Word: lupo
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...Alan Lupo's Liberty's Chosen Home, a landmark study of the crisis precipitated three years ago by Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr.'s decision to implement integration by busing, attempts to deal with those questions and criticisms. Lupo, an experienced Boston-bred journalist with a keen eye for detail, does not present the reader with a completely seminal work. He repeats and amplifies some of the observations Harvard's Robert Coles and the lesser-known teacher and author Kim Marshall have made about Boston's problems with busing. On balance the value of his book is that it backs...
Boston never has deserved its reputation of being a bastion of liberalism, Lupo states early in his book--from the start, bigotry and oppression existed side-by-side with more enlightened attitudes. So Bostonians cannot accurately becharged with hypocrisy. And any surprise about Southie's revolt, or the negative feelings in Charlestown, the North End, West Roxbury and Dorchester is based on a misunderstanding of Boston's history and people...
...more endemic problem is wrapped up in class differences and American attitudes toward the city. It was class, as well as race, that made busing such an explosive issue: working class whites resented being the subjects in some grand social experiment designed and supported by middle-class suburbanities. Lupo condemns the arrogance and inflexibility of a system that shows little regard for the concept of neighborhood and consciously mixes the poor South Boston Irish, traditionally hostile to blacks, and the economically and socially deprived of Roxbury. The results were predictable. Moreover, little constructive purpose was served by playing chess with...
...Lupo writes with the same harsh, penetrating anger and displays the same compassion and understanding of the working class that New York City's Pete Hamill once demonstrated in essays like "The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class" before he lost touch with his roots and started hobnobbing with Hollywood and Manhattan's Beautiful People. And in the way Hamill knew the people of Brooklyn, Lupo knows the people of the North End and South Boston and Dorchester. He seems incapable of patronizing them. Although we see them as ignorant, fearful of change, bigoted, and often violent, their finer...
...school-integration plan ordered the busing of children between the city's most antagonistic neighborhoods (Irish Catholic South Boston and black Roxbury). It was resisted by every defiant or foot-dragging means possible by a Boston School Committee that exploited the town's inherent bigotry and fear. Lupo contends that Mayor Kevin White, a progressive but hard-nosed political pro, saved Boston from chaos in 1974 by pleading, cajoling and threatening the city's many factions-including its antibusing police-through wearying hours of public meetings, private coffee klatches, telephone calls and stormy sessions with top aides...