The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

The same “white proles of Boston” Fallows described would be subjected to the most high-handed carrying out of federal law in the decade to follow: the court-ordered “desegregation” of Boston’s public schools, starting in 1974. The word desegregation belongs in quotation marks because most of the schools affected were within white ethnic (mostly Irish-American and Italian-American) neighborhoods. There had never been any black people there to segregate. The process involved two-way busing, transporting white students into poor and violent Boston neighborhoods and replacing them with bused-in black students. When the whites of South Boston and Charlestown protested, their neighborhoods were put under military occupation. “Southie” had a curfew and laws against public assembly, enforced by 1,600 police officers, 100 federal marshals, 50 FBI agents, and 600 National Guard troops. Whites made up 60 percent of the public school system on the eve of busing, less than 20 percent when it had finally done its work, little more than a decade later.