FUP| First-Year Urban Program

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work that city: south boston previous|next home | back bay | beacon hill | boston common | chinatown | downtown boston | fenway | north end | roxbury | south end | south boston | cambridge | other places South Boston is an area mostly east of the Fitzgerald Expressway (I-93) that constitutes one of the few white ghettos in the country. The population of South Boston is largely working class, mostly Irish by ethnicity, and famous for its portrayal in Good Will Hunting, which also had a few choice scenes filmed in Harvard Square. People outside of Boston know the neighborhood largely for its role in the 1970s race explosions Boston experienced. In an effort to follow laws requiring the integration of public schools, a federal judge instituted a system by which students from various racially homogenous neighborhoods were exchanged by bus, forcing an integration of schools where one didn't exist in housing. Riots erupted; black students bused into South Boston, a historically insular community, met with verbal and physical violence neighborhood residents physically blocked the buses from arriving at school, provoked black students into fights in the cafeteria, and organized politically against busing. National news programs covering the almost daily violence condemned South Bostonians as racist and ignorant; the Boston Globe and other local papers were consistent critics of the neighborhood's residents. The story, however, as Ronald Formisano argues in Boston Against Busing, is more complex. The judge who implemented the busing plan lived in the wealthy suburb of Wellesley; similarly, the executives of the Globe and political officials who endorsed the plan were largely from the suburbs or wealthy neighborhoods within Boston, which were never included in the busing plan. In fact, South Boston was matched with the poorest black school in the city, Roxbury High, while many of the schools in wealthier (and more politically influential) white neighborhoods were never touched. While there was an undeniable racist element to South Boston's resistance to school integration, there was also a largely overlooked class element: the architects and proponents of the integration plan were mostly from areas where their children were in homogenous white school systems. Many moderate South Bostonians who considered themselves well-intentioned and racially progressive were outraged by the hypocrisy on the part of rich white liberals. Interesting census data: Southie was 96% white in 1990, but is now down to 85%. As of 1990, Charlestown (another historically homogeneous community) was 95% white; it's now down to 78%. Read the section on youth violence in "Boston in 2004" to find out about recent tensions among residents. South Boston Links - previous|next

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