Can anyone reccomend any books about the Desegregation Riots in South Boston in the 70's?

[Taverner]

Have there ever been movies about it (besides the intro to 'The Departed'?)

[virgogal]

1. Common Ground. J. Anthony Lukas

[Taverner]

2. Thx

He was the judge wasn't he?

[chelsea0011]

3. I think the judge was Garrity

But that is considered the best book about the era.

[Davis_X_Machina]

4. Hon. W. (for Wendell) Arthur Garrity. As someone who lived through it...

...who had relatives in Southie throwing rocks at buses, and relatives working for the Boston Public Schools trying to get kids onto those same buses in one piece, where family Christmases were canceled for a decade over it, I will tell you Lukas' book has no peer. (I know/knew nine people in his index....several are now dead -- it was thirty-plus years ago.)

[rug]

5. Don't forget how ROAR was beaten back.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restore_Our_Alienated_Rights

[Davis_X_Machina]

6. It wasn't the PLP...

...so much as the Sox' pennant run and series appearance, that made September of '75 quieter than the year before. The two most popular guys in town, Luis Tiant and Jim Rice, just happened to be black.....

I have a few theories about who may have authored that particular Wikipedia piece....

[TNDemo]

7. But racial problems and bigots are only in the south.

:evilgrin:

[Davis_X_Machina]

9. No sane person..

...and certainly no sane person baptized in the Gate of Heaven church, maintains that.

[rug]

8. Don't underestimate PLP's role.

Baseball is rarely the vanguard of social change. It certainly didn't stop the firebombing of the NAACP two months after the World Series.

[Davis_X_Machina]

11. The disorganized crime...

...that flourished in the wake of the troubles in Southie, and particularly Charlestown, was drawing way too many law enforcement flies. ROAR started being run as an extortion racket, demanding 'contributions' for 'the struggle' from local businesses, using a model imported from Derry and Belfast. You didn't have a little embroidered shamrock showing financial support for the Academy, you were a paraiah. This represented competition for the boyos, who basically told people to back off, or they'd have have to deal with them and the feds. The level of theft from the Moran terminal and Castle Island was astronomical, and they didn't want a lot of attention. (Ironically, the mob was up to its scally caps in FBI moles at the same time.)

[rug]

13. And Louise Day Hicks was unravelling as quickly as Christine O'Donnell.

[Davis_X_Machina]

15. Palin:Hicks::O'Donnell:Pixie Palladino. n/t

[EFerrari]

10. Holy crap, I didn't know any of that. Thanks, rug. n/t

[rug]

12. It's an overlooked time.

The buses for the May Day march were assembling at Columbia Point in South Boston when a mob that had been innocently hanging out in the ballfield nearby, with bats, attacked the gathering point. Given what they had been doing to school buses and school children since the previous September, this was expected. Unlike September, they were met with force. Four of us were arrested for being "concerned in affray" and those charges were later dismissed.

Coincidentally, that day, April 30, 1975, is the same day Saigon fell. I remember, while lying down in the cell waiting to see a judge, talking to another guy about the various Vietnam War demonstrations we had gone to. A common slogan then was "Right On, Take Saigon". He told me, "I'll be damned, they did."

I don't like Afghanistan either and I still don't like racists, north or south.

[EFerrari]

14. Wow.

:yourock:

[Taverner]

17. W --- O --- W

Have you ever written?

[rug]

18. No. But it's an interesting subject you're looking up.

I think I'll read those two book suggestions you got. What was interesting about Boston, aside from it being in the north, is that it was essentially working class people who were agitated to such vicious racist acts in the guise of defending the neighborhood against "them". It's like petri dish nationalism that flowers now in the hills of Aghanistan and the hills of Pennsylvania. And it's pretty clear which class gains from these divisions.

BTW, if you read more about this, read too about the New York draft riots during the Civil War. Irish immigrants and poor working class whites rebelled against the draft which allowed rich whites to literally buy their way out of the draft. Sounds good so far. Until the draft riots turned into the lynching in Manhattan of African Americans whom the poor whites blamed for causing the draft in the first place. American history is littered with confusion and distraction disseminated by the ruling class. Reminds me of these great lines from Dylan's "When the Ship Comes In":

And the words that are used
For to get the ship confused
Will not be understood as they're spoken
For the chains of the sea
Will have busted in the night
And will be buried at the bottom of the ocean.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXJlBGRLLWM

[petronius]

16. Not strictly on target, but I've heard good things about "All Souls" by Michael MacDonald