Word: charlestowners
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...Boston's white, working-class Charlestown neighborhood, hundreds of mothers, many with small children, chanted: "Over there, over there, the kids aren't going over there." Just outside Louisville, 1,500 people attended a Ku Klux Klan cross burning one night, and 6,000 shouted "Boycott! Boycott! Boycott!" at a protest rally...
Aside from a white students' boycott last Thursday, with attendance back up on Friday because of the weekend football game, these mothers' marches have been the only formal protests in Charlestown. And the cries of Pat Russell, president of Powder Keg, an anti-busing group, "Remember, a mother's power is the greatest power on earth!" did not sound very stirring on the first day they marched, when the crowd of women met police several lines deep with riot helmets and nightsticks in their hands, waiting to prevent them from parading down past Bunker Hill Monument in front...
...first two weeks of court-ordered busing, at the beginning and end of each school day, Charlestown High School has looked like a besieged citadel. It is almost at the top of a hill, on a block facing the Bunker Hill Monument, which one boycotting student sarcastically predicted would be renamed "Martin Luther King Monument." Scores of policemen--the Tactical Patrol Force, U.S. Marshals, National Guard Helicopter pilots, MDC and city police, state troopers, and even an MDC sharpshooter--have all been on duty, guarding the area around the school to ensure the peaceful loading and unloading of school buses...
...people of Charlestown, who are intensely proud of and loyal to their community and resentful of the police presence, will be the deciding factor. Jimmy Breslin hints that those Irish-Americans will stick to the anti-busing fight for a long time, characteristic of their nature to doggedly support a "doomed" cause...
...present, Charlestown protests do not seem to have much political awareness about them. In fact the most visible protests have been a series of Mother's Marches, in which women and girls often with babies in strollers, walk two by two chanting repeatedly the Lord's Prayer and Hail Marys. They march to neighborhood churches to pray and sing hymns, sometimes kneeling down to statues of patron saints to pray for intercession to stop forced busing. The unvoiced desire to keep blacks out of their schools and community is obviously there, producing prayers that are suspect in their motivation...