Out There in America

...Thomas Vail, publisher of the New-house-owned Plain Dealer, figures prominently, frequently, and unflatteringly in Bartimole's acerbic prose...

...Yes...

...The Racial Imbalance Law, enacted in 1965, decrees unambiguously that any school is imbalanced if more than half of its students are of a minority...

...Merchants have convinced themselves that inner-city neighborhoods and people are bad credit risks and dangerous...

...Opposition to the state's plan is not confined to South Boston's Irish...

...These were documented by a black state legislator who, over a period of several months, dressed shabbily and visited a number of city and state agencies...

...The first stage of a plan devised by the State Board of Education will go into effect this fall and will reduce the number of imbalanced schools to forty-four...

...The payments come in things you can't measure financially...

...After about $10 worth of lunch at the expense of all of us telephone users, he cautiously backed into his point...

...I know blacks who have been required to deposit up to $150...

...A small band sends the tunes of Greek dancing songs drifting over the Common...

...There's something embarrassing about seeing your mistakes in print," he says...

...She could not have been more frightened if she were facing a jail term...

...Well, the clerk just assumed from the exchange that you were black and mistakenly sent you a termination notice...

...The administrative judge, who turned out to be a service representative, was taken aback when she appeared with an attorney...

...Most inner-city dwellers are black...

...His targets are often those not accustomed to finding their names taken in vain...

...State and Federal regulatory agencies rarely check upon subtle harassment based on race, income, or address...

...There is nothing to indicate that in a spirit of voluntarism the School Committee will do one damned thing...

...But since his one-man crusade has no money "there's nothing there to get...

...But Bartimole feels his effort has not been wasted...

...Department of Health, Education and Welfare concluded that the School Committee had established a dual grade structure, the effect of which is to segregate blacks and whites...

...Among his targets, The Plain Dealer, Ohio's largest daily with 400,000-plus circulation, has often been accused by Bartimole of pursuing the Pulitzer Prize "by any means necessary, with one exception: Don't offend anyone important...

...The city itself is not averse to discriminating in the quality of its services...

...After the 1968 riots, a neighborhood improvement group attempted to pass a resolution deploring the violence against local merchants, but the attempt bogged down over a question of wording...

...Bartimole has also written caustically of the Cleveland Press, the state's second-largest paper, and the city's radio and television news programs...

...After nine years of twisting and jockeying, the city must come to terms with the unique Massachusetts Racial Imbalance Law...

...The Costs of Inner-City Life Baltimore Shortly after moving into a predominantly black, inner-city neighborhood in Baltimore, I received a notice from the telephone company threatening termination of service because of late payment of a bill...

...The company readily agreed to a most reasonable settlement for her, "just like white folks...

...Quite a number of blacks are fearful and upset...

...For Bostonians, the half-million people who still live within the city limits, the Irish, the blacks, the Italians, this season has brought premonitions of trouble, even chaos...

...One friend of his has begun fixing up a second home in the suburbs, preparing to move if reality comes to pass this fall...

...The same people who run the corporations control the civic, cultural, and political life of the community...

...On another occasion, neighborhood kids helped me turn up $1,200 worth of silver stolen from my home, after police had given it up as lost...

...Arnold, a former reporter for the Columbus Dispatch, is a graduate student in the Kiplinger Public Affairs Reporting Program at Ohio State University...

...He was more upset—and called in a company lawyer—when the attorney questioned his authority to order her appearance and suggested that the company might have violated her civil rights...

...It does not threaten whites' livelihood, their living conditions, or the quality of services and products on which they depend...

...The police preferred to concentrate on vice, rather than on robberies, burglaries, and assaults, because vice is more visible and makes for better statistics...

...Even the Boston City Hall, which usually resembles a grim prison, does not seem so foreboding...

...Ideally, there could be change without panic...

...A great newspaper thumbs its nose...

...They're accustomed to it...

...Do you mean she wouldn't have if she had known I was white...

...One has heard the same apocalyptic predictions in Adanta, Charlotte, Jackson...

...Bespectacled, gray, and forty, Bartimole is both praised by his friends as the conscience of Cleveland journalism and attacked by his enemies—he has made a number of them—as the town gossip...

