Volume 22, Number 13 · August 7, 1975
Stricken Boston
By Robert Coles
A City in Terror: 1919—The Boston Police Strike
by Francis Russell
Viking, 256 pp., $10.00
Boston, during the past winter and spring, offered Southerners a fistful of ironies. While schools in Mississippi's Delta or the so-called Black Belt of Alabama, just over ten years ago the bastions of segregationist resistance to the civil rights movement, have been quietly desegregated for several years, Boston's schools have been described by a federal court as deliberately and overwhelmingly segregated. Judge Garrity's effort to change that state of affairs met with opposition that surely rivals the worst kind once experienced by black children in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi. Boston is a delicious object for Southern scorn, or serious or mock indignation. Boston, and its metropolitan area, is not just one of many Northern cities—though for some Southerners, one suspects, any evidence whatsoever of moral hypocrisy on the part of that nondescript group still called 'Yankees' would be sufficient.
Review, 5347 words
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