THE NEED FOR A TOUGHER KIND OF HEROISM

By J. ANTHONY LUKAS

At the crest of Boston's Beacon Hill, a bronze monument portrays Colonel Robert Gould Shaw leading the black soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry in their assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in July 1863--a battle that cost the young aristocrat and nearly a hundred of his troops their lives. When the Union army asked for his body, a Confederate officer replied, "We have buried him with his niggers." Shaw's sacrifice--memorialized by the poet James Russell Lowell as a "death for noble ends"--has become an emblem of the lofty idealism that inspired New England's 19th century abolitionists and their 20th century descendants in the civil rights and school-desegregation battles.

In the 1960s and 1970s, those movements enlisted the energies of some of that generation's finest young whites, eager to express their altruistic impulses, to live and, if necessary, to die for noble ends. But from the late '60s on, the role of white liberals was circumscribed by the rise of black nationalists, who suspected that Northern whites were as eager to put their own virtue on display as to seek self-determination for Southern blacks. After all, the Shaw monument portrays the young colonel with his patrician features, astride his prancing steed, while his swarthy soldiers follow obediently. As the 20th century moved toward its close, most American blacks no longer saw this as the model for relations between the races.

Now the relentless tides of demographic change in most large American cities have eroded the gains made during the school-desegregation era. In 1972--the year blacks sued to desegregate Boston's schools--some 90,000 students were enrolled in the public system, 54,000 of them white. As of September 1995, some 63,000 students remained, barely 18% white. What does it mean to say that one is for integration in a school system so configured?

The Milliken v. Bradley decision laid the groundwork for today's desegregation conundrum. Had Boston's federal district court been able to embrace the school systems of such storied American communities as Concord and Lexington, there would have been more whites with whom to integrate and less criticism that Judge Arthur Garrity's order did little more than mix "poor blacks" with "poor whites." But it would be naive to imagine that most suburban whites would obediently put their children on the bus to the inner city. Suburban families might have thrown fewer rocks than did the working-class whites of Charlestown and South Boston, but I suspect that when the dust settled, many would have put their children in private or parochial schools, or found other means of evading the order.

Ultimately, it is futile to debate what might have been. I still believe in desegregating schools by both class and race. But since it won't happen in many places, what goal realistically remains for those who fought so bravely for desegregated schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, Boston, New Orleans and Denver? To what vision of the good society can they dedicate themselves?

As a Boston school official told me last year, "Our task is to educate the kids who're here, instead of yearning for those who have left. And, who knows, perhaps if we do a good enough job, some of those who have left may start trickling back." Call her naive, if you wish, but that strikes me as the only realistic alternative: to make the urban public schools work for whatever clientele remains. It will be a long, slogging, incredibly difficult task. Those who demonstrated their virtue with marches and vigils must now do the harder thing of raising taxes and committing public resources, which may require more genuine heroism than the theatrics of the old integration story.

J. Anthony Lukas' book on the Boston busing wars, Common Ground, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986.