Every Little Breeze Whispers Louise

"I have been elected to the School Committee, and that's what I will be." Whatever it was supposed to mean Louise Day Hicks's victorious burble sums up her mandate from the voters of Boston. Disencumbered of Arthur Garland's opposition and with four newly elected colleagues still huddling in her shadow, Boston's political Leviathan will be making or breaking school policies all by herself for the next two years.

By massively endorsing Louise Hicks, Boston has reminded the nation that democracy has two faces: "This-tonight-is a vote of confidence," Mrs. Hicks said Tuesday. "The people are speaking. Sometimes we hear just a vocal minority, but tonight, through the democratic process, we are hearing the majority." Next morning, defeated candidate Melvin King, a Negro, was telling reporters, "A little bit of democracy died in Boston yesterday."

Boston elected Mrs. Hicks to preserve the neighborhood school," which is a polite way of saying de facto segregation. She carried 15 of the city's 22 wards, and of the seven intransigent yards, five are predominantly Negro. In another, Mrs. Hicks missed first place by only five votes.

Arthur Gartland, the only incumbent who spoke out against racial imbalance, won a plurality of votes only in the Back-Bay-Beacon Hill area and in Allston. Both are middle-class white neighborhoods, buffered from Roxbury geographically as well as economically. In the final totals Gartland was shoved out of the number have position by John J. McDonough, a complete newcomer whose only stated virtue was his accordance with Mrs. Hicks's philosophy.

As an incumbent, Gartland had been expected slip back into office amidst the general clamor for the status quo. The Wednesday newspapers blamed the loss on his affiliation with a reform group, the Citizens for Boston Schools. The citizens backed four candidates besides Gartland, all of whom lost after managing to get on the final ballot. The introduction of this reform slate crystallized the racial problem as a political issue.

Complying With the Law

Although the thrust of its campaign was toward overhauling Boston's archaic educational practices and facilities, the Citizens group tamely advocated compliance with the new Massachusetts Racial Imbalance Bill. This law, passed in July, requires local school boards to submit by November 22 plans to eliminate non-white majorities in any given school.

But in late August, Committeeman Thomas Eisenstadt ignited the racial issue by attempting to block the busing of 583 children out of over-crowded Roxbury schools, a plan proposed by the Superintendent. Eisenstadt's motion passed, with Gartland and Thomas Lee dissenting. Although nearly a thousand pupils of both races had been bused the year before, for the same reasons, busing suddenly loomed as a dramatic threat of the "neighborhood school."

Negro parents responded to the busing edict with Operation Exodus. They privately arranged to bus 300 of their children out of the Roxbury schools which were doomed to over-crowding and possible double sessions. Residents of Dorchester, West Roxbury, Jamacia Plain, Hyde Park, and Roslindale all got a taste of the real thing, as Negro children began to enroll in their schools.

The Citizens' pamphleteers worked day and night to counter the anti-busing fervor. They wrote, "the issue [racial imbalance] has been clouded by the false emphasis on busing, which has frightened people into forgetting that the real issue is educational progress of all children." They cited the Kiernan report, the document which led to the Imbalance Law, to prove that segregation was educationally harmful. Mrs. Hicks responded by pledging, in effect, to ignore the law. And one week ago, Mrs. Hicks and her four disciples rode a school bus into office.

Of the successful candidates, only Mrs. Hicks did any campaigning. But she plugged Eisenstadt, Lee, O'Connor, and McDonough whenever she got the chance. She spoke ominously of "busing all over the city," encouraging the casual bigots' fears that their children might someday be bused into Negro neighborhood schools, although law requires that parents give permission before their children can be transported.

Joseph Lee allowed himself to be identified with Mrs. Hicks, despite his August vote in favor of busing. Lee has always been fairly outspoken in his opposition to the principle of racial balancing, but he has his own scheme for satisfying the state requirements. Dubbed "scatteration," the plan calls for shipping Negro children to suburban schools, where Boston would pay their tuition. Theoretically this would halt the exodus of white Boston residents to the lily-white suburbs.

Successful Bedfellows

Apparently Eisenstack felt his voter strength had been slipping ever since he voted for meeting with the leaders of the 1964 school boycott, but his busing stand unequivocally bonded him to Mrs. Hicks in political wedlock. He ran second. Thomas O'Connor, has never, in his four years on the Committee, been known to vote against Mrs. Hicks.

Boston reporters notwithstanding, Arthur Gartland '36 seemed to know exactly what he was risking when he lent his name to the Citizens for Boston Schools. The Hicks juggernaut was proclaiming the current excellence of Boston schools. In his campaign speeches, Gartland pointed to the $29 million in building funds which has been available to the Committee since a 1963 bond issue; only $2.2 million of this has been allocated to date, although in some schools, more than 40 pupils are crowded into classrooms. Gartland also critized the obsolete vocational training program, the large number of temporary, unlicensed teachers now employed in Boston, and the old examination system of teacherhiring. He cited the reading scores of Boston school children in the fourth through twelfth grades, which are considerably below the national average. And he attacked racial imbalance.

Gartland is no flaming radical. He is an insurance broker, Irish and Roman Catholic, born and raised in Boston. He admits privately that de facto segregation never bothered him until the school boycott of 1963, when he was already serving on the school committee. His concern first manifested itself when, as a minority of one, he proposed that the school committee discuss the boycott leaders' grievances. After the second school boycott in February, 1964, Gartland finally succeeded in mustering the two additional votes necessary to bring about a meeting. Gartland finally succeeded in mustering the two additional votes necessary to bring about a meeting. Gartland was apparently the only member who paid attention at that meeting.

