Book on busing not grounded in reality

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BOOK REVIEW Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, by J. Anthony Lukas, Alfred A. Knopf, 1985, 659 pages, $19.95.

Nowhere was the resistance of racists more violent, better organized, and long lasting than during the battle to desegregate Boston's public schools in the mid-1970s.

In the wake of a 1974 desegregation order by Federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity, white mobs took to the streets on a daily basis-hurling rocks, screaming racist epithets, beating Black victims. During the crisis, politicians from Mayor Kevin White to President Gerald Ford fanned the flames by denouncing "forced busing.

Yet the Black community and its allies won the battle. Ten years later Boston's schools are desegregated. Police cars ac -company the buses, and there are still incidents of racist violence, but the organized racist movement has been severely set back. Despite the withdrawal of many white children from the schools, desegregation is now accepted as a fact of life.

In this context appears J. Anthony Lukas' Common Ground, a journalistic account of the impact of the desegregation struggle on the lives of three Boston families-Irish, Black, and Yankee.

The book makes compelling reading. Every major character is presented with a Roots-like chapter detailing the complete family history. Lukas presents the social conflict from the point of view of various family members so convincingly that the reader feels he or she is looking at the world just as each character sees it.

In addition, five key actors in the drama and the institutions they represent are de -picted in depth: Mayor Kevin White, ROAR leader Louise Day Hicks, Cardinal Humberto Medeiros, Boston Globe editor Tom Winship, and Judge Garrity.

For or against busing?

Common Ground is an interesting social history. But it makes no effort to tell the story of the political battle as it actually unfolded. Lukas doesn't sum up anything, nor does he allow the characters to sum up. Seemingly, the book makes no case for or against busing as a way to desegregate the schools.

However, all social histories are influenced by a political bias, and Lukas' bias, despite all his attempts to be objective, deeply flaws his account. Common Ground exudes an atmosphere of disenchanted liberalism. While the ug -liness of the racists emerges, the Black struggle against racist violence and for busing is simply omitted. Busing appears as a project of idealistic Yankee liberals. Like all half truths, this is really false.

Busing became an issue in Boston because Black parents fought for it in court, and Black youth displayed incredible courage and tenacity in facing down racist mobs in the streets.

Time and again the Black community and its allies outmobilized the racists in the ANSPOR streets to demonstrate their determination to win their goals.

Lukas, however, never tells this story. For the former New York Times reporter, this news is not fit to print. Of the five political leaders he chose to profile, incredibly not one is Black. The bias also emerges in the choice of families.

Mother and daughter McGoff, who are Irish, are activists in Powder Keg, the Charlestown racist outfit, so we get a lot of details about this group's internal politics. But the Twymon family, which is Black, is not equally involved in the desegregation struggle. The mother is something of a church activist involved in the housing SOCIALIST ACT issue, and her estranged sister's home is attacked by racist thugs. But the balance is not the same.

The Twymon daughters, who are bused to Charlestown, are somewhat over -whelmed by the situation. Understandably, they begin to cut school. Lukas' message is hazy, but there: Busing was an obstacle to their education. In reality, racists were the obstacle to their education.

Disillusionment with social change is personified by the Diver family, who are New England Yankees. A Harvard Law graduate, Colin Diver turns down a big money job for public service in the liberal Kevin White administration during the late 1960s. But as White marches steadily to the right, concluding a secret deal with Louise Day Hicks, Diver becomes disenchanted and ultimately withdraws from government for academia.

Turning his attention to the very real problem of crime in the South End, Boston's only integrated neighborhood, Diver organizes community patrols. He quickly finds himself in the role of urban vigilante. Rejecting this alternative, the family leaves the South End for the suburbs.

Some might conclude that the problems Diver sought to change are intractable and have their roots in human nature. But the real lesson of the Diver story is quite different. Social change is made by oppressed people struggling in their own interests. That's the way the battle of Boston was won, in reality.

Racism, crime, unemployment, poverty: These will be with us until its victims organize to replace the social system that spawns these horrors. This sense of things is completely alien to Common Ground, and that's the vacuum on which this nontheless intriguing story founders.

ON JANUARY 1986 5

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Little attention, for example, was paid