MAGA : An early warning from Boston 50 years ago

Populist revolts are not new in America.

Boston revolted against desegregation in 1974-1976. 

Pulitzer prize winning photo by Stanley Forman, Boston Herald, 1976. 

Today's guest post is part one. Today college classmate Larry DiCara reminds us of the history of the populist uprising in Boston against busing to integrate Boston's public schools. He observed it up close. 

Part two comes Monday, when I draw parallels between the Boston revolt and the MAGA revolt we see around us.

Larry DiCara grew up in the working-class Dorchester neighborhood of Boston. He was a standout at Boston Latin School, then at Harvard. Then he became the youngest person ever elected to the Boston City Council, which then led to a long career as a lawyer helping shape the extraordinary turnaround of Boston. In the early 1970s, Boston was a ragged declining industrial city, part of America's "rustbelt" story. Now it is one of America's "star" cities, a hub of technology, education, and health care. The populist revolt of 1974-1976 was centered in working-class ethnic neighborhoods, at a time when Boston was at its lowest ebb. A federal judge had ordered that the public schools -- which were segregated by race due to the city's racialized ethnic neighborhoods -- needed to be desegregated by busing students into other neighborhoods.

Larry maintains a website, newsletter, and blog: https://www.larrydicara.com

Guest Post by Larry DiCara

               Desegregation in Boston 50 Years Later

Having read Death at an Early Age and many other books written in the 1950s and 1960s, it is no surprise to this observer that the desegregation of the Boston Public Schools in 1974 and subsequent years was an ugly chapter in the history of the city. I watched in the late 1960s and early 1970s while sitting in a dormitory across the river as the cauldron began to bubble. As J. Anthony Lukas and many others have written, the battles were significant, and the wounds remain. 

When I was running for Boston City Council in 1971 and 1973, there was an anticipation that something would happen; we were not sure what. I am not sure any of us anticipated the kind of resistance which we experienced. The anti-busing movement became, without any doubt, the most significant grassroots citizens movement that I have seen in Boston in my lifetime. 

 There was a city-wide organization which called itself ROAR – Restore Our Alienated Rights – which placed their signs in the windows of the City Council offices for all to see from City Hall Plaza. Because Louise Day Hicks was their chief patron, they held their meetings in the Boston City Council chamber. I never attended. I was the only member of the City Council or the School Committee who did not support the anti-busing movement, did not attend their rallies, did not give them money and, as a result, I barely survived in the 1975 election.
 
I sat next to Louise Day Hicks in 1974, 1975 and 1977. In those days the councillors had free-standing desks with chairs which rolled. That meant I could roll to my left and have a conversation with Louise. She would sometimes warn me of meetings to which I should not go, for my own safety. After a very ugly demonstration, when U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy was pushed into the Federal Building and then the demonstrators broke the glass doors – perhaps a premonition of what happened at the Capitol on the 6th of January in 2021 - she came back from the demonstration, and she was physically shaking. She said in so many words “I created it, and I can no longer control it.”
 
As happens in every movement, as we have all seen with the so-called MAGA movement, those who are the most extreme, the loudest, the crudest, the most bigoted, rise to the top. That was discussed in the recent PBS documentary, which featured Bobby Monahan from South Boston who went to Harvard and dropped some leaflets for me through the years and later rose to a major position at the Boys & Girls Clubs. Bobby almost breaks down on camera, suggesting that going to the demonstrations was what young people in Southie did, but he stopped going when a mob threw bricks through the home of a family across the street, since one of them, or both of them, were participating in a school council appointed by federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr., who had ordered the desegregation.

The amount of money spent on transportation became a major topic of discussion. Today, it remains so.

 

Neighborhoods which were racially integrated, and we had a few in Boston at that time, although not as many as now, were, not surprisingly, more accepting. The Italians were more accepting than the Irish, but way down deep nobody really liked it. Nobody was satisfied that the education at the end of the bus ride was any better than it had been before. Large numbers of children quickly stopped going to school.

There were different groups in different neighborhoods. The one in Charlestown called themselves Powder Keg. There was concern that the group in East Boston led by Elvira “Pixie” Palladino would actually try to blow up the tunnels to prevent school buses from going through. To me, as a young man in politics, someone who had Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign poster on the wall, as I still do, it was a nightmare.

In the Black community, there was also significant organizing to protect the children who were being assaulted while riding buses on their way to South Boston High School and other places. Otto and Muriel Snowden had created Freedom House, which became an unofficial headquarters. The METCO Program, then in its early years, siphoned about 3,000 young people of color and brought them to school in the suburbs.

As for political leadership, other than me, the only city-wide elected official who did not participate in some way in the anti-busing movement was Kevin White. He saw his political future evaporate. Kevin had been quietly positioning himself to get on the Democratic ticket in 1976; he had emissaries working in different states. He hosted national reporters and national leaders at the Parkman House. All of that stopped when the desegregation order hit. He never really recovered politically. He barely survived in 1975; it was the closest of his four mayoral elections.

In 1976, after we had horrible violence with white people being assaulted in the Black community for no reason and a Haitian man delivering bread in South Boston almost being killed for no reason other than the color of his skin, Kevin White convened a march against violence. I remember I was giving a speech at Morgan State University in Baltimore, and I flew back early the next day so I could attend. As we gathered on the Boston Common, I saw that I was the only city-wide elected official other than Kevin.

That’s where we were when we bottomed out early in the summer of 1976. Luckily, on the 4th of July, the Queen of England appeared; I even attended a small lunch with her. A few weeks later, we opened Quincy Market and people carried on with their lives even though the school system of the late 1970s was nothing like the school system of a few years prior. It was significantly decreased in size from approximately 100,000 to some 65,000, and it was now a majority-non-white school system.

 

[Note: To receive this blog daily by email, go to: https://petersage.substack.com 
Subscribe. The blog is free and always will be.]