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Sporadic violence erupted every night, chiefly scattered skirmishes involving white youths who hurled rocks and beer bottles at police. Some whites were also irate that Senator Edward Kennedy has urged compliance with the court's busing order. The house in Brookline where John F. Kennedy was born was damaged by a Molotov cocktail. Painted on the front sidewalk was a piece of angry advice: BUS TEDDY.
By week's end attendance had risen to 68.4%, up from the 48% average during the yearlong white boycott in 1974-75, and was giving school officials some reason to hope that the boycott was crumbling. Said Lou Perullo, a school department statistician: "As parents see that it's safe, they are sending their kids." Observed Phyllis Curtis, an antibusing mother of four non-boycotting children in South Boston: "Some parents would keep their children out of school for five years to stop the busing. But the kids would have to pay the price. When they look for jobs, they won't find them because they'll have no education. That's not healthy, not for them and not for the community."
Still, emotions were high inside many schools. Said Karen O'Leary, 15, a white freshman at South Boston High School: "It's very strange. We just eye each other." Added a white schoolmate, Susan Downs, 15: "It's scary. With the black kids coming in, it's getting more and more tense. You can't trust anybody because you never know what they'll do." Kenny Williams, a black student at Boston's Hyde Park High School, found that "everything is cool right now. Of course all the white kids here are being nice to us, but you know they're sneaky and probably at some point they will try something." Added Malinda Brown, 15, a black junior who is bused to Charlestown High School: "I don't want to graduate from there. I'd rather go to my old school. I felt more free there." Indeed, as in Louisville, there was widespread concern that the uneasy peace in the city might end in violence once the National Guardsmen and federal marshals were withdrawn.
Boston and Louisville demonstrated anew that Northern cities are no happier with school desegregation than their counterparts in the South. Since the historic Supreme Court decision of 1954 that separate schools can never be equal, hundreds of communities have been forced by the courts to desegregate. Most are in the South, which had dual black and white school systems for nearly a century. More recently, the N.A.A.C.P. and other civil rights organizations have successfully challenged the legality of segregated schools in the North. They argue that such official actions as building schools in all-black or all-white neighborhoods and racial gerrymandering of district boundaries also constitute illegal segregation.
To remedy such situations, the federal courts have frequently ordered cities to bus children to neighborhoods far from their homes. In addition to Boston and Louisville, cities now being forced by courts to bus include Miami; Corpus Christi and Beaumont, Texas; Charlotte, N.C.; Denver; San Francisco; Springfield,