Boycott's Repercussions

Students who watched the "freedom stay-out" Wednesday at boycott headquarters, freedom schools, or the City Hall rally reported three impressions. They were struck by the purposefulness and orderly enthusiasm of freedom school students, broken only by jubilant freedom songs. They noticed the closeness of the movement's leaders to the participants--"They were really from the people," one girl said. Finally, the students said "a sense of beginning" pervaded the boycott day.

It was hard for participants to see the stay-out in any other perspective, since the response was so emotional that even the dearest political issues were forced into the background. The implications and repercussions of the issues were farthest from peoples' minds.

Few thought of the effect the boycott might have on Boston's ecumenical movement. Sectarian division between Catholics and Protestants on school integration has been troubling Boston religious leaders interested in unity, but they have been reluctant to bring the split into the open. Richard Cardinal Cushing has supported the Boston School Committee's contention that the stay-out was harmful, practically siding with the smug bigotry of Committeewoman Louise Day Hicks. Episcopal Bishop Anson Phelps Stokes, on the other hand, has sided with the boycott leaders. One of the movement's co-chairmen is Canon James P. Breeden, a Negro Episcopalian minister. Many Protestant clergymen gave their churches for use as freedom schools.

The stay-out was designed to protest the Boston School Committee's failure to produce, at the NAACP'S request, a time-table of steps for reducing de facto segregation in public schools. The Boston press has consistently added "alleged" to "de facto segregation," but almost no one denies that the Roxbury public schools are in fact ninety percent segregated. Mrs. Hicks only claims that changing the Roxbury situation would involve sending children by bus from one neighborhood to another, an uprooting which she considers cruel. The NAACP, on the other hand, has announced that it too is opposed to the bus solution. The association only wants a committee of three School Committee members and three NAACP representatives to formulate, in cooperation with the Harvard School of Education, a "Boston" integration plan. This might or might not be modeled on the "Princeton" plan, which pairs Negro and white schools together. An integrated student body then spends half its school career in one of the buildings, and half in the other.

Movement Strengthened

But more important than the emotion of the isolated issue of the "freedom stay-out" is what the boycott has done to strength Boston's civil rights movement. The Hub has been slowest of the northern industrial centers to evolve a militant civil rights movement. Partly this is because the Negroes population is relatively small, partly it is because Negroes here are not quite so oppressively impoverished as in New York or Chicago. New York passed through these relatively pleasant phases of the movement which Boston is experiencing well over a year ago. The Negro civil rights leadership there has now begun to split, with organizations competing to attract followers.

The internecine competition in New York has meant increasing militancy and increasingly professional civil rights administration. This contrasts sharply with the situation in Boston, where unity leaves the leadership free to choose an appropriate degree of militancy, and where the cadres are still untrained volunteers. There is a small core of deeply committed students in Boston who now qualify as professional organizers. But on the whole, the civil rights movement in Boston is less advanced than in New York: as the groups here gain strength, we can expect militancy and competition.

The biggest dividend from the stay-out will not be School Committee concessions, or increasing civil rights participation, but the useful strain it puts on the leadership itself. As the demonstrations grow bigger and the objectives become more complex, civil rights groups will have to add trained personnel to their staffs to cope with burgeoning administrative duties. Organizers and fund-raisers will have to be employed on a full-time basis. The Boston movement can begin to build the kind of civil rights "bureaucracy" that has proved so crucial to the sustained, sophisticated struggle in New York. There, part-time civil rights enthusiasts have given way to predominantly Negro "bureaucracies" able to fight the subtle segregation of the North through every boycott and legal-action phase.

It is unlikely the stay-out will change the School Committee's mind. But if it doesn't work, something else will. The movement, with practice, can learn to increase the harshness and variety of its tactics until they are sufficient to break racial imbalance in the schools. Then it can move on to the housing problem.