The Bigots of Boston
KOZOL, JONATHAN
The Bigots of Boston by JONATHAN KOZOL Countless investigations have been conducted and are being conducted of the segregationist patterns in America's public schools. Few, however, have...
...At the meeting the principal recounted to us the statistical facts about the unplaced special students in our classes...
...It is imperative that we begin to end this harmful system of separation...
...She did not say why, did not discuss the fact that we did not even have an extra room in which to teach them, and did not point out that perhaps fifteen or twenty thousand dollars and a willingness to bus the children or to re-district the whole area might have begun to solve the problem if School Superintendent William Ohrenberger or the School Committee had been willing...
...Lewis Weinstein, a widely-respected Jewish leader...
...Hicks was obliged to confess that she could not do this until she had had a chance to read it...
...Asked what she meant by 'balanced,' Mrs...
...Never mind the niggers, join the army...
...Among these was the school in which I taught...
...What about some school libraries...
...Would lives have been lost without them...
...Not long before, there had been the annual St...
...So now Mrs...
...I remember that the radio stations were deluged all day long with calls from people who wanted to say, on the air, how they felt about the problem...
...And he said to me: "Darn right...
...She was quoted by the Boston Herald as noting a "strange coincidence" in the close proximity of time between this act of vandalism and the recent civil rights march that had accompanied a visit to Boston by Martin Luther King...
...The report underscored the damage, exclusively to Negro children, with eloquent compassion: "It is not difficult to understand why racial separation is harmful to Negro children...
...In 1963 he involved himself with the Negro community in Boston and taught in the city's schools...
...Hicks did not mind speaking of the report if it would bring her press attention, but that she had no serious intention of ever dealing with it...
...Its findings are not unique to Boston...
...These comments from this landlord, an educated man who went on regular trips to Europe and had placed his own child in a sophisticated little French school outside of Boston, must be repeated by thousands of people in our city every year...
...As other alternatives—what about hiring ten good teachers, a qualified counselor, and a fulltime psychiatrist for the discipline school at which I had worked...
...Racial imbalance represents a serious conflict with the American creed of equal opportunity...
...What became apparent to observers was that Mrs...
...Mrs...
...It does moral damage by encouraging prejudice within children regardless of their color...
...For the rest she had to admit that she could promise nothing...
...His answer had two parts: One answer was that "We did it, and we never had any fancy schools either and nothing special for us, no special classes or stuff like that...
...On page two appeared these summarizing words: "Our conclusions are clear...
...Certainly they were consonant with the views expressed by a great many Bostonians during the days after the State Board's report came out...
...What about some bright cans of pink, green, blue, and light yellow paint to cheer up our gloomy walls...
...that there was no damage, so far as she could see, to Negro children...
...After the first of the two fires, Mrs...
...It is difficult to see how any member of the School Committee can be so lavish with public funds...
...An alarmingly large number of them, so far as I could tell, were on the Boston School Committee's side...
...This article is adapted from Mr...
...In a year and a season in which desks could not be found for students to work at in view of their teachers and in which money could not be found to paint walls, put lights in basements, or replace cardboard windows with glass panes, it seemed the height of political effrontery to create six new posts costing a total of $102,000 a year for people who would not even be in the schools but who would be sitting in office chairs up some place at the top...
...It represents an inaccurate picture of life to both white and Negro children and prepares them inadequately for a multi-racial community, nation, and world...
...Mrs...
...White children do not want large numbers of backward pupils from unprospering Negro families shipped into their present mainly white schools, either...
...At Perkins Square, Father Serino flew out of the line of march for a second time when a young group in front of a bar chanted, 'Nigger lovin b...
...My own classes were interrupted, as were those of several other teachers, and the morning was lost for most of the children while repairmen tore out windows and put in new glass-panes, sometimes only a few feet from the children's desks...
...The sense of outrage felt about the salary increases, about her stand on segregation, about her unwillingness even to talk seriously about the State Board's scrupulous report, created a groundswell of seething discontent that could be felt in every Negro neighborhood...
...Kozol's new book, Death At An Early Age, published this fall by Houghton Mifflin Company and copyright © 1967 by Jonathan Kozol—The Editors...
...Signatures presented in approval of the report included those of Ralph Lowell, banker and prominent Bostonian...
...Immediately upon the release of the State Board's report, the various members of the Boston School Committee began issuing defensive statements...
...Hicks...
