Ah yes, the desegregation of Boston.
You know, I go through a lot of books, and hence am usually giving boxes and boxes of them away, but one book I've always kept is Uncommon Ground, 1985, by J. Anthony Lukas, a well-written and highly-illuminating description of the school crisis in Boston during the late 1960s, early 1970s.
I recommend it to primitives who happen to be literate; the author after all was about as "left" as Saul Alinsky or Noam Chomsky.
Despite his ideological bent, though, the book's been hailed as a pretty definitive, unbiased history, and it presents conclusions sharply contradictory with liberalthought or primitivethought.
It's a story of affluent white liberals imposing their will upon powerless poor whites and powerless poor blacks; "sacrifices are for 'other people' to bear."
Drunken Bill of Skins's island was in kindergarten through about the third grade, when this crisis was going on. One can easily see Mama Raven, picketing for desegregation, and at the same time doing her best to insure that lilliputian Bill remained in a lily-white school.
OH Frank, You and others here do bring back some memories from the past.
I at the time, young, could not understand why kids had to ride a school bus one hour each way to go to school with people outside their neighborhood.
Seemed like all was going well, the kids all went to the walking distance schools lived around their classmates, any kind of school activity's the parents and siblings could attend. Most of the parents knew the teachers as they lived in the neighborhood.
When this Tom Foolery busing started I was WTF----How did the poor family's get into the city's when they had little transportation. How could they have any connection with the school, teachers or their children's friends and family's ?
Then the poor whites that were terrified to drive through slums and appeared that they were to get mugged when they got out of their cars to attend a child's school what ever.
Heck of a mess, the Catholic Church began to build neighborhood schools got the Irish and Italian students, no more hour bus rides and back to neighborhood values.
I saw on TV a news program out of Boston sometime back then that showed a Boston school bus come to pick up kids 5-6 years old to be bussed to some white school out of the neighborhood.
So disturbing I called my kids in to watch, These little black kids were terrorized when a bunch of White men attacked the bus and them. This was one of those times one does not want to be alone watching what could happen to your kids were things reversed.
Everything started to go down hill from there.
