“Sunlight struck the gnarled limbs outside his window, casting a thicket of light and shadow on the white clapboards. From his high desk under the eaves, Colin Diver could watch students strolling the paths of Cambridge Common or playing softball on the neatly trimmed diamond.”
This book is a great reminder than whenever someone starts talking about “local control” in politics, referring to education policy, they are talking about segregation. I remember when I was a kid a specific election season (though I don’t remember whether it was a general election or a special election) in which my county was voting on a possible consolidation with the city school system. This would mean that the county would take over the city school’s and run it, with the added tax base of the city going into the school budget. My parents were very much against it, ostensibly because it would mean I would go to the closer city school, moving away from the much farther away county school. I think I was kind of excited by the prospect, not really knowing much about anything, but it failed and I was kind of bummed.
What I didn’t understand at the time was that the city schools were where the largest population of the area’s Black school children went to school, and that this very fact was likely a significant factor in county parents, including mine, voting it down. I don’t think I will ever ask them about it because I imagine I would get some very defensive posturing about their choice and their decisions, despite their Blue collar Democrat (and this is post-Reagan) bona fides. And I try not to be too hard on them because I live in a city where “well-meaning white parents” are happy to send their children to elementary school, some middle schools, and the city’s three specialty school (but almost exclusively not the mainstream high schools). Only one of my friends admits that the city schools is why she moved to the county, and I appreciate her honesty. I also appreciate that she bought a house zoned for one of the “bad” county schools. We like to pretend that the legacy of segregation, massive resistance, and busing is over with, but like a lot of issues that intersect with race, the choices are buried, when they used to be voiced. (We’re of course moving back to a time where they’re voiced, and that actually might mean some honesty, however disgusting).
This book was something I was avoiding because what I thought it was going to be was a n”actually conservatives have had it really tough” and/or economic anxiety nonsense that has been popular in the last couple of years. But no, this is a comprehensive history of the Boston busing era from the late 1960s through the 1970s. Rather than being a chronicle, the history is thematic as well as a kind of people’s/oral history with three families as a focal point. We are offered a Black Blue collar family, an Irish-Catholic Blue collar family, and a WASP middle-class family (if we’re being broad here). But whenever something touches some other part of the city’s history and politics, it’s given enough time to explicate how it affects an overall understanding of the time.
We end up spending a decent amount of time with Kevin White, longtime mayor of Boston who was also almost tapped as George McGovern’s running mate in 1972, and who oversaw 16 years of Boston management. He’s often lauded for his role in peacefully subduing violence on the night of Martin Luther King’s assassination, in part by buying out a James Brown concert and broadcasting the show on public access to keep people off the streets. On the afternoon of MLK’s murder, what was White doing? Watching Gone with the Wind. A little too on the nose.
But we also end up with some other looming figures like Louise Day Hicks, Barney Frank, and Jonathan Kozol.