...He lives now in Boston's South End ghetto and continues to work with children in the Newton Public Schools and as a consultant in curriculum development to the Federal Government...
...According to police records, the School Committee chairman gave no instances why she felt compelled to take out the permit other than the 'protection of life and property.' With this permit, Mrs...
...Editor's note: Mrs...
...You take these kids from homes like those and parents from all over no place and everything all mixed up and nobody living right and how on earth do you expect a day in school to change that child's life...
...The major point behind all of this, of course, is the extraordinary bravado with which the Boston School Committee waved off criticism and rejected, out of hand, a report that had been signed by so many distinguished citizens...
...It did not surprise me to find the following item on the front page of the Herblock in The Washington Post Destruction of civilian centers, U.S.A...
...At last, one day in April, the report was released...
...A child cannot comprehend the subtle difference between illegal segregation in the South and racial imbalance in the North...
...The report was 132 pages long...
...Hicks, May 20, at Boston police headquarters...
...It too often produces inferior educational facilities in the predominantly Negro schools...
...Outside of the school the Negro child and his family too often have heard the message, 'Keep out, stay back, you are not wanted.' He and his family have too often been made to feel different and inferior...
...Hicks in there is terrific and she's doing a wonderful fine job...
...Louise Day Hicks, School Committee chairman . . . said she thought the school budget had been properly balanced before being sent to the Mayor...
...I wondered if the television station knew what a hoax had been perpetrated upon it and whether the reporter and the photographer would have been surprised to know that it took their visit to our school building before our class could have new windows...
...Civil rights representatives were bewildered and enraged a few days later when they asked the School Committee to discuss the report with them on an open basis and Mrs...
...His articles have appeared in many leading journals including The Atlantic Monthly, Harvard Education Review, and The New York Review of Books...
...The worst of it was that so much of the cruelty could be expressed in the guise of paternalism and so many of the staunchest bigots in the city could convince themselves that they were acting and speaking out of decent feelings...
...He maintained as well that "white children do not want to be transported into schools with a large proportion of backward pupils from unprospering Negro families who will slow down their education...
...Hicks in power gave up all pretenses of tolerance or Christian kindliness and let themselves loose for one regular old-fashioned American session of drunkenness and bigotry...
...Jonathan Kozol is a graduate of Harvard and a former Rhodes scholar at Oxford...
...It seems to me," he said, "the pupil from the unprosperous Negro family is usually backward in school, otherwise there wouldn't be any concern or any state commission report for the overcoming of his backwardness...
...She said she was afraid that she was going to be able to find space in special classes for, at best, only eight out of forty-two during the academic year ahead...
...Erwin Can-ham, editor of the Christian Science Monitor...
...What about $100,000 worth of integrated readers, of modern histories and geography texts, of tape recorders, record players, poetry recordings, movies, slides, and prints...
...But now suddenly, as soon as I put it that way, he reversed himself completely and he took an opposite position: "No sir, I don't," he told me right away...
...You holy niggers.' " It was during the same period of racial unrest and surfacing bigotry that we had a memorable teachers' meeting at my school...
...What uses, became clarified in a series of items that appeared in the press at about the same time...
...Few, however, have produced meaningful results...
...Trouble," reported the Boston Globe, "cropped up at I Street, where a group of youths in their twenties held forth, their beer mugs held high...
...But its meaning was clear and its content was strong and its recommendations were straightforward and specific...
...He sees only that he is Negro and almost all his schoolmates are Negroes...
...Call after call came in from people of our city who said in essence: "We don't go for all those troublemakers" and "we're all with you, Mrs...
...Hicks said that money was taken out of other accounts to take care of the raises...
...As a result of her stand on the question of alleged de facto segregation in Boston, Mrs...
...In this article the author reports on the Boston experience of several years ago...
...that there was no disadvantage in this kind of schooling—at least, not at this level and not at this age—and not at least as far as she could tell...
...I thought it was unfortunate if people had threatened Mrs...
...The report dominated much of the news media for several days...
...He was fired for introducing his pupils to a poem by Langston Hughes that was not listed in the approved curriculum...
...Louise Day Hicks has obtained a permit to carry a gun to protect 'her life and property.' The authorization was granted to Mrs...
...If this one act was not enough, the School Committee also voted at this time to give a salary increase to some of the old administrators who were already at the top...
...Or was the need a dire one...
...Hicks, but it could not be news to anyone that she had made herself the object of a great deal of hate...
