Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s by Ronald P. Formisano

Author:Ronald P. Formisano [Formisano, Ronald P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Education, United States, Educational Policy & Reform, Civil Rights, 20th Century, Political Science, History, Politics, General
ISBN: 9780807855263
Google: xDSbkZQYY1MC
Goodreads: 1686218
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Published: 1991-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

Fear of Change: The Reactionary as Conservative

If the major newspapers and local television stations played down black aggressions in the schools, as antibusers claimed, one journalist in Boston, Dick Sinnott, did persistently call attention to black attacks on whites. Sinnott unflaggingly criticized busing, liberals, the media, and the suburbs, and was perhaps the most popular print spokesman of the antibusing legions. His column appeared regularly in the Transcript, serving West Roxbury, Roslindale, and Jamaica Plain, the South Boston Tribune, Charlestown Patriot, Dorchester Argus-Citizen, and a dozen other neighborhood weeklies, including the Post-Gazette, which circulated widely in the suburbs. Sinnott also came to be a fixture for several years on local television news shows as one of the few media representatives of the antibusing position.41

Sinnott’s education and career had led in conservative directions. After attending various business colleges, with a stint at the University of Wisconsin Naval Training School, he spent eleven years as a reporter for the Associated Press, and in 1959 he became press secretary to Mayor John Collins. In 1969 Kevin White appointed him city censor and chief of the licensing division. In his last four years as a reporter, Sinnott had served as New England entertainment editor and thus knew show business. It seemed fitting that the man who served as the city’s moral watchdog, holding the gates against obscenity and pornography, also expressed so effectively the reaction of white neighborhoods against Boston’s desegregation. The connection between the general backlash against the social and cultural changes of the 1960s and the specific white backlash against black militance that Hicks had embodied in the 1960s found perhaps its fullest articulation in the 1970s with Sinnott.

In 1974 Sinnott lived in Hyde Park and had four sons in the public schools. Two of them were in Boston Latin, but he pulled out the youngest two and sent them to Catholic schools. Though Sinnott had grown up in Dorchester, his roots ran straight back into the antibusing heartland: his father boasted of his Townie origins while his mother hailed from Southie.

Sinnott once described his readers as “mostly 40 or older. Bostonians who were affected by the Depression and who fought in or vividly remember World War Two, and/or the Korean War. They remember FDR and Alfred Landon and Wendell Wilkie and Harry Truman, they liked Ike and they used to boo when Herbert Hoover’s face appeared on the Pathe news.”42

For these people black militancy, affirmative action, and forced busing were part of an entire syndrome of social malaise rampant since the 1960s. On a broad range of issues Sinnott voiced the anxieties of the vulnerable lower-middle and middle classes: excessive rights for criminals, insufficient protection for victims, restoration of the death penalty, opposition to gun control, abortion, and pornography. It was not so much Sinnott’s ideological consistency that mattered to his readers, however, but rather his ability to articulate their frustration, anxieties, and anger. As one older West Roxbury couple wrote to him, “When we read your column, it is like hearing an echo of our thoughts.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.