BUSING IN BOSTON

...Some just drop out...

...The Boston school desegregation case raises, once again, many questions about the capacity of the federal courts-one judge, like Judge Garrity or nine judges, the Justices of the United States Supreme Court-to resolve major social problems...

...I have been in most of the troubled schools, and I know of what I speak...

...All the Justices of the United States Supreme Court insisted, in Cooper v. Aaron, that the amount of popular opposition and potential violence aroused may never constitutionally justify watering down a desegregation order...

...Judge Garrity, who has threatened to hold certain members of the Boston School Committee in contempt of court and is presently actively considering whether to place it in receivership (like other bankrupts) and transfer all its powers to the Massachusetts State Board of Education, realizes that if he exercises these powers, the result may be counterproductive...

...The kids from Southie have to work during high school, and they try to get jobs, if they can, as soon as they graduate if they do...

...The people in this city, and other parts of the country, have been used, to the American way of life since the inception of this great country...

...In a Northern city like Boston, by contrast, where almost all blacks are concentrated in the Roxbury section of the city, Phase II of Judge Garrity's order has thus necessitated citywide busing of both races over long distances...

...But he has always felt uncomfortable with outsiders-Italians from "Eastie," and members of the Klan and the American Nazi Party who came to Southie and tried to envelop its residents in a brotherly embrace last fall (they were quickly ushered out of the neighborhood...

...If only they could join forces and unite politically to bring about a readjustment of the disparities which exist between the central city and its suburbs...

...Little people that pay all the bills . . . have had it up to their necks and they are going to fight back...

...Robert Coles' friend will frankly admit, too, that he is afraid-afraid of losing his small house, his Church as he has known it (which he feels, has almost deserted him in its ecumenism and support of busing) and his community...

...The bill that was sent to the City Council included the payment of the State Police, the Metropolitan District Commission police, and the National Guard troops that never left the Armory...

...We're poor here, a-lot of us...

...The judge may be saddled with enforcing the details of the remedy over a period of many years, as in the Charlotte and Denver eases...

...Oh, no...

...John of the University of Massachusetts and others have demonstrated, very mixed results, at least early in the Northern desegregation process (many hope for improvement later, after the tumult and the shouting die down...

...Let me say this, and you can bet on it, wait until they start to bus people into Charlestown, North End and East Boston-all hell will break out, and somebody will have to reexamine their conscience...

...But I'm not sending her...

...These needs-for security and love-reflect the needs of their parents...

...Despite the difficulties of desegregation, Judge Gar-rity's findings were clearly constitutionally necessary and his busing order well within the limits set forth by {he Supreme Court in the Charlotte and Denver cases...

...As the schools opened, most of the focus of the media has been on Charlestown, a lower-middle-class, almost solidly Irish community even more isolated and closed than South Boston...

...They are maybe all he has...

...For example, how many, and which, suburban communities should be included in a metropolitan desegregation order (the issue faced in the Detroit case) in order to ensure meaningful and long-tattitig desegregation of the central city...

...When school has been in session there has generally been calm throughout the city, the most visible protest being the march on Charles-town High by the assembled mothers of that section of the city, joined in their tiny flag waving and Hail Marys against busing by City Councillor (and former School Committee Chairwoman) Louise Day Hicks, an ironic twist of notions about both God and Country...

...Yet, even as this article appears in print, events may have changed dramatically...

...Of course, one hopes that both whites and blacks in the city of Boston will soon come to the realization that they have far more legitimate grievances in common than those which seem to divide them...

...Surely they seem to have successfully grasped the aspira-tions of the ''little people" of the city, "their people" Testifying this past June against forced busing before the United States Commssion on Civil Rights, "Dapper" O'Neil predicted: It will never work in this city...

...These issues, usually involving class actions, are often "political" in nature- and for a long time, before the Supreme Court's "one man-one vote" decision in Bakery...

...It Is with very deep feelings such as these, feelings of people who have very little and are in so many ways trapped, with which judges like Judge Garrity are forced to deal...

...They are fighting for their own flesh and blood, and I can't blame them...

...of planning over the slimmer, close cooperation and high visibility of city and state police and federal anthor-ities, personally led by J. Stanley Pottinger, Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice...

...In the North, the problems of transportation are often far more difficult than in the South...