...The Globe reported his comments in a story that appeared on its front page: "Mayor Collins today angrily accused the Boston School Committee of being 'extraordinarily open-handed with taxpayers' money.' Commenting on $4,000 pay hikes granted last week to top echelon school administrators, Collins fumed: T am appalled by what I see here...
...Each day of delay is a day of damage to the children of our Commonwealth...
...The racially imbalanced school reinforces that feeling...
...Hicks connected the arson of this public school to a Nobel Prize winner's visit...
...Patrick's Day parade, a major event in a heavily Irish Catholic city, and this year again —just like the year before—a handful of the people who keep Mrs...
...Inside the school, the young faces are almost all black...
...The separation of some children from others of similar age and qualification because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone...
...As I read it in the Globe, the School Committee voted, first, to add a total of six new high-paying positions to the top of an already top-heavy school system administration in the form of six new "district superintendents" at salaries of $17,000 per year...
...During the course of six weeks, two of the most highly segregated schools in Roxbury were burned and one of them was gutted badly...
...At my own school, unknown persons, possibly students, entered the building on weekends to empty desks, slash curtains, scatter records, scratch obscenities on already obscenely dirty walls...
...Hicks appeared, surrounded by reporters, to view the ruins...
...She pointed out that $1 million was taken from the alterations and repairs account...
...One stepped out from the gutter and spewed a mouthful of beer on Archie E. Dick-erson, a Negro, from Roxbury...
...As we drove through the ghetto, he gestured around him and said to me confidently that it was not the fault of the Negroes, they just didn't have the background or preparation to know how to live...
...I think Mrs...
...Louise Day Hicks, School Committee chairman, was equally prompt in coming to the defense of the present set-up, but she concerned herself with somewhat different aspects of the report...
...More recently Boston police have been forced to clear a path through civil rights pickets for Mrs...
...Hicks Gets Gun Permit for Protection "Boston School Committee Chairman Mrs...
...More extraordinary still was the fact that the people of Boston, at least those who were most vocal, seemed to back up the School Committee and Mrs...
...Whoever had been in the school had also upset a drawer from my own desk, and scattered papers around, although they did not take money that was in partial view...
...And the other argument was: "Why out in the country they walk miles to school and they all sit in one big classroom, farmers' children all of them, and they are good American kids and do their lessons and you don't hear anybody saying that those kids don't get an education because they do get one and they get a damn fine one and so do these kids right here in Boston if they would only pull themselves up and do something for themselves for a change and if their mothers and fathers, when they even have them, would just stop living off the government and would straighten their own lives out too...
...But all that surprised me was that every one of those schools had not been burned down yet by an outraged population when so many of them were obvious firetraps and when every one of them bred so much igniting hate...
...I always thought that elected representatives were responsible to all citizens of Boston, all taxpayers, $nd also to those with children who go to our schools.' These salary increases for the top executives came as a surprise to city officials because salaries of the top school officials had been raised $1,000 less than two years ago...
...Hicks can purchase a weapon and carry it anywhere inside the Bay State...
...As a piece of writing, it represented in a sense the conscience of that part of our community which thinks and cares and lives by principle but which apparently cannot affect the outcome of a vote...
...Ohrenberger's salary from an already high $26,000 to $30,000, an increase in the salary of Miss Marguerite Sullivan, the deputy superintendent, from $19,000 to $23,000, and similar jumps in pay for several other officials...
...The older faces—those of the teachers, the ones in charge—are mostly white...
...Focusing on some of the fiscal and transportation suggestions made by the State Board, she derided them as unworkable and undemocratic and protested, furthermore, "What they are trying to do is set up a dictatorship...
...The curtains in our auditorium, already torn and filthy and ugly, wrere stabbed and slashed dozens of times by an unknown person...
...It squanders valuable human resources by impairing the opportunities of many Negro children to prepare for the professional and vocational requirements of our technological society...
...The statements quoted above were for the most part not coarse or vulgar, but just loaded with bigotry...
...What about twelve new genuinely qualified teachers to begin to educate the hundreds of unplaced special students in the city...
...Tl^ese people, of course, were not willing and one of the reasons for this, along with many others, was that they had some other and more immediate uses for these funds...
...Globe about eight weeks later: Mrs...
...These latter boosts included a jump of Mr...
...I said: "Then you feel the schools are really doing pretty well...
...What about the children with twenty-five substitute teachers at William Lloyd Garrison School...
