COMMENTS: Boston Elects an "Urban Populist" Mayor
Beatty, Jack
For the first time in 16 years, Boston has a new mayor, former South Boston State Representative and City Councilor Ray Flynn, and he has become a cynosure of hope for many. Flynn's record,...
...He is the grandson of Irish immigrants, the son of a South Boston longshoreman and a cleaning woman...
...That will moderate the esthetic differences between the two Bostons...
...What links this urban populist to the antibusing activist of a decade ago...
...it is certainly evidence of Flynn's ability to count...
...This may or may not be evidence of "growth...
...By practicing the media politics at which he is adept, Flynn can set a powerful example on race...
...He is the first Boston mayor from South Boston...
...RAY FLYNN DID SOMETHING ELSE, too, that not only helped him to win but also may help him to govern...
...But Ray Flynn changed the subject from race to class...
...Ray Flynn boasts a resonant Boston biography...
...During the busing crisis a decade ago, for example, then State Representative Flynn introduced a bill to abolish compulsory public education, hoping thus to relieve South Boston of the necessity of complying with a federal court order to integrate its high school...
...Connecticut pays the city of Hartford for the use of its cultural institutions...
...Only 25 percent of Bostonians, as opposed to 61 percent of Philadelphians, own their homes, and 20 percent fall below the poverty line...
...back unions for the city's many hotel, hospital, and university workers...
...This early exposure to the hazards of life left Flynn with an authentic social conscience...
...He did it partly by attending to the municipal needs of constituents all over the city during his years as councilor, partly by having the luck to run in a crowded primary where his South Boston base told far more than it would in a sparser field, and partly by having as his opponent in the general election a black radical who spoke well of Yasir Arafat, accused Boston's late, lamented Cardinal of anti-Semitism, and generally acted as if he were a candidate for a position on the Village Voice, not for mayor of this Catholic city...
...the other of service workers who live in the city's ethnically distinct neighborhoods and protect, barber, care for the children of, type the letters and clean the streets for the gentrifiers...
...One is made up of gentrifiers and professionals...
...the people there are very proud of him...
...Kevin White, who stepped down in January after 16 years in office, was the perennial candidate of the new Boston, which he did as much as anyone to create...
...in his selection of a former SDS member to run his campaign, as well as in his radical promise to "decentralize power," from the mayor's office to neighborhood councils...
...Flynn succeeded where she failed...
...The federal highway program, the federally assisted urban renewal program, and the federal tax subsidy on home mortgages have done much to hasten the movement of jobs and people out of Boston over the last generation...
...During that time, the city lost 25 percent of its white population, and it would have lost more if race had remained the subject...
...of Hyde Park, not the Back Bay...
...Blacks can't swim at the city's beaches, which are in South Boston, live in Charlestown, or walk the streets of the Italian North End without fear...
...145 That is why Ray Flynn has stirred hope in Boston...
...Roxbury's candidate, longtime State Representative Mel King, argued that there were not just two Bostons but three, and that the third Boston suffered from racism as well as from poverty...
...Fair Share, women's organizations like Nine to Five, and insurgent unions like the Hotel and Restaurant Workers...
...Ray Flynn was the candidate of the other Boston—of Dorchester, not Beacon Hill...
...the public language from morals to economics...
...Flynn promises better neighborhood services and backs a linkage proposal that would require corporations building downtown to contribute to a neighborhood development fund...
...Boston will need help from the state and federal governments...
...A short answer is that they espouse the same values but in different contexts...
...What Jane Jacobs calls the "city-killing" federal expenditure on defense continues to drain wealth 146 from Boston...
...A crucial moment will come this summer, when Flynn's promise to open the city's beaches to all its citizens will be put to the test...
...and set up city-run daycare centers, so that more Bostonians can work to increase their families' income...
...Flynn's record, however, is not such as to warrant great expectations...
...He changed the subject, but it will take more than political imagination to change the realities...
...Increasing the incomes and enhancing the life chances of Bostonians will prove much the more difficult task...
