Race and Class

...That easy way out is the one taken by Kevin White, Ed Koch, and most other big-city mayors...

...The Twymons are a black family struggling to keep its younger members in school and out of jail while the matriarch fights to stay off welfare...

...The city, like its institutions, is a mass of contradictions...

...Common Ground traces the roots of Boston's woes in the 1970s through the lives of three Boston families...

...Too often, Garrity's plan only threw them into conflict with the equally poor Townies in equally dilapidated schools with equally antiquated equipment...

...The eruption of violence that greeted the advent of school busing to achieve racial balance in Boston in the mid-1970s stripped away the veneer of "northern enlightenment...

...Not surprisingly, the central theme of Common Ground is the way events and circumstances have of defying the intentions of their instigators...

...Therein lies one of the anguishing things about the book...

...Certainly Boston's realities were sufficiently complex to daunt all but the most fearless (or foolhardy) of urban planners...

...In that respect, the main lesson of Common Ground is that any kind of urban planning that purports to be progressive must deal with the city as a whole, as an intricate network of racial and class relationships...

...But at the same time, Massachusetts had a dominant role in the slave trade...

...Indeed, reading Lukas's discussion of this gentrification process, one feels strongly how much the city—not just Boston, but any large urban environment—is a living organism, a system of relationships held in fragile balance...

...At the end of Common Ground, Boston has changed...

...These mini-essays are necessary and fascinating, although the book's structure is a bit unwieldy as a result of their placement...

...Hicks had presided over now had a perverse momentum of its own...

...Although Lukas chose his three families "not for their typical-ness," but rather for the intensity with which they experienced the decade between 1968 and 1978, the book is a cautionary tale, a portrait of urban institutions careering out of control...

...George Robinson (George Robinson, a member of the National Writers Union, writes on film, sports, and civil liberties for a variety of publications, including Newsday, In These Times, and The Progressive...

...The Divers are a pair of Yankee liberal do-gooders, he a member of the mayor's staff, she a toiler in the vineyards of foundation philanthropy...

...In lengthy digressions on the history of the book's families (and on Hicks, Mayor Kevin White, and some of the city's major institutions), Lukas outlines a series of stratifications along racial, ethnic, and class lines—stratifications that affect not just the school system but also the government, the churches, and even philanthropic organizations...

...Granted, it is not the work of a journalist, however skilled, to take on the mantle of the urban planner, but when reading a book as depressingly detailed as Common Ground, one yearns for a little solace...

...The sight of white mobs stoning school buses full of black children, redolent of the Freedom Rides, Selma, and Little Rock, convinced white people of what black people had always known...

...In this respect...

...individual lives have been altered in large and small ways...

...It was from Boston that the abolitionists had issued their calls for a holy war against slavery...

...What raises these portraits above cliche is not that the people Lukas writes about are real...

...But the fundamental dilemmas of the city remain, as they do for all of America's frost-belt cities, and Lukas doesn't seem to expect a solution soon...

...Judge Arthur Garrity's school integration program is doomed to a certain kind of failure...

...The explosive forces of hate and tribal loyalty that the people of Charlestown expended in the anti-busing movement served ultimately to splinter their community, after initially uniting it...

...Boston is both typical and unique...

...The intention of school integration is to put poor blacks into better facilities, giving them access to both equipment and environment and, thereby, enriching them educationally and experientially...

...As Lukas writes, "The problems of the neighborhoods were systemic, rooted in intractable dilemmas of race and class, while downtown could be treated with quick infusions of cash and chic...

...As Lukas's portrait of Boston illustrates, piecemeal solutions lead only to unexpected and unwanted consequences...

...Few American cities have a white ghetto as hermetic as Charlestown, a community, as reporter J. Anthony Lukas points out, which is desperately impoverished and, simultaneously, almost fanatically tribal in its resistance to all elements that threaten its homogeneity...

...Yet in reading Common Ground, I, as a New Yorker, was struck by how closely the trajectories of Boston's school, crime, and housing problems resembled those of my own city...

...Similarly, the actions of pre-Yuppies like the Divers in trying to develop the South End as a "nice" integrated community lead almost directly to the area's gentrification, with increased polarization along racial and class lines...

...Lukas's writing skill portrays them with the sort of inconsistencies and contradictions that a lesser journalist would gloss over...

...the same interplay that produced most of urban America's woes...

...The tensions that exploded in predominantly Irish Catholic South Boston and Charlestown were the product of a complex interplay of race, ethnicity, and class...

...Similarly, Irish Catholics were drawn passionately to the Union cause in the Civil War, while being angrily anti-black...

...To his credit, Lukas neither minimizes these contradictions nor passes them off with a bemused wave of the hand as the product of "the ironies of history...

...Repeatedly, Lukas presents events as the product of forces that have been unleashed, Pandoralike, by his protagonists, who then stand by appalled as chaos ensues...

...Sadly, Lukas offers no hope of another, more humane, solution...

...The movement Mrs...

...But the ironies of history weigh heavily on both Boston and on Common Ground...

...neighborhoods have shifted around...

...On the one hand, as Lukas observes, "there was something about Boston that drew Southern Negroes...

...Of the anti-busing movement and its leader, Louise Day Hicks, he writes, "The movement she had nurtured and exploited over the years, but which she could no longer control, swept the city closer and closer to the brink...

...The McGoffs are working-class Irish Catholics who become embroiled in the anti-busing movement...