...What is not in doubt is the segregated pattern of Boston's public schools...

...The heavy percentage of local users pointed to a lack of mobility and shopping know-how of residents...

...They howl in glee when he attacks their rivals and curse in helpless fury when he directs his merciless pen at their activities...

...A former reporter and editorial writer for The Atlanta Journal and The Baltimore Sun, he is currently writing a book based on his personal experiences outlined in this article...

...It destroys your human dignity...

...The police, who had been investigating a number of burglaries in the vicinity, were surprised at my information and amazed when it turned out that the stealing club was tied into two major fences, other burglary rings, and had information on area homicides and escaped convicts...

...A politician, Joseph Timilty, tells strangers, "This is going to make law-breakers out of law-abiding citizens...

...Taking reportorial aim at Cleveland's urban problems and chastising the city's news media, which often, he claims, ignore them, Bartimole adheres to the principle that pointed, not-necessarily-objective criticism is good for everyone...

...For a time Bartimole drove an ancient Volvo his wife Susana had to push to start...

...Whether a deposit will be required, and in what amount, is determined by utility fiat...

...Rather, he hopes to see such one-man publications as his six-year-old newsletter, Point of View, proliferate...

...So...

...This effect of the merchant mentality, inexplicable to most whites, was best described by the previously mentioned black legislator who experienced some of the humiliations himself...

...The first question is not for your name or account number, but your address and whether or not it is a private residence...

...Well, it's a downtown exchange, isn't it...

...JOHN ARNOLD (Mr...

...Dorothy Ahem, of South Boston, sat in a room at her daughter's school (the very one which educated former House Speaker John McCormack) and told a visitor: "Every parent I have talked to is preparing to go to jail...

...Mayor Kevin White, a nervous man under any circumstances, ponders the precise mixture of events under which his city will start to fall apart...

...I have paid deposits ranging from nothing to $25 to utilities in various cities...

...His contribution, he says, is to report the reality of the times, something not reflected in the city's news media...

...Banks and other financial institutions would require as much as one-third down, forcing buyers to take additional loans or second mortgages at high interest rates...

...Mortgage money for inner-city housing has been scarce for years, and is now nonexistent...

...Chapman is a national affairs correspondent for The Washington Post...

...It means, initially, that some 10,000 white and black children will be bused to schools different from the ones they would normally attend...

...But a great newspaper doesn't run around kissing ass...

...Even by the wavering standards of the Federal Government, Boston's schools are in violation of the law— not by accident of neighborhood housing patterns but by official actions of the Boston School Committee, the last major governing body controlled by the city's once-dominant Irish...

...Then there are the litde bureaucratic humiliations practiced by the city's health, education, and welfare agencies...

...He has decried what he calls hypocritical public service programming by the city's broadcasters to satisfy FCC requirements, and what he believes to be suppressed news stories protecting Cleveland's corporate leaders and their alleged payoffs to black militants to keep the ghetto quiet...

...You see, generally, Negroes are poor credit risks...

...We have to stay on top of them to see that they pay...

...Cleveland's Press Gadfly Cleveland In a time when the mass media of Marshall McLuhan's global village may have rendered the pamphleteer and his press old-fashioned, a Cleveland reporter-turned-journalist-gadfly demonstrates that an individual pen can still puncture...

...The effect of these policies is to choke off home purchases in inner-cities, and to trap people who already own homes there by making it difficult for them to sell their property, except to speculators...

...Roldo Bartimole believes that, at the least, he has attained job security...

...Many blacks have good credit, too...

...Few people know what it is to be treated as a non-person," he said...

...His mailing list has grown to 1,200, and the income sustains his five-member family at about $5,000 a year, far below the $7,200 standard the Department of Labor has set for the minimum amenities of a family of four...

...Last year, a hearing examiner of the U.S...

...When asked where he comes out, after all his reading and discussions, this politician answers, uncharacteristically, with two words: "White flight...

...I feel that I'm doing something of value without thinking of it as something great...

...Next fall, Boston must make the leap to a racially integrated school system...

...One-man publications like his, he believes, may be a way to restore democracy to a freedom of speech that has become the property of media monopolies...

