Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s

Rating:
Summary: No difference between Boston & Birmingham
Review: Funny how busing caused such a flap in Boston and no southerners hopped on buses to go demonstrate in the streets of Boston.

Rating:
Summary: excellent reassessment of a controversial subject
Review: Ronald Formisano's "Boston Against Busing" is the single most valuable -- though not the most significant -- book about the school integration crisis in Boston in the mid-1970s. Contrary to the prevailing thought on the Boston busing imbroglio, Formisano argues that the crisis was not only a manifestation of rage and racism, but was also the natural reaction of working-class and ethnic Bostonians to a decade's worth of promises from public officials that busing would never come to Boston. Indeed, a number of public officials in Boston, such as School Committee Chairwoman/Mayoral Candidate Louise Day Hicks and School Committee member Jim Kerrigan, built their careers on such promises, which primarily served to do nothing more than enflame the passions of citizens. Another thorny aspect of the crisis that Formisano handily details is the perceptive anger and resentment of working class and white ethnic Bostonians that their neighborhoods were hijacked for social experimentation by so-called "limousine liberals" from the suburbs. This anger, which welled up in South Boston, Charlestown and other sections of the city, arose from the fact that schools like South Boston High School and Charlestown High School were no more white and non-integrated than the suburban school systems in which the judges and politicians who ordered busing lived - yet it was the city schools that faced federal orders to integrate. Formisano has written an incisive book that moves forward our knowledge of the Boston busing crisis. The book cuts more directly to the heart of the situation than J. Anthony Lukas' "Common Ground," which is a far more celebrated work. Formisano's book is more scholarly and research-driven and less anecdotal and windy than Lukas' book. Overall, "Boston Against Busing" is highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: excellent reassessment of a controversial subject
Review: Ronald Formisano's "Boston Against Busing" is the single most valuable -- though not the most significant -- book about the school integration crisis in Boston in the mid-1970s. Contrary to the prevailing thought on the Boston busing imbroglio, Formisano argues that the crisis was not only a manifestation of rage and racism, but was also the natural reaction of working-class and ethnic Bostonians to a decade's worth of promises from public officials that busing would never come to Boston. Indeed, a number of public officials in Boston, such as School Committee Chairwoman/Mayoral Candidate Louise Day Hicks and School Committee member Jim Kerrigan, built their careers on such promises, which primarily served to do nothing more than enflame the passions of citizens. Another thorny aspect of the crisis that Formisano handily details is the perceptive anger and resentment of working class and white ethnic Bostonians that their neighborhoods were hijacked for social experimentation by so-called "limousine liberals" from the suburbs. This anger, which welled up in South Boston, Charlestown and other sections of the city, arose from the fact that schools like South Boston High School and Charlestown High School were no more white and non-integrated than the suburban school systems in which the judges and politicians who ordered busing lived - yet it was the city schools that faced federal orders to integrate. Formisano has written an incisive book that moves forward our knowledge of the Boston busing crisis. The book cuts more directly to the heart of the situation than J. Anthony Lukas' "Common Ground," which is a far more celebrated work. Formisano's book is more scholarly and research-driven and less anecdotal and windy than Lukas' book. Overall, "Boston Against Busing" is highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Narcissistic Partisan Scholarship
Review: Skirting around its source material to promote a self-referential premise; the book: 'BOSTON AGAINST BUSING: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960's and 1970's'(c. 1991) by history professor Ronald P. Formisano, is a sanctimonius and inconsistent work that provided few insights into the dynamics of Boston's anti-forced busing movement but "demonstrated a kind of intellectual onanism to which the author was dedicated". Fundamentally, documented truisms coupled with dogmatic assertions seemed to be the author's methodology to promote his pet theory of 'Reactionary Populism'.

The American philosopher, W.V. Quine, stated "That nearly any statement can be made to fit with the data, so long as one makes the 'requisite compesatory adjustments'". And these 'adjustments' can be found throughout BOSTON AGAINST BUSING as: question begging (e.g.,"Anyone who reads Garrity's decision in Morgan v. Hennigan will understand why he found the school committee guilty of segregative practices." p.9); truisms (e.g., "The Boston Irish did not feel responsible for slavery or the long history of black oppression. They believed that the blacks should raise themselves up as other immigrant groups had done before them." p. 41); palindromes(e.g., "Hicks was just as much a creature of the backlash as she was one of its creators." p. 30) and in 'post hoc ergo propter hoc' - confused digressions for correlations ("I know that discord between Irish Catholics and African-Americans extended back to before the civil war." p. ix) as distracting fallacies to emphasize the author's own theory of 'Reactionary Populism'.

But Reactionary Populism, defined within chapter eight of BOSTON AGAINST BUSING as "a movement that included the organized and unorganized, militants and moderates, terrorists as well as middle-class reformists respectful of democratic norms of civility." (p. 172) is a crude oversimplification in the description of an indeterminate social class found in South Boston. Thus the author's theory of 'Reactionary Populism' becomes nothing more than another universal existance statement - an unfalsifiable assertion! Such divigations only propound the disparity between the author's notes to the content of his text, as the author eschewed the usual canons of evidence and logic to espouse a historically determinist system along the lines of such specious authors as: Hillson, Lukas, Lupo, and O'Connor.

Professor Formisano would only have strengthened his work if he had actually included interviews and opinions of Boston residents who were actually involved in the street demonstrations to have realized that the protest against busing centered on the use of 'force' to send kids to non-selected schools in dangerous areas; an acknowledgment of the federal judge's violation of the separation of powers act; and that the Boston schools were never segregated, 'de facto' or 'de jure' in the first place. As even the author indicated, Boston residents were not against the Racial Imbalance Act. But he omited that each of the several thousand protesters were individual eye-witnesses that the schools were neither segregated nor imbalanced.

Instead, admiting he was unaffected and far away, the author's only source on South Boston were his graduate students or colleagues doing most of the research: ("...[they] called to my attention countless books, articles, and newspaper stories ... and sending them not only through the campus mail but even to Italy during the 1989 spring semester, where I continued to work on the manuscript while on a Fullbright." p.xv)

Obviously this professor did not commit himself entirely to his text, and it showed in his work. So while historian Dr. Formisano was commuting outside of Boston between the city of Cambridge and the city of Worcester, on September 12th, 1974, the first day of forced busing in Boston, my fellow classmates and I walked into Southie High to begin our senior (fourth) year; then on December 11th, 1974, I witnessed a stabbing of a classmate outside the headmaster's office on the second floor adjacent to the trophy case! Yet neither myself nor any of my classmates had ever been interviewed by the journalistic or academic 'experts' on the topic of forced busing.

The book: BOSTON AGAINST BUSING, was only written in Boston's seventeenth year of forced busing. Today in its twenty-ninth year, South Boston High School is 95% black & hispanic in a 90% white neighborhood; Southie High had been declared officially 'dysfunctional' by the Massachusetts Board of Education; and the court order costs Boston taxpayers $25 million a year to implement. Yet, thanks to judicial interference, what was once an adequate school system has been reduced to a wasteland!

Invalid as history; the book: BOSTON AGAINST BUSING by history professor Ronald P. Formisano is a smugly written, unbalanced, and, considering the author's Ph.d. in history, a surprisingly biased inquiry into the nature of Boston's forced busing protest to promulgate a history professor's unfalsifiable assertion of 'reactionary populism'. This work of 'Ignoratio Elenchi' is neither political science, social science, nor sociology and cannot be recommended.