Before Busing by Zebulon Vance Miletsky

Author:Zebulon Vance Miletsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press

Not wanting a repeat of what happened in 1967, after the sit-ins at the welfare office, and not wanting white police officers in the community on the night of King’s assassination became a strategic move, designed to avoid the problems and pitfalls of what took place the year before.

While the immediate spark for the riots was King’s assassination, the underlying cause was decades of injustice and inequality. It was not that Boston was exceptional or special, save in the way that its Black leadership possessed the skill, ability, and power to steer its people out of harm’s way, though even then they were only able to attenuate the race problems that visited many American cities after major race riots—certainly Watts, Newark, and Detroit were examples of what Boston did not want to happen to their city. But in this case it was not white Boston but Black Boston—with their champion James Brown—that spared themselves from this fate. This is not exceptionalism, as many historians came to believe but rather an exercise in that abstract concept of self-determination. Leaders like Chuck Turner used that power to try to create opportunities for the Black community, such as the items on his list of twenty-one demands issued just days after King’s death. James Brown could not save Boston from what lay ahead. That would take the expert guidance and strategy of Boston’s Black intelligentsia and a cadre of select Black leaders who would navigate Boston through perhaps its roughest waters yet.

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