Symposium Recalls Boston's Busing

The Salem News (April 13, 2004)

By Alan Burke, Staff Writer

SALEM – In 1974 a federal court order to desegregate the schools of Boston nearly ripped that city apart.

Yesterday, as a prelude to the presentation of the Salem Award for Human Rights and Social Justice to Jane Elliott, three veterans of that struggle, former Ambassador Ray Flynn, former South Boston High School Headmaster Jerome Winegar and lawyer Ted Landsmark, joined a symposium on discrimination.

They were joined by Alison D'Amario of the Salem Witch Museum and Dorca de Gomez, chairwoman of the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. The group spoke generally about discrimination, the busing controversy and how it had touched their lives.

In 1974, Flynn was a state representative from South Boston and an outspoken opponent of the plan to achieve racial balance in Boston by busing children from neighborhood to neighborhood. Winegar had been summoned from Minnesota by federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity to tame newly desegregated South Boston High, then wracked by riots and disruptions.

For his part, Landsmark, a black man, found himself drawn into the controversy when he was attacked on City Hall Plaza by a white man using the American flag as a spear.

Stanley Foreman's Pulitzer Prize winning photo of the attack became the signature of the crisis.

Yesterday, Landsmark and Winegar praised Flynn as a leader who helped bring the city back from the brink of racial chaos. "He's the healer," said Winegar, celebrating Flynn's election as an inclusive mayor in 1978. "Ray Flynn was a hero."

Both men served in Flynn's administration.

Describing his youth in racially segregated Missouri, Winegar noted that this is the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision, Brown v. the Board of Education, which ruled segregated schools inherently unequal. "I was buoyed by the idea that everything would be better straight away," he recalled. "But it's going to be 50 years and I'm still disappointed."

"If you're hoping that I'm going to describe myself as a victim," said Landsmark, "you're going to be disappointed."

He told how, as a youngster, he'd been bused to an upscale school in New York City. That provided the launching pad for an education that saw him attending Yale with people like George W. Bush and Hillary and Bill Clinton.

He discussed an evolving Boston, where many blacks today hail from places like Nigeria and Kenya. He noted that as early as 1990 a majority of Boston's population had been born after the 1974 court order. "The issue we're all going to have to face is not race," he concluded. "It's class."

Flynn, who also served as the U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican, echoed that view. The busing episode, he said, was an example of elites making decisions that has an impact on poor people, black and white, who merely wanted a good education for their children.

"The people making the decision didn't even consult with these people. I saw it on both sides." Nor has the situation improved for the poor, he said. "Who is their voice? Who is their advocate? There isn't that voice any longer."

In terms of race, Gomez commented, "It has gotten better. But are we where we want to be or where we should be? No."

In the Hawthorne Hotel audience was Salem School Superintendent Herb Levine, one of Winegar's administrators in South Boston. "I had the great fortune to work with Herb Levine," he said.

Levine also saluted Flynn and after the speaking had ended, he and Winegar embraced.

Reprinted with permission from The Salem News.