites, once Kennedy loyalists, now curse Ted Kennedy because he supports the court; they think that Mayor Kevin White has sold them out, and have mocked him as "Mayor Black."

Boston's current troubles are also due to a public-school leadership that has been almost unique in the North for its policies of segregation. The schools are run by a committee whose five members are elected at-large throughout the city; the committee has never had a black member. The school administration has long been an Irish-Catholic bastion, and the entire school system has a well-earned reputation for patronage and petty politics.

Many whites in Boston, convinced by such antibusing demagogues as Louise Day Hicks, a former member of the school committee, have thought over the years that desegregation could be prevented. Now they are frustrated. "When a community senses that social change is going to take place come hell or high water, you don't get violence," says Harvard Social Psychologist Thomas Pettigrew. "But the people in Boston have been told for years that busing is not inevitable, that it will not happen here. Such a constant holding out of hope has a devastating effect."

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