Another Belfast in Boston?

Busing Farce Divides Boston Working Class

By Hazel Daren

International Worker, December 20, 1974

Boston's School Committee has refused-by a 3-2 vote-to approve a court plan for further desegregating Boston schools that would increase the number of bused children from 18,000 to 31,000. Both the refusal by the School Committee to approve the plan and the decision of controversial Judge Garrity (of the U.S. District Court) not to issue contempt citations to three School Committee members nor to allow 50 angry South Bostoners to attend the court hearings for the three recalcitrant School Committee members (while allowing the press in) has increased the polarization of Boston's working class and the threat of a violent explosion. This clearly points out that any move by either side or social force which is not class-wide will further polarize Boston's population.

The people of Boston, which has seen school boycotts and closings and periodic racial violence since school opened in Sept., are now talking about the terrifying possibility of Boston becoming another Belfast. The violent events and polarization in Boston have been precipitated by the implementation of a court order to integrate, by busing, the children of South Boston-the predominately working class Irish ghetto of the city-with the children of Roxbury-a poor and working class black ghetto of Boston.

The final court decision to bus Boston's school children-made by Judge Garrity last June-was preceded by a ten-year series of court battles between the State of Massachusetts and Boston's School Committee. Garrity's decision in favor of desegregation was his final ruling on a suit brought against the city by the National Association for. the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the summer of 1973 for not abiding by the 1965 Racial Imbalance Law. The NAACP has brought such suits to bear in most major cities across the country-Detroit, Cleveland, Pasadena, Los Angeles and others.

The bourgeoisie has two programs which it openly puts forth as a solution to the problem of racial inequality. On the one hand, the "conservatives" propose what then Nixon's Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Patrick Moynihan called "benign neglect." That is, leave everything just as it is, and allow decay and degeneration to advance, under the watchful eyes of cops and other armed forces of bourgeois-racist "law and order."

On the other hand, the bourgeois liberals propose to correct the inequality by merely redistributing among the exploited and oppressed the burdens and miseries that make capitalism everything that it is. Whatever concessions may be won by the black people within this context meets the approval of the liberals, as long as they are at the expense of the poorest of whites.

Tribal Warfare

Boston is divided into tightly knit ethnic communities whose families have lived together for generations. The neighborhood is a stronghold in Boston, particularly the white working class. The neighborhood is now providing fertile soil for mass-based classical fascist organizing by dividing the population on ethnic lines and playing on the most backward feelings of desperate workers and the petit bourgeoisie-"us first . nobody steps on our turf." (Of course the model for reactionary neighborhoods in Boston is the one belonging to the bourgeois ruling class, Mayflower aristocracy of Beacon Hill.) Busing, which threatens to break up the neighborhood comes at a time of intense social and economic crisis with the jobs and living standards of the working class under escalating attack. Busing in such a period is seen as an immediate threat-coming at a time when all other aspects of education budgets are being gutted.

In the absence of a class-wide socialist perspective, busing is being fought by residents of South Boston under the "leadership" of Louise Day Hicks and Senator Flyn in a racist, reactionary manner. Backed up against wall, residents of South Boston are striking out in terror and rage, clinging harder and harder to their crumbling world, and are in fact being organized as a reactionary mass base for fascism.

Sham Solution

The irony of the situation is that the working class is being polarized by busing which has no advantages for either the black or white people involved. The black ghetto schools are terrible-with both physical facilities and the quality of teaching crumbling, making drug pushing increasingly a way of life-and the white working-class schools are rapidly reaching a similar state of deterioration.

Busing is not a way up from, or out of the ghetto The economy is no longer expanding, and education is no longer progressive. There are no jobs that promise a good life waiting for working class youth upon leaving school-only the miserable prospects of unemployment and slave-labor jobs, a worsening of the current nightmare. Busing brings the Irish working class another step closer to the ever-expanding bottom of the barrel-a place they know only too well from their hard days as immigrants in the early part of this century.

Busing to achieve racial desegregation, was relatively progressive ten years ago, when capitalism still had some leeway for expansion. Then, it gave black youth a slightly better chance to learn a skilled trade (if not to enter college), and furthered the kinds of working-class unity which the Civil Rights movement had often displayed. Now, however, virtually all working-class and oppressed youth are faced with the grim prospects of industrial educational tracking: giving children the most watered-down, narrow-minded curriculum possible in training them for low-skilled jobs. Vicious, cost-cutting tracking systems are taking hold in Boston, Chicago, and other near-bankrupt cities. Under these kind of school conditions, the push for busing can only be a cruel power-play by the ruling class to distract workers' attention from the burning, class-wide educational issues.

Where is the Left?

Its response to the Boston events was to call marches against racism. Some organizations, such as the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party align themselves uncritically with the liberal busing program, and even call for federal troops to enforce it, or to "protect" the black community. They actually lay the basis for the introduction of military presence in everyday life on a "progressive" pretext. Of course, the U.S. troops would be ordered to protect black people in Boston in the same way Lt. Calley protected the Vietnamese, the same way the Wehrmacht protected the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto.

