With the Presidential race finally over (I’ll have some Beijing-centric wrap up on that soon), political junkies like me have little to follow except for the recount in Minnesota and process stories about Obama’s transition, so it was with nostalgic glee that I caught this column in today’s Boston Globe about the 1983 race for Mayor of Boston.
This is the first political event that I remember being aware of as a kid. I wasn’t around for the start of busing in Boston but I remember the racial troubles that were palpable throughout the city in the years that followed. The mayoral race between Mel King and Ray Flynn took place amidst an ocean of racial undercurrents, yet these two leaders strove to keep those debates -and problems arising from them- contained.
One of my earliest memories is from Election Day that year. I can remember walking to the Edward Everett School where I attended kindergarten that morning and seeing all of the people holding signs and handing out leaflets as people walked into the polling station that was in the basement there. Just before I got onto the school grounds, a bus drove by. It was filled with black kids and was on its way to a white neighborhood to drop them at a school that had been forcibly integrated just a few years prior.
What I remember was the entire busload of black kids all pushed up against one side of the bus, with half of them hanging out of the windows, yelling: “MEL KING!! MEL KING!!”
Now these kids couldn’t vote, but they were swept up in what was happening at the time: White Boston was in a race to beat back an insurgent Black Boston. It was truly the first racial electoral battle of Boston’s modern age. Previous battles had been fought between the Brahmins and the Irish in the late 19th and early 20th century, but now it was different.
Whites “won,” but they elected a guy who was pro-desegregation and who worked hard to keep the progress of race relations in the city on track. One generation later, Boston is a “majority-minority” city with far fewer racial troubles to speak of, and who voted overwhelmingly to elect America’s first black president. We’ve come a long way, baby!
Damn, I love my hometown.