...When Ray was a small boy his father came down with tuberculosis, forcing his mother to go on welfare for a time...
...Mel King is right: there are three Bostons...
...of South Boston, not Roxbury...
...Anyone who knows his background, or has seen his face redden in rage at the mention of "welfare chiselers," can't doubt that he meant what he said when he pledged in his inaugural that the test of Boston's greatness under his administration will be how it cares for its poor, its sick, and its vulnerable people...
...the new mayor drives a beat-up station wagon...
...At the same time, 33 percent hold professional or managerial jobs...
...and they will try hard to "come over," as Southern whites say, with him on the race issue...
...These statistics from the 1980 Census reveal a two-class city...
...Then Flynn's issue was neighborhood stability...
...These better-off Bostonians work in the high-rise office buildings that have sprouted downtown over the last 20 years, while neighborhoods, schools, and public housing have deteriorated...
...Growth, say his liberal admirers...
...WHAT OF THE ECONOMIC DIFFERENCES...
...Massachusetts could do the same for Boston...
...lure light industry back to the city with tax concessions...
...The evidence is in his campaign rhetoric about wanting to represent all of the city's neighborhoods—white, Latino, and black...
...Flynn's nearly 3:1 defeat of King in a vote "starkly," as the Globe put it, along racial lines, served to underscore King's contention that the face of inequality in Boston is most likely to be black...
...In the campaign, Ray Flynn did not deny this, but he insisted that the issues dividing two of them were not so powerful as the lack of life chances, the run-down neighborhoods and housing their people had in common...
...Flynn, 44, his wife, and six small children live in a Dickensianly humble house in South Boston...
...Flynn can tax commuters...
...Boston voters have consistently rejected mayoral candidates who espoused the politics of racial polarization, a fact not lost on Flynn, whose predecessor in South Boston's City Council seat, Louise Day Hicks, was never able to extend her appeal decisively beyond Southie...
...In these and other ways the public sector can add to the wealth of a city...
...Job opportunities for blacks in Boston have declined ominously since 1970, and surveys have found that minorities face discrimination in 85 percent of the city's neighborhoods...
...But if Ray Flynn is to keep his promises to give Boston's poor a fairer deal, he will need help from Washington...
...now it is neighborhood revival...
...try to improve the city's poor schools...
...But it cannot create many jobs and, with nearly half the city's property occupied by tax-exempt charitable institutions, it can't raise more money from taxes to do all the good things Ray Flynn wants to do...
...CLEARLY, THEN THE PROMISE of Flynn's administration, as of Boston itself, rests to a large extent on the outcome of the 1984 presidential election...
...Of the nation's 30 largest cities, Boston ranks 26th in median family income, right down there with Cleveland and Newark...
...And yet, this is the same man the liberal Boston Globe says "will prove a compelling and convincing advocate for racial tolerance in the white community...
...and calls himself an "urban populist...
...If the federal government put its weight behind improving city schools, if it gave companies tax write-offs for training new workers, if it heavily increased spending on restoring the city's infrastructure, if it helped fund subways and high-speed trains linking the city with the far suburbs where the good jobs are, then Boston's dreary neighborhoods might revive, its people might dispose of more income, and its future might redeem Ray Flynn's promises...
...the politics from a divisive juridical liberalism to a unifying "urban populism" that addressed what South Boston and Roxbury have in common, the substantial poverty of their residents...
...He also opposed a bill to create a black Senate district in Roxbury, was coauthor of a bill that would deny abortions to women on Medicaid, voted to repeal the state's racial imbalance law and voted against a program to bus inner-city black children to suburban high schools...
...What's going on here...
...He changed the subject...
...and in the endorsements he received from progressive citizen groups, such as Mass...
...Because of his antibusing past, his proponents argue, Flynn can do much to improve the city's racial climate...
...For 20 years, Boston's politics have revolved around the integration of its schools and neighborhoods...
...Ray Flynn has grown...
Vol. 31 • April 1984 • No. 2