...Unlike their liberal antagonists-the Abolitionists who look down upon them only a few transit stops away in Harvard Square-they have no choices to move to the suburbs, or even to another job, if they have one...

...It has not yet "tipper...

...They believe in the neighborhood school system...

...Federal troops were dispatched to Little Rock, and it is urged that "Southie" and Charlestown should receive the same treatment, if the situation so demands...

...Coles recalled a dialogue he recently had with a South Boston friend of his-a factory worker, Irish and father of five: I graduated from South Boston High School and mere was a time I thought my children would graduate from there, and my grandchildren, though I don't know about that now...

...FORD Questions about the capacity of the federal courts It is always difficult to come to conclusions after the first week of desegregation in any major city, and pre-dfetions are particularly perilous in Boston, that "Athens" of...

...The motto carved on the entrance to the United States Supreme Court is "Equal Justice Under Law...

...Given a recalcitrant school committee, which Judge Garrity confronts daily in the Boston case, a judge may find himself enmeshed in presiding over a mass of detail governing minute operations of the school system, such as the ratio of hiring white and black teachers, the physical condition of school buildings in certain areas of the city and the ever present threat resegregation...

...In some special situations like Louisville, where both the city and the country school systems were proved to have practiced segregation, a metropolitan desegregation decree has given most whites no place to flee...

...Federal marshals have now been put on nighttime duty, and the threat of federal indictment for violating Judge Garrity's order of depriving their fellow citizens of their civil rights, as well as an occasional rainy evening, seem to have had detertrent effects...

...Dublin and Belfast.the Irish in...

...Mixed Results Any honest look at the social science evidence about the educational gains and attitudinal changes produced by desegregation reveals, as Professor Nancy St...

...Many contend that the hostility which has been seen on the streets of Charlestown and South Boston this fall, though it has fortunately not erupted into major violence, and which broke out at Carson Beach earlier this summer, has little to do with busing...

...But he has so few resources, as a judge, with which to chip away at such intransigent social problems...

...The beating up of a black man in South Boston would produce sporadic retaliatory violence against whites in Roxbury, and there were constant fears that a stabbing at South Boston High, Hyde Park High or Roxbury High might be the spark which would ignite the whole city...

...At the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa address this June, an address designed to shake the audi-ence out of its comfortable mood of self-congratulation, Dr...

...Gangs of over a hundred teenagers roam the streets in both Charlestown and Southie, overturning, and occasionally setting fire to, cars, hurling missiles at the police and storing up Molotov cocktails...

...She shouldn't miss one minute of school and the special program they have for her...

...And if we even...

...Those who ingrain such attitudes in the very young are driven to desperate measures...

...Or anybody, like us people here...

...Although there was mandatory school segregation by statute in the South and everyone knew each other's "place," blacks and whites-the servant and the master-lived close to one another...

...It's racism, pure and simple...

...Others are sensitive to the fact that Boston is not a homogeneous, educationally and culturally enlightened metropolis, but rather a city of geographically isolated ethnic strongholds, each with its small village mentality...

...The late Professor Alexander Bickel of the Yale Law School, a former law clerk to that apostle of judicial restraint, Justice Felix Frankfurter, and author of the Supreme Court and the Idea of Progress, and Professor Philip Kurland of the University of Chicago Law School have been the principal legal scholars asking this question...

...During the following week, cars driven by whites passing through Roxbury's Mission Hill section were stoned, although, in general, blacks tended, given the magnitude of the provocation, to show somewhat more restraint than whites...

...But there is some fear that Boston, as Professor James Coleman has been wont to emphasise of late, will become another Cleveland, Newark, or Philadelphia, with a largely poor and black city school system ringed by affluent, white suburbs...

...The chief threat at the court's disposal is the contempt power, but this presents problems of its own...

...Because of the large number of colleges and universities there and the fact that many young professionals seem to want to live in Boston, the city is attracting new business and industry, which may give it a more promising economic future than many cities...

...In addition, the judiciary, which Alexander Hamilton called "the least dangerous branch" of our government, lacks many of the tools to deal with many of these complex and emotionally fraught situations...

...This is legalized kidnapping, and nobody is going to tell me any different...

...And many of those families who can afford to do so are moving to the suburbs with their kids...

...One mother on O'Reilly Way pointed out her young daughter, clasped to her side as the bases began to roll: "Terry has real learning difficulties...