Workers World ducked the issue of busing by saying that it was not the issue, but implying support in its editorials. It was very obvious in its activity in organizing the 20,000-fold "Say No to Racism" demonstration of Dec. 14, under the banner of the Emergency Committee Against Racism in Boston, which was formed for the purposed of the march.

The SWP led a splinter-split about 10 percent the size of the main contingent, giving as the reason for the necessity to split that it wanted to follow the police-ordered line of march, while it accused the main body of being "illegal." It would have been more successful in pushing for troops if the Spartacists had not entered their contingent and opposed that.

The petit-bourgeois left like the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Workers World and the Spartacist League, are easily seduced by moral abstractions on the "busing question." Engaging in feeble attempts to arrive at the "correct position," the petit-bourgeois left has mobilized around the busing issue as a way to fight that timeless evil: racism. Of course racism is being "fought" in the abstract, through slogans, positions and demonstrations such as the December 14 March Against Racism. The left radicals in their opportunistic attempt to trail after the "black community" are in fact trailing after black bourgeois and petit-bourgeois groupings such as the NAACP. Most black working people don't want busing. They recognize that it gives them virtually no meaningful advantage and has only been dividing working people.

Liberal Left Disorganizing

The onslaught of rhetoric from the liberal establishment, from the liberal press, and left radicals has backed both white and black working people into a corner.

The radical "organizers" who did the leg work for the Dec. 14 march were, for the most part, furious, when Dick Gregory and Amiri Baraka both stressed a class-wide approach to the question of racism in Boston. These speakers from the platform at the rally that ended the march laced into the capitalist system for its impoverishment of black and white alike around the world, and for its divide-and-conquer strategy, and explained busing in that context.

Baraka denounced the "abstract schoolboy moralizing" approach of the bulk of the radicals to organizing, and directed them to concretely organize the working class in South Boston around its material needs. It is ironic that Baraka-who for years did outright fascist organizing in Newark, N.J.-came out far to the left of all the "socialist" groups represented at the march-offering the sharpest class-wide perspective! Funded by Prudential Life Insurance, Baraka organized his black-nationalist cadre to beat up picketers in the Newark teachers' Strike in 1970 and 1971-exacerbating racial tensions in that city. Now Baraka, denouncing his putrid past, claims to be a converted socialist and ready to unite the black and white working class around a socialist program. Baraka's concrete response to united-front agitation around Third Force organizing will reflect how serious his apparent left turn Is.

Recently in Jamaica Plain, a working-class Boston community, several parents organized an open meeting to discuss and present initial work they had done in developing a program to deal with the crisis in the schools. The program urged calling parents instead of police into the schools in case of violence, and also began to formulate a code of ethics for street behavior designed to avoid racial violence between students. The task of preventing and dealing immediately with attacks by white racists on Black school children and working people is a delicate but crucial one for a class-wide intervention into Boston. The question of what constitutes real "quality education" (a term the liberals have used to justify their austerity cuts) was also approached-focusing on the need for parents and teachers to determine what children must know, and the importance of children learning how the society works.

The meeting was attended by around 20 black and white neighborhood residents and 20 members of various left groupings who were organizing around busing. The posturing, moralizing leftists monopolized the meeting in an effort to bamboozle the parents into adopting a "position" on busing. Fighting amongst themselves-and totally unable to deal with the concrete issues at hand-the "socialists" sabotaged the meeting. The working people who had come to seriously engage the real issues facing them left feeling angry and confused.

This disorganizing-while claiming to unite the class-poses no solution to the problems of education and racial tension. Both the right and the petit-bourgeois liberalized left are feeding off of each other's parochial organizing-worsening the tension in Boston which may erupt Into race war.

The real question to be confronted and answered is what must be done, what must actually be accomplished- not symbolically demonstrated for-to prevent race war in Boston and to provide a decent education for all children. These are the questions which have relevance to the working people not only of Boston but across the country.

While the left student groupings have disorganized the class with their posturing "positions," apolitical students at Boston's Emanuel College-a predominately working class school-have done serious research with their sociology teacher on the political and financial sources of support for the busing program. Their time and skill as students was used to do significant work for the working class. The result of their research clearly indicates that busing has been hacked by the ruling class aristocracy of Boston in an attempt to break the entrenched ethnic Irish-based Democratic Machine's control of Boston. This Democratic machine won control over Boston's government several decades ago from the Yankee aristocracy. The Yankee ruling class aristocracy is now operating mainly through the state of Massachusetts using the state legislative machinery to bid for control of the Boston School System from the elected conservative School Committee, and is also using the NAACP as their "grassroots" front.

The working class has been caught in and the left duped by this factional political battle amongst the bourgeoisie. Obviously neither side in this battle has a solution for the working class. A full report detailing this research into the basis of the busing struggle in other cities will be printed In the International Worker in an upcoming issue.

The Third Force

As fragile as particular groupings of working class people are, such as the Jamaica Plain organizing, the organic threat of much of the working class-in contrast to that of almost the entire Left-is towards class-wide organization. Working people in Boston are moving to break out of the impotence of the deadly divisive choice between busing or no busing. A third force-the class for itself-is beginning to emerge in Boston. This force, if aggressively and creatively expanded city-wide and nation-wide, will firmly unify the working class by engaging all working people in the struggle to transform the world.