jetblasted wrote:Here is a photo of the Boston Busing Riots in 1974.
As I previously mentioned, my Dad took a promotion to the area, and we moved from GA to MA. (Thank goodness he got another promotion 10 months later & we moved back below the Mason-Dixon Line).
But moving from GA to MA in the early 70's, with all the civil rights issues just barely passed, the extreme ethnic healings & racial harmony that took place in Atlanta, witnessing the Boston Bus Riots was a shock.
Seeing how the north loved to preach to re south about the former racial divide, was quite telling.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/01/31/its_time_to_end_busing_in_boston/
Jet, you were pretty close to the action, about 40 miles west of the real troubled neighborhoods. I lived in the suburbs of Boston (as I do still) and would like to comment on your north/south comparison, indulge me. I admit I did not read your link.
There is no possible justification for the violence that broke out, for the vitriol that spewed forth, for the ugliness that stained the City of Boston...98.2% perpetrated by white citizens. I will not justify any of it, but I may take a stab at defining differences in creating what happened here.
Civil Rights had been the law for a while when a judge (Garrity IIRC) determined that Boston Public Schools were segregated in violation of the law and needed to forcibly be integrated. Everyone from here knew why they were segregated, it was because of the racial make-up of the neighborhoods. How that happened is an interesting story for another time, but for many people, they just wanted to live in ethnic similar areas, with schools they chose to live near. Understandable that families may try to choose the schools to live near.
Regardless of how they were formed, there was a strong Italian section, Irish, Polish etc, and after tons of migration from job seekers leaving the south, Black neighborhoods emerged, with a factor of "white flight" too.
But the black and white schools were far from equal, the Boston School Committee clearly had racist members among the group, and very little was done to improve schools in Black neighborhoods. They were separate, but not even "separate but equal".
So suddenly busing happens, as much to integrate as it was to (hopefully) allow for equal quality education in a system that was still good at the time. The original outcry was not about mixing races at all despite what you may have perceived as a youth. It was about families choosing neighborhoods partly based on local schools and being forced to bus across town. Hell, we moved into an area of my town because we knew the elementary school was superior. It would have been very upsetting to be forced into another, lesser school.
Obviously protests eventually morphed into racial taunting, rocks thrown at buses of black children became the story nationally, and all of it was sickening. But most of the ugliness was well choreographed by organized racist factions. Many other residents, black and white, also opposed forced busing yet supported equal education and would have preferred to work on solving that problem in a fair and peaceful way.
And yet others actually supported forcibly enforcing the law of the land. What they got was a terrible school system left in the wake, with a reverse of the racial make-up.
I guess I am saying it wasn't a culture of racism born of slavery, accepting of the premise of black inferiority in the eyes of God, developed over many generations as in the South that motivated this embarrassment. Rather it began as a protest to losing one's neighborhood school, and hideously was captured by REAL true disgusting violent racists.