BLACK AND WBITE IN BOSTON:
Cort, John C
BLACK AND WHITE IN BOSTON JOHN C. CORT Report from one who is not a priest in plain clothes Several hundred white kids were standing on the front steps of South Boston High, facing out as the two...
...But the thought occurred that perhaps the nun would have some answers that I hadn't heard before...
...And maybe some of them are glad to see the black kids...
...I went to see the nun...
...We leave it to them to make up their own minds...
...The school was being reopened —January 8,1975—after a prolonged closing occasioned by the stabbing of a white boy by a black boy on December 11, 1974...
...When she first came there in 1963 there had been only two black girls and very few girls from South Boston...
...I remember from my anti-poverty days in the '60s that there were some "fairminded" people at the Community Action agency in South Boston...
...Green Beret said, "The Catholic Church is falling apart...
...They asked for my credentials and I gave them a letter from the editor which they read very carefully, more carefully than I had read it...
...They gave me two pages of quotes from papal documents to the effect that parents must be "truly free to choose according to their conscience the schools they want for their children...
...She mentioned the chronic failure to get a separate road for truck traffic, which regularly caused the death of little children...
...I asked her if she would tell our mutual friend at the Center because if she didn't I most certainly would...
...I asked what the boycott signs meant...
...It seemed to me that I could already hear the answers...
...Then I had a long, mostly friendly talk, with three or four members of the Home and School Association which runs the place...
...Two said, "No...
...He said the boys had bitten her breasts off, a detail I didn't remember reading, and characterized the act as "animal...
...Before I left he complained that none of the media had mentioned the fact that a black woman had been elected president of the Home and School Association at the Norcross elementary school at the D Street housing project...
...I resisted the temptation...
...The next day the Globe reported that things had been peaceful in all the buildings of the South Boston High School complex, which, strange as it may seem, includes Roxbury High School, almost across the street from where we used to live...
...One of her daughters started the year at South Boston High, but because she lived so close she had to walk to school...
...She said, "Mrs...
...She was very nice and really seemed to believe in integrated education...
...Thomas Aquinas that he must take 50 percent black kids in his school, give them free tuition and free uniforms, and he closed down the school rather than go along...
...I mentioned the fact that when we lived in Roxbury we noticed that not only were very few blacks hired as cops, firemen, teachers, school custodians, bus drivers, etc...
...As I got up to leave, she expressed the fear, as the others had, that my report would be prejudiced against the people of South Boston...
...He thought the injustice was exaggerated and that now the usual thing was to give incompetent blacks preference over competent whites...
...He was cordial...
...I asked if they believed in integrated education...
...When black girls first became a sizable percentage of the school there had been some "serious problems," but now things were going smoothly and the black girls were accepted and recognized as making a very positive contribution to the school...
...Also, a copy of the Boston Patrolmen's union publication which was full of stories about blacks raping and beating up whites...
...When we were introduced he asked me if I was a member of the John Birch Society...
...As I left the rectory I walked across the street and visited the basement of the imposing church...
...He was particularly disgusted by a case of four black boys raping a white girl that had occurred about a year ago in Roxbury...
...Another man said, "Northern Ireland has nothing to do with this...
...She said, "Why don't you go down to the South Boston Information Center and find out...
...I mentioned the more recent incidents of two black men pulled from their cars in South Boston and beaten up for no reason other than their blackness...
...He generally agreed with the people at the Center...
...How could this be, with so many black kids and so few white kids...
...They gave me a sheet of statistics showing the incidents of crime in different parts of the city...
...The next day I looked up St...
...Thought for the Week was, "Live for today, dream of tomorrow and learn from yesterday...
...I asked her about the black president of the Home and School Association...
...I said, "Did you ever think that maybe one of the reasons for the crime and murder in Roxbury is that black people are rebelling against the discrimination and injustice of the past...
...The meaning of the signs remained confused, particularly when the Globe reported next day that John Duffy, president of the Home and School Association, had said, "I wish more students had gone to class...
...I tried to make the obvious parallel...
...The problems of integration, according to this report, were not in Roxbury but over in South Boston, where the white kids were in the great majority...
...The real story for you is not here but in West Roxbury [a white middle-class area] where the Archdiocese told the pastor of St...
...What they objected to was their kids being forced to go to schools in Rox-bury, a high crime area where they weren't safe...
...Cardinal Cushing High School, she said, is a school of 600 girls who come from all over the city...
...He said that all the priests of South Boston were opposed to forced busing...
...Was it friendly or ironic...
...An attractive young woman beside me said, "We can't do anything to please you people, can we...
...He asked me, "Well, did the black people apply...
...It showed that Rox-bury had 25 murders in a ten-month period of 1974 as against eight in South Boston, 91 forcible rapes as against 12, and 565 aggravated assaults as against 121...
...He said this was the act of "a few crazy people" and should not be laid at the door of an entire community...
...I said I would check it out...
...They said that they did if it was done on a voluntary basis...
...They didn't have the nuns to run it...
...I went there and spoke to one of the top staff, a youngish Boston College graduate...
...What they felt was that the school should not be integrated: "because in this country we have a patriotic right to have free schools...
...No luck...
...Bridgewater, who was an excellent president, was forced out of the project a few months ago...
...Some of her neighbors feel very badly about it...
...Thomas Aquinas...
...The Christmas crib was still in place before a side altar...
...I also called St...