...This sounded to me like an idea I had heard before...
...I remember a talk that I had around that time with a man who owned a lot of property in the Negro section and who made a great deal of money out of this property, but still retained a very special image of the Negro people whose rents comprised his livelihood...
...Why six new officials with six new fat salaries...
...and Cardinal Cushing...
...Does the child wonder why only black children go to this school...
...they are relevant to one of America's most tragic national failures...
...That evening, we had a chance to see our school principal on television as she replied to the news reporter that there was nothing inferior, so far as she could tell, about a racially imbalanced school...
...The result of all of this in practical terms, as it filtered down through talk and gossip within our school itself, was that expansion projects which had been planned would now have to be curtailed, that repairs to buildings would stay at a minimum, and that very little would be done during the immediate year to improve the quality of textbooks in our school...
...Hicks following meetings at the Boston School Committee...
...So I told him then about our school, saying in particular that we had two classes which did not even have their own rooms, others in which there were many disturbed or retarded children, two classrooms in a cellar, others with broken windows, rooms with windows that did not open, and several other things like that...
...Hicks' statement also sounded similar to the statements of certain racist leaders in the Deep South who blame the troubles that come upon them not upon their own active sins, or sins of omission, but rather upon the interlopers, civil rights leaders, and trouble makers who move in, as they would put it, "from the outside" to get the people angry and to stir the people up...
...The means are at hand...
...Hicks, in person, to the hilt...
...The people who used the coarser terms, however, sometimes were quoted in the newspaper also...
...It is detrimental to sound education in the following ways: It does serious educational damage to Negro children by impairing their confidence, distorting their self-image, and lowering their motivation...
...She said further that the Committee deducted from 'our budget certain items for educational expansion programs in order to give the raises.' " I thought that this was a remarkable self-indictment on the part of those who ran the schools...
...The schools are doing a wonderful job with what they've got...
...Reaction to this pay boost was considerable and even the Mayor of Boston had something angry to say...
...A few days later, the Globe reported: "Mrs...
...He defended to the hilt the nature of the present set-up...
...Hicks has praised the police for their efforts in her behalf...
...It seemed to me to be the same thing that teachers in Boston were implying when they said that, in the old days, the Negroes took what they were given without complaining, whereas now, with the advent of civil rights commotion and rabble-rousing, everybody was bitter and angry and the children all were getting up in arms...
...A number of the most highly segregated and most dilapidated public schools in Boston were listed in the report and recommended for closing as soon after 1965 as possible...
...Mrs...
...Encouraged by this second statement —because he seemed so blunt and honest—I asked him if he thought then that the problem was that the schools were not doing as well as they should...
...The one they picked was the school where I was working and the consequence of this was that we lost about half a day of teaching while the School Department sent in a crew of repairmen to try to make the school look a little less dilapidated before the television cameras got there...
...The animosity in the Negro community against the School Committee chairman, as a consequence of this action and others, became very great...
...It was not an accusatory or unforgiving piece of writing and it was in fact rather moderate and conciliatory in its tone...
...Were they needed...
...The problem, he said, "was not due to them but due to the poor education they were getting...
...The Bigots of Boston by JONATHAN KOZOL Countless investigations have been conducted and are being conducted of the segregationist patterns in America's public schools...
...And if we did it then I don't see why can't they...
...The parade hadn't gone a block when another youth staggered out and cursed a priest...
...Watching events at that time, and talking with various people in the city, was for me a disheartening education in the nature of the attitudes of the American people, and it caused me to wonder, as I have been obliged to wonder since, whether there is any longer a real connection between the preferences and cruelties of American citizens and the kinds of assertions about fair play and freedom that we are attempting to sell to other nations...
...Joseph Lee, whose reactions were reported in detail by the Boston papers, seemed unmoved by the Board's emphasis and eloquence...
...Hicks finished first in a ten-candidate preliminary race for mayor of Boston last month and will run in the final election November 7 against Massachusetts Secretary of State Kevin H. White.] Throughout this time, naturally, there was a vast amount of public controversy and a television station in Boston apparently decided it would be an effective part of news coverage to visit one of the segregated schools...
...For a number of months the State Board of Education had been preparing a full report on racial imbalance in Massachusetts schools...
...Hicks has been constantly harassed by telephone calls and visits to her home...
...He was a good-natured man in his late fifties and we were riding in his car...
Vol. 31 • November 1967 • No. 11