...In human and racial terms, it means that black children from Dorchester and Roxbury will go into South Boston schools and Southie's children will make the trip the other way...

...The Plain Dealer Managing Editor Robert Burdock, commenting on Bartimole's printed invective, has said, "If The Plain Dealer listened to all its critics it wouldn't be the great newspaper it is today...

...Black mothers, interviewed in a housing project, proved to be just as concerned about their children being bused into South Dorchester as the Southie mothers were about their kids going the other way...

...I don't know how many times he sold that broom," he said...

...One grocery store owner, he said, always kept a new broom near the checkout counter, or several items of canned goods by the cash register...

...The School Committee has served two purposes for most of that decade—keeping the schools as segregated as possible and providing a launching pad for small-time politicians preaching solidarity for the Irish neighborhoods...

...Inner-city residents usually distinguish between good merchants and exploiters, and even when they can't pinpoint the exploitation, they are aware they are being taken...

...McCaffrey is a free lance writer who has contributed to The New Republic, The Nation, Potomac, Sepia, and Travel...

...Paul Parks, the black leader of the Model Cities Administration, who had a hand in drafting the law as an NAACP leader nine years ago, says: "The only reason that the School Committee does anything at all for the black schools is because of the Racial Imbalance Law...

...it was finally replaced by a generous friend with a more serviceable Mustang...

...Perhaps it is all exaggeration...

...She couldn't know...

...City chauvinism is inbred, and the newspapers help foster the parochialism...

...Legal aid bureaus across the nation, however, have a dozen suits pending against such practices as discriminatory rate structures, security deposits, and arbitrary service termination...

...One first notices such harassment when applying for utility service...

...Part of the problem is the merchant mentality that equates influence with affluence...

...The few who do don't talk about it...

...Politicians talk of civic disintegration, the destruction of neighborhoods...

...When some of my lawn furniture was stolen, I used neighborhood kids to track down the culprits—a teen-aged theft ring that operated out of a garage on the edge of the ghetto...

...Patrick j. McCaffrey (Mr...

...That's discrimination...

...This, Bartimole says, is because he shares with the journalism reviews of other major cities a power to embarrass the conventional media by printing views that don't make the newspapers and explaining the reasons why...

...By its very ineffectiveness in these areas, it often takes the course of suppressed rage or senseless violence toward immediate and visible white neighbors...

...Other American cities offer examples of both, and one leaves Boston wishing there were some convenient formula for choosing peaceful accommodation...

...One resident offered a compromise: "Let's say, 'We deplore the violence—but not very much.'" Such resentment, sometimes considered reverse racism, is a predictable product of the discrimination inherent in the merchant mentality...

...A survey by the city planning department found that half of the area residents shopped at these stores, though three-quarters of the people considered them inadequate...

...The same newspaperman says it is common knowledge at The Plain Dealer that the paper would like to sue Bartimole...

...By most standards, the family's economic sacrifice has been great...

...It was an administrative order from the gas and electric company for a hearing on her bill, which was two months past due...

...In short, black racism does not dictate the day-to-day course of whites' lives...

...Blacks and white inner-city poor or oddballs are written off as marginal consumers...

...If the customer checked his sales slip and complained, the owner would only shrug and say, "Oh, I thought that was yours...

...It developed in the hearing that she was wrong, and confused, about the bill...

...My black housekeeper told me one day that she would have to have the afternoon off because she had been ordered to appear at a hearing...

...He is sure Point of View will be in business for a long time...

...Everybody does it...

...The result is smoldering, bitter resentment...

...But the commission lacks the power, funds, and staff to enforce equal rights, and, of course, no one can enforce courtesy...

...History suggests that we should reserve some measure of skepticism for the anguished comments of those faced with racial change...

...In our neighborhood, Reservoir Hill, on the northern edge of the city's commercial area, there was a cluster of about twenty shops...

...And there are isolated examples of busing complications that defy reason: one school now neatly balanced (fifty-two per cent white, forty-eight per cent black) would be split up to balance other schools a mile or more distant...

...But, in opposing repeal, they argue—with much experience to support them—that without the Racial Imbalance Law hanging over its head the School Committee would offer no changes at all in the pattern of segregation...