...She said that if the anti-busing movement had any value, it had at least brought the poor people in the housing projects together with the more well-to-do in the nice houses out toward City Point...
...I said I would mention it...
...Earlier I had talked to three white boys on the street...
...I asked them if they knew any priests in South Boston who agreed or disagreed with their position...
...The boycott was still working...
...but that even the men on the city garbage trucks were white...
...She was very sympathetic to the people of South Boston who she felt were largely misled and exploited by their elected officials and shortchanged on city services...
...The pastor told me their school was still open and the only instructions he had received from the archdiocese were that parochial schools should not be used as a refuge for parents trying to escape integration in the public school...
...I said, "Aren't you going to school today, girls...
...I tried to make a parallel between violence in Roxbury and the violence of Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland rebelling against the discrimination and injustice that they suffered there...
...Something good might yet come from this new unity...
...She said there had been two priests who had been outspoken and had gone out on the street to keep peace and try to make integration work, but both had recently left South Boston...
...He said that he would have been for integrated education ten years ago but after raising three children in South Boston he had changed because he "wanted them to have a decent chance...
...I said, "What do you think should please me...
...I tried to think of some intervening words that might defuse that last part...
...No luck again...
...I'm surprised that they don't know that up at the Social Action Center...
...Of course you're telling people what to do...
...I denied it...
...He mentioned a nun at Cardinal Cushing High School...
...I said, "I was just asking questions...
...Later he said he thought that maybe I was a priest in plain clothes...
...I turned to a reporter and asked, "What do you suppose the applause meant...
...After all the students had entered the school without incident I walked to my car and passed three white girls of obvious high school age...
...BLACK AND WHITE IN BOSTON JOHN C. CORT Report from one who is not a priest in plain clothes Several hundred white kids were standing on the front steps of South Boston High, facing out as the two yellow buses drove up with the black kids from Roxbury...
...As I drove down Broadway toward the South Boston Information Center I noticed signs in many of the store windows: "We Support the South Boston School Boycott...
...On my way out I picked up a parish bulletin...
...I checked to see if the usual black Wise Man was present...
...One of the men thought that this remark proved that I was probably sick...
...He was quite indignant that I mentioned it...
...At one point she said that she thought that all white people were racist, either consciously or unconsciously, because we all considered ourselves superior to black people...
...At the bottom was the name of the Center...
...They said that they didn't object to black kids coming to South Boston if they wanted to...
...To cover my retreat I said, "Sister, I'm like you— I'm prejudiced against all white people, including myself...
...She didn't like that and later quizzed me sharply as to whether I was really a practicing Catholic...
...I got the impression that they didn't really believe in integrated education...
...I asked about her school...
...Meanwhile the cops kept the black kids in the buses...
...The lady who seemed to be in charge said, "Well, we're not telling anybody what to do...
...Theresa's in West Roxbury, just to be sure...
...His back was to the congregation and I had to lean over the communion rail and peer sideways to authenticate the black skin...
...Things at Roxbury High, it seems, were particularly peaceful and harmonious, not only on reopening day but also last fall before the stabbing incident...
...She promised she would tell him...
...She said, "Well, the kids are going to school, aren't they...
...Cops were ringing the building like an armed camp...
...As the discussion went on they expressed the belief that black students dragged down the quality of education because the teachers had to spend most of their time on discipline...
...I want to know what the kids really think, what they feel, what the community feels...
...They said that they were not racist and they resented the slurs in the media...
...I spoke to the pastor and he said the school had closed two years go but it had nothing to do with black students...
...He was candid...
...I was tempted to go back to South Boston and ask the kids on the street and the people in the Information Center and the priests in the big church and the anti-poverty worker in his social action center, "How could this be...
...He had a more humble, subdued look than the others and I wondered if the gift he was holding was the myrrh which traditionally symbolizes Christ's burial...
...Attendance in the South Boston buildings was only 40 percent: 471 white, 143 black, and 13 other minority...
...Some of the white kids applauded as the buses drove up...
...She had to move to Roslindale...
...They mentioned one who they thought was "fair-minded...
...One was a tall, handsome fellow in a green beret whom I recognized as the man who had figured in a small fracas in front of the school when the cops tried to move him along as he was talking to a reporter...
...It was in Jamaica Plain...
...Maybe I was prejudiced...
...He was disenchanted with the Church, which he thought was doing too little too late to help the urban poor, both white and black...
...There were so many more bad actors in Roxbury than in South Boston...
...The third said, "Yes," then a few words I couldn't catch, then "keep the niggers out...
...I went to see him...
...I asked him if there was anybody in South Boston who really believed in integrated education...
...She said that for five years she and eight other Notre Dame nuns had been living in the D Street project, a very poor housing development in more ways than one, so as to identify more closely with the community...
...In Roxbury only 26 white students from South Boston had showed up—there were supposed to be several hundred—along with 215 blacks and eight other minority...
...Another man said he didn't think I had the guts to write that story...
...She was pelted so much by white kids going to and from school that she had to quit...
...When I got there I said I was covering the busing story for Commonweal, "a national Catholic magazine...
...Right then it looked as though the white kids were ready to block the door to keep the black kids out, but it turned out that the concentration was caused by the delay in passing the white students through the metal detectors in the lobby...
...I said I had ten children and he said, "The way things are going, that doesn't prove a thing...
...I was untactful and said, "Don't kid me...
Vol. 101 • January 1975 • No. 13
