Phase Two for Boston

"It's the death knell of the city," predicts Boston City Council Member Louise Day Hicks. "People will not comply," says State Senator William Bulger. "They will leave the city." From Hyde Park to South Boston the doomsayers were in full cry last week, and their bombast was directed at Federal District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity. In a 104-page court order, Garrity produced his final plan for desegregating the city's troubled schools--a decision that promises, at the least, to keep Boston in turmoil for months to come.

Garrity's new plan supersedes a temporary one that he had ordered the Boston School Committee to put into effect last fall. That order led to school boycotts by whites, unruly demonstrations, occasional bloodshed and massive use of police. At first glance, it appears likely that Garrity's Phase Two scheme will spawn more of the same. The plan calls for the busing of approximately 21,000 students, 3,000 more than in Phase One. In addition, Garrity has ordered that 12,000 of those to be bused be children in Grades 1 through 5; only 3,000 students in those grades were bused this year. Garrity says that he hopes to limit the length of the trips to an average often to 15 minutes. For that reason he has ruled out busing for one potential trouble spot: predominantly white East Boston, which is separated from the rest of the city by Boston Harbor.

Garrity's aim is to bus enough students to ensure that the racial mixture at most Boston public schools conforms more or less to the city wide ratio of 51% white, 37% black and 12% other minorities. To help achieve that goal, he has ordered 20 schools to close their doors and has created nine new school districts. One of the districts will consist of 22 "magnet" schools spread throughout the city. The magnet schools, open to any Boston children as long as their enrollment conforms to citywide racial ratios, are designed to encourage voluntary desegregation by offering specialized courses that will attract students from other neighborhoods.

Blacks generally reacted favorably to the new ruling, but many whites were enraged. During a hearing last week in Judge Garrity's courtroom, hundreds of R.O.A.R. (Restore Our Alienated Rights) members wearing STOP BUSING buttons and waving American flags demonstrated noisily outside. Inside the courtroom, Garrity was hissed as he questioned two R.O.A.R. leaders about their part in a demonstration the week before outside South Boston High School. As the hearing ended, one spectator complained (loud enough for Garrity to hear): "The guy's sick, that's all, sick."

New Schools. Some whites, resigned to the inevitability of public school integration, are making plans to educate their children elsewhere. Says Helen Barrett, whose son will start school in September, "We may just go to Ireland for a couple of years." Ed King of West Roxbury has another solution. "We'll start our own schools," he says. Indeed, some white students are already attending new private schools.

Councilwoman Hicks, who unsuccessfully ran for mayor in 1967 on an antibusing and law-and-order ticket, signaled her intention to fight. Judge Garrity's decision, she warned, "will trigger rising tensions and chaos and disorder." In September, she said, "it will be the decision of each individual parent whether to put their little children on a bus and send them into hostile territory. But I predict one of the biggest boycotts that has ever been witnessed in this country."

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