LIBERTY'S CHOSEN HOME
by ALAN LUPO
330 pages. Little, Brown. $12.50.
The question has become a shibboleth: Why has the North's most violent resistance to integrated schools arisen in Boston, the place John Greenleaf Whittier called "Christian liberty's chosen home"? Alan Lupo, a onetime reporter (the Baltimore Evening Sun, the Boston Globe) and dogged historical researcher, provides some thoughtful answers.
Lupo writes out of sympathy and sadness for a city afflicted by tensions that stretch far beyond its precincts. Boston failed to cope peacefully with its school-busing crisis of 1974 in part because Boston had never been a unified city....