...When blacks marched on South Boston's Canon Beach for a "picnic" one Sunday in August, 800 police were needed to keep the peace, so angry were some of "Southie's" denizens about the invasion of their "turf...

...He resents the crime and slouchy, jazzier life style which he fears blacks will bring to infest his neighborhood, not that it isn't without violence of its own...

...I heard a nine-year-old, kept out of school by his mother, say on the streets of Chariestown last week, just before one of his small friends pointed to a passing garbage truck, saving: "That's another load of them...

...I know of what I speak, win somebody please listen...

...My brother says the people near Harvard, the professors and doctors and lawyers and fat-cat businessmen, their kids, a lot of them, don't go to the Cambridge public schools, they go to fancy private schools and they have nice summer homes and all the rest...

...Just how much do people in power think they are going to take...

...and I'll tell you, the kids from Southie don't go to Harvard and don't go South to fight for the colored people, and don't try to protest against their own government by calling it every name in the book, and glorifying the dictatorships we're opposed to...

...no troops or police are at its direct command and no power to raise the tax revenue necessary to remedy the decreed inequalities...

...This is no Brattle Street, off Harvard Square...

...Under cover of dark, however, more ominous symptoms of malaise appear...

...South Boston High and Charlestown High may have suddenly become edifices for local pride recently, but to any outside observer they seem grimy, shabby, uninviting places for the transaction of anything, let alone the important business of education...

...What is at the end of the bus line, especially for blacks, is of questionable worth...

...His Phase II desegregation plan is, in many ways, highly innovative, enlisting citizen participation, through the creation of the Citywide Coordinating Committee (an organization of residents and business and civic leaden) and Biradal Councils, and drawing upon the resources of the area's higher educational institutions, moat of which have agreed to be paired with, and develop educational programs for, specific districts within the Boston school system...

...Even seeming "illiberals," such as, Boston City Councillors Louise Day Hicks and Albert "Dapper" (Weil, who have constantly stirred up popular senti-ment against Judge Garrity's decree, have a point...

...Not us...

...blacks presently make up only about 17 percent of the population of the city and less than 40 percent of the public school enrollment (the latter figure being com-paratively high due the large number of blacks who are children and Boston's large parochial school system, which siphons off many whites...

...Rather others are to blame, like successive Boston School Committees, which, as Judge Garrity's opinion conclusively demonstrates, for more than ft decade have practiced segregation through means both overt and devious...

...There is now "something to do" in addition to playing half ball (the Charlestown version of stick ball and a rather graceful sport in which half a tennis ball is the projectile), "drinkin" and "hanging around" on the stoop...

...But, at the present time, there seems little more chance of bringing this about than of uniting two other groups who are also lacking in this world's abundance-the Irish in...

...The scops of the violation is unclear, and the scope of the remedy which should be applied to redress the grievance even more murky...

...There is no learning going on whatsoever, only fear and frustration...

...That a second Battle of Bunker Hill has not yet materialized (Charlestown High stands right opposite Bunker Hill Monument) attests to long hours MAURICE DEG...

...In his lectures delivered in England last year, while Pitt Professor at the University of Cambridge, he wondered whether federal judges are equipped to handle the rather different kinds of constitutional issues which have been presented with increasing frequency of late...

...Unlike most court equity decrees, where the party who has been found guilty of the wrong bears the onus of remedying and atoning for his misdeeds, those who bear the brunt of being bused under a desegregation order have not themselves been direct perpetrators of the injustice...

...The jailed or fined members of the school committee will become instant martyrs (which some suspect, for political reasons, they want to become), with the mothers and fathers of the city holding torchlight parades outside the jailhouse...

...William Leary, recently not rehired as superintendent of schools in Boston because of his attempts to comply with Judge Garrity's orders, has seen the in-school issue in terms of 'turf'-where students would sit in the lunch room, where they would "hang around" in the locker room and what school activities and athletic teams they would job...

...They're just trying to give their children the 'best education possible,' that's what my brother hears them say-and he's no professor, but he can listen with his ears and he can figure out what he hears...

...These disparities are now beyond a federal judge's constitutional authority to remedy, given the Burger Court's recent decisions in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez and Milliken v. Bradley, the Detroit case, decisions by the same Court which refused to consider education a "fundamental" constitutional right What happens in Boston is so important became Boston is a salvageable city...

...At least we've proved once and for all that the issue isn't busing," Said one black woman, running terrified, from Carson Beach...