...A former employe of several neighborhood stores told me he had seen many instances...

...Louise Day Hicks made her leap to fame—including one term in Congress^—from that pad, and her successors are doing it now...

...These attitudes are reflected especially in the harassment tactics of utilities, which have a monopoly on services...

...Was I aware of the significance of my telephone exchange...

...The fall will prove them right or wrong...

...Well, not exactly...

...The phenomenon is noticed again when downtown dwellers telephone for service or repairs...

...And, indeed, everybody does...

...But all that is for outsiders to enjoy...

...It is not hard to find a negative view...

...Police protection is a glaring case: Though the number of policemen assigned to our neighborhood was heavy (because of high crime-rate statistics), actual protection was erratic or poor, depending upon political pressures...

...But what about the shoplifting on the other side of the counter...

...He reported to the city's human relations commission that he had waited long hours, only to be ignored or snapped at by clerks and attendants...

...I wrote the company that I had always paid my bills, even if a little late, and that in view of my credit record I was miffed at such threats...

...Yet there is a distinction between white and black racism: The latter is not institutionalized...

...A veteran Cleveland newspaperman declares, "Roldo Bartimole is an important force . . . because he writes only what he believes is the truth and because his audience is composed of some of the most influential, aware people of the area . . . Point of View is read religiously by some of the most powerful men in Cleveland journalism...

...Usually, he speaks in long rolling sentences, full of wit and irony...

...And most customers with that exchange are Negroes...

...It was not, as I first thought, a judicial summons to appear in court on some civil or criminal matter...

...There are various moves under way to repeal or replace the Racial Imbalance Law, although this might only mean that a Federal judge would step in with an even more sweeping desegregation plan...

...When mortgages could be found in recent years, the down payments often were prohibitive...

...The merchants contend their prices are higher because their shops do a smaller volume of business and are subject to high pilferage rates...

...The black leadership recognizes these pitfalls...

...He looks at journalism not so much as an industry or profession but as a matter of conscience...

...The history of nearly a decade argues powerfully that Parks is right...

...Proper Irish mothers talk of breaking laws...

...The politician has read all the essays, has studied the findings of educators James Coleman and Christopher Jencks...

...But Bartimole says, "I feel good about myself...

...Philosophizing mordantly on his profession in this Great Lakes city, one crusty Cleveland journalist has observed, "Tom Vail talks about what a great newspaper The Plain Dealer is...

...By that standard, the racial composition of sixty-seven of Boston's schools is illegal...

...He has done his homework, but he also has talked with his friends...

...Point of View, his biweekly pamphlet, sells for $7.50 a year, and fifty cents a single copy...

...And the pattern of discrimination is evident in termination cases...

...Not that Roldo Bartimole, a one-time reporter for The Wall Street Journal and The Cleveland Plain Dealer, is conducting an exercise in nostalgia...

...On the surface, it sounds like a prescription for disaster, and there are plenty of voices willing to support that view...

...A few days later, a company public relations man invited me to lunch to explain the situation...

...Utilities say they want the owner's approval, but it is the order of the questions that appears discriminatory...

...Cleveland Magazine Contributing Editor Ted Joy maintains Bartimole does little more than "ladle up a warmed-over mishmash of newsroom gossip, unchecked facts, and poorly written invective...

...Residents were unhappy not only with gouge-the-poor prices at some stores but with the quality and selection of merchandise...

...If you repeal the Racial Imbalance Law you give the School Committee the power to resegregate, and that's the thing that I'm scared to death of...

...Journalism doesn't have a very fertile setting in Cleveland, a city incestuous in its civic and business interlockings," he maintains...

...Another friend vowed never to put another dime into the home he has occupied for thirty years...

...Well, that and that you had a good credit record...

...WILLIAM CHAPMAN (Mr...

...Utilities, banks, merchants, and even local governments code neighborhoods and quietly discriminate in the quality of services they provide...

...Instead, one recalls most vividly the words of a thoughtful politician who has lived his life in South Boston and knows his neighborhood well...

...Bartimole has exposed the Cleveland newspapers' word puzzle contests which promise thousands in prize money, but which he calculated can be rigged at eight million-to-one against winning...