Boston: Led by Children

In Boston last week the children were leading the way--trying, where adults had failed, to cool down the city's bitter school integration battle. At racially troubled Hyde Park High School, black and white students held separate meetings and elected ten representatives each to a committee charged with bringing peace to the classrooms and corridors. The committee then requested the aid of a biracial mediation team composed of Dalton Bough, a black youth worker, and William F. Lincoln of the National Center for Dispute Settlement.

After a few sessions, Lincoln reported that the kids were making progress. "They are not talking about integration," he said, "they are talking about education--and that's cool."

Still, although attendance was gradually increasing in the public schools, not much education was going on in Boston--especially in South Boston. In an effort to stop the stoning of school buses and fighting among students, police units were further beefed up. Fifty-five patrolmen were assigned as motorcycle escorts for school buses, and three busloads of police stood by to rush assistance to trouble spots. At South Boston High School, where jeering, rock-throwing gangs of whites have been continually menacing black students, a squad of 800 helmeted tactical police worked 16-hour shifts. A police helicopter hovered overhead, radioing the locations of suspicious gatherings.

As disruptions continued, Mayor Kevin White decided to modify his previous position on court-ordered busing ("It's a lousy law, but we must comply with it because it is the law"). He called on U.S. District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity to begin hearings on a second phase of Boston school desegregation scheduled to go into operation in 1975. His strategy, the mayor's aides explained, would draw antibusing sentiment off the street and into the courtroom. At the same time, they speculated, it might lead to a decision not to bus students between schools in South Boston and predominantly black Roxbury, but to bus black and white students to a neutral site between the two neighborhoods.

Short of that kind of compromise, whites in South Boston seemed determined to continue their boycott of the schools. They were encouraged in their action by Boston School Superintendent William J. Leary's refusal to enforce truancy laws, which include provisions to fine adults who are keeping children out of school. "If you are fearful of putting your children's lives in danger by putting them on a bus," he once told a group of mothers and students, "be my guest down at the beach." At week's end, however, the state commissioner of education ordered Leary to begin enforcing the law.

It was all too much for N.A.A.C.P. Director Roy Wilkins, who flew into town last week for a quick tour of the trouble spots. "Boston should be ashamed," he said. "My gosh, in Hattiesburg, Miss., children, black and white, are playing football together and singing in the choir together. And they call Boston the cradle of abolitionism!"

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