...Anyone who visits his courtroom, and it is a shame that so few Boston residents have chosen to do so, sees in action an enormously patient man, who does his best to listen to all sides and to arrive at a wise accommodation of interests within the framework of the Constitution...

...He may be rigid, but he may be right...

...The shouts of the crowds standing along the bus routes are hardly encouraging, especially the epithets coming from the mouths of the very young...

...Thus there was comparatively less residential segregation...

...Niggers...

...that is why they move into a neigh- borhood-because they want to go to the nearest school of their choosing, and also their choke of religion, and also the neighborhood shopping centers...

...Can, the federal courts tried to avoid "political" questions...

...But even a comparative "liberal," Archibald Cox, who, as President Kennedy's Solicitor General, argued and won so many cases outlawing discrimination and upholding the Civil Rights Acts of the early 1960s and who, before becoming Watergate Special Prosecutor, wrote the highly admiring volume, The Warren Court, has been troubled by it...

...He does not want to be uprooted...

...The anti-busing protest and the opening of school have provided a focus for their usual aimlessness, the product, in no small measure, of a depressed economy and lack of summer jobs...

...Robert Coles, author of Children in Crisis, has shown his accustomed sensitivity to these needs on the part of South Boston residents...

...The South, too, has almost gracefully delighted, in a Sam Ervin I-Told-You-So way, at the scenes of the police protection necessary to quell the violence at trouble spots in Boston...

...Moreover, especially as America is viewed by other countries, any alternative to desegregation would be symbolically unthinkable...

...In this respect it differs from Louisville, also under a court order this fall, and may ultimately present more problems...

...Yet the nagging question remains, what warrant does a non-elected federal judge have, in a democracy, for imposing massive social change in a democracy and in an area, the education of the young, which affects so maty people in the most intimate concerns of their dally lives...

...Well, who has the money to afford those private schools...

...This is no Beacon Hill or Back Bay...

...ethnic islands, which the over 1600 police and federal marshals protecting the safety of public school pupils have turned into an armed camp as well as a media event During Phase I last year under federal Judge J. Arthur Garrity's order, one could never be certain when the situation, if ever, was under control...

...After all, haven't fashionable sociologists since the late '60s (like Nathan Glazer), psychiatrists (like Gerald Caplan) and blacks (like the authors of Black Power) stressed the importance and healthiness of community solidarity...

...Dublin and Belfast...

...This pattern has continued throughout the summer and early fall...

...The vast majority of urban whites, and not a few urban blacks, are strongly opposed to busing in order to achieve desegregation...

...mention trying to form our own private schools here in South Boston, then they tell us we're trying 'to evade the federal court order' and we're 'racists.' But if rich people send their children to private school, they're not trying to 'evade' anything...

...ford, a graduate of the Harvard Law School, it the author of the forthcoming book, "Southie Is My Home Town...

...Civil rights lawyers, picking up on this, have insisted that there not be one standard for the South and another for the North...

...This is no suburb...

...Here in Boston, the people voted 15 to 1 against forced busing-but this did not count I thought the majority ruled, but I guess the voters don't count anymore...

...While, under the strict orders of Cardinal Humberto Medeiros, the parochial schools have refrained from becoming "escape hatches" from Judge Garrity's order (despite the great temptation of the additional, badly needed tuition which many whites have offered to pay), some private schools, such as South Boston Heights Academy, are starting to spring up, reminiscent of, the segregation academies of the South...

...Irish in Charlestown and South Boston and Italians from the North End and East Boston rarely mingle, save, perhaps, on opposite sides of the field at the annual "Southie-Eastie" football game, where 40- and 50-year-olds still wear their high school letter sweaters, so great has been the identification between school and community...

...But the root question remains one of judicial legitimacy to order large-scale social change, and in answering this question one is forced to define what it means to be a "liberal" no easy dilemma for one, who like myself, was brought up campaigning for John F. Ken-nedy and George McGovern and who has worked as an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, but has been exposed to Alexander Bickel and Nathan Glazer...

...Here come the little monkeys...

...How would Judge Garrity feel if his son or daughter was brutally beaten or stabbed...

...In addition, the result of a desegregation order may be further "white flight" The early figures indicate that more than 10,000 whites may have left the Boston, public school system in the year between the implementation of Phase I and Phase II, an ominous sign...