Last winter the Kiernan report, compiled by a distinguished committee of educators, public officials, and clerics, came out against racial imbalance. The report bluntly stated that de facto segregated schools erode the motivation and self-respect of Negro children, often lead to inferior facilities for Negroes, and encourage prejudice in both races.

Armed with the Kiernan Report and faced with the new state law, Gartland entered the lists this summer as a firm opponent of racial imbalance. He is still reluctant to propose busing as a comprehensive solution. This summer be moved to institute a study of redistricting; the Committee, to Gartland's surprise, approved it for sometime in the future. He also envisions larger elementary schools with up to 800 pupils, built near ghetto boundaries.

Louise Doesn't Mean It

Gartland's long-range proposals are practically identical to the compliance plan which Mrs. Hicks says she will submit by November 22. The only difference is that Gartland is serious. Mrs. Hicks describes her plan as a long-range schedule for school construction on the peripheries of Negro residential areas. However, as she assured reporters on election night, Boston has only to submit a plan, not to complete it at any given date. She concluded with a grin and a counter-question: "The peripheries move. What do you do then?"

If her record to construction is any indication, Mrs. Hicks could probably delay any significant new building for the next 20 years. The Committee has made a pretense for the last two years of hunting for a site for the new Boston English High School, the "keystone" of any new building program. Gartland has repeatedly suggested a BRA-owned site in Roxbury; it is accessible, available, and the new school would be an asset to the new housing development it would join. But no one listens to Gartland.

On the subject of redistricting, Mrs. Hicks announces, "I will never redistrict for the sake of rebalancing." She insists "there is no way to eliminate racial imbalance in Boston's schools." Ever since the Imbalance Law introduced the possibility of a loss of state funds, Mrs. Hicks has ferociously assured Boston that nothing of the kind will happen, and if it does she will get the law repealed.

A Department of Health, Education, and Welfare team is now trying to determine if Boston has violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Law of 1964, which forbids discrimination in federally-aided programs. The law does not prohibit de facto segregation, only willful segregation of the uneven allocation of resources. Although $34 million in funds were briefly withheld from Chicago this fall, due to fairly blatant violations of the law, they were soon reinstated. In Boston it appears that some white neighborhoods, such as Charleston, receive just as raw a deal in education as does Roxbury.

Why do Mrs. Hicks and her disciples whip up such a political turmoil for small political peanuts like the School Committee? Mrs. Hicks insists that she honestlybelieves in neighborhood schools. Instead it is probably safe to say that all five members-elect are genuinely afraid of Negroes.

In the Swim

For the young lawyers, Eisenstadt and McDonough, School Committee seats can provide invaluable contacts. They will be in the public eye and in the swim of Boston politics, an excellent opportunity to extend their professional reach. The School Committee job probably hasn't done Mrs. Hicks's law practice any harm. Furthermore, the School Committee provides one access route to the City Council, which is a traditional source of Boston mayors.

Mrs. Hicks has been hinting her political apprenticeship is over and she intends to run for mayor in 1967. She commented cryptically on election night that she will now have a chance to "go hunting. And I'm not saying where or with what." She admits that, around nomination time, "there was a great hue and cry throughout the city that I run for mayor."

Her most obvious asset is the 92,579 votes she carried away last week. She won 19,523 more votes than the front-running city council candidate on the same ballot. Sixty-four percent of the voters chose Mrs. Hicks, while the school committee runner-up tallied less than 50 per cent. These figures indicate that she received large number of bullet votes: ballets with only her named checked among the School Committee candidates.

In 1963, a mayoral election year, Mrs. Hicks garnered 125,000 votes, far outstripping Mayor Collins. If she runs for mayor, Mrs. Hicks will probably be fighting Collins's record, rather than Collin's himself. He may default in order to run for U.S. Senator when Leverett Saltonstall's seat comes up in 1968.

Hicks, the Ax-Man

The crucial question is whether School Committee votes, based on a narrow, highly emotional issue, will hold good in a contest for the leadership of the New Boston. Mrs. Hicks did carry Boston in her unsuccessful candidacy for State Treasurer last year, but as in the past, she was competing for the political second string. If she wants to take the helm of an All American City, Louise Hicks will have to doctor her image considerably. She now stands on a completely negative, reactionary platform, and is better known as an ax-man than as an innovator.

It is just possible that Mrs. Hicks will contrive to inject the racial issue into the mayoral race, by means of the impending crisis over state aid. If Commissioner Kiernan is not appeased by Mrs. Hicks's integration plan, or satisfied with its implementation, he can withdraw state aid (now amounting to 28 per cent of the budget) from the Boston schools. If he approves her proposals, on the other hand, state aid will go up by 25 per cent as an incentive to racial adjustments.

If Kiernan withdraws aid, Collins would be forced to put the screws on the School Committee to comply with the law. Collins's first economy as mayor was to chop a couple of million off the school budget, and he needs every cant he can get. Furthermore, he can't risk siding with Mrs. Hicks on the racial issue if he wants to win a statewide election.

With Collins applying public pressure, Mrs. Hicks would become the beleagured, last-ditch defender of the "neighborhood school," hoping to gain control of the city's finances in order to save the little white children of South Boston. Another road to profitable martyrdom would be a losing fight to repeal the Imbalance Bill.

Either way, Boston is in for some exciting adventures in democracy.