Kevin Hagan White (September 25, 1929 – January 27, 2012) was an American politician best known as the
Mayor of Boston
The mayor of Boston is the head of the municipal government in Boston, Massachusetts. Boston has a mayor–council government. Boston's mayoral elections are nonpartisan (as are all municipal elections in Boston), and elect a mayor to a four- ...
, an office to which he was first elected at the age of 38, and which he held for four terms, amounting to 16 years, from 1968 to 1984. He presided as mayor during racially turbulent years in the late 1960s and 1970s, and the start of desegregation of schools via
court-ordered busing of school children in Boston. White won the mayoral office in the 1967 general election in a hard-fought campaign opposing the anti-busing and anti-desegregation Boston School Committee member
Louise Day Hicks. Earlier he had been elected
Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth
The Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth is the principal public information officer of the government of the U.S. state of Massachusetts.
The Secretary of the Commonwealth oversees the Corporations Division, the Elections Division, the ...
in 1960 at the age of 31, and he resigned from that office after his election as Mayor.
White was credited with revitalizing the waterfront, downtown and financial districts of Boston, and transforming
Quincy Market
Quincy Market is a historic building near Faneuil Hall in downtown Boston, Massachusetts. It was constructed between 1824 and 1826 and named in honor of mayor Josiah Quincy, who organized its construction without any tax or debt. The market is ...
into a metropolitan and tourist destination. In his first term he implemented local neighborhood "Little City Halls" but ended them after narrowly winning the 1975 election during the Boston school desegregation busing crisis, and subsequently constructed a classic and centralized city political machine. He was unsuccessful in his efforts to obtain higher office (
Governor of Massachusetts
The governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is the chief executive officer of the government of Massachusetts. The governor is the head of the state cabinet and the commander-in-chief of the commonwealth's military forces.
Massachuset ...
and
Vice President of the United States
The vice president of the United States (VPOTUS) is the second-highest officer in the executive branch of the U.S. federal government, after the president of the United States, and ranks first in the presidential line of succession. The vice ...
).
His mayoral administration was subject to decades-long federal investigations into corruption, which led to the conviction of more than 20 city hall employees and nearly as many businessmen; the investigations were influential in leading White to decline to seek reelection in 1983, allowing him to avoid public debate and criticism by other mayoral candidates on the topic. He himself was never indicted for wrongdoing.
Family and education
Kevin H. White was born in
Jamaica Plain
Jamaica Plain is a neighborhood of in the City of Boston, Massachusetts, United States. Settled by Puritans seeking farmland to the south, it was originally part of the former Town of Roxbury, now also a part of the City of Boston. The commun ...
, Boston, on September 25, 1929 to Joseph and Patricia Hagan White. White's father,
Joseph C. White, and maternal grandfather, Henry E. Hagan, both served as Boston City Council presidents; Joseph White had also been a state legislator.
Kevin White married Kathryn Galvin in 1956, the daughter of
William J. Galvin, another Boston City Council president.
White was educated at
Tabor Academy,
Williams College
Williams College is a private liberal arts college in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It was established as a men's college in 1793 with funds from the estate of Ephraim Williams, a colonist from the Province of Massachusetts Bay who was kill ...
(A.B., 1952),
Boston College Law School
Boston College Law School (BC Law) is the law school of Boston College. It is situated on a wooded campus in Newton, Massachusetts, about 1.5 miles from the university's main campus in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.
With approximately 800 stud ...
(LL.B., 1955) and the Harvard
Graduate School of Public Administration (now known as the
John F. Kennedy School of Government
The Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), officially the John F. Kennedy School of Government, is the school of public policy and government of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The school offers master's degrees in public policy, public ...
).
Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
White was first elected to the open statewide office of
Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth
The Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth is the principal public information officer of the government of the U.S. state of Massachusetts.
The Secretary of the Commonwealth oversees the Corporations Division, the Elections Division, the ...
in 1960 at the age of 31. The incumbent secretary,
Joseph D. Ward, decided to run for governor that year (and lost to
John A. Volpe in the general election). White won the Democratic Party nomination at the state convention with the crucial assistance of his father and father in law, who called in political debts in order to obtain enough votes to win the nomination. He was nominated on the third ballot of the convention, thus becoming the Democratic candidate in the general election in November,
in which he defeated a rising Republican,
Edward W. Brooke (who in later years was elected U.S. Senator).
In 1962, White was reelected to a second two-year term, and in 1966 reelected to a four-year term. He served in office through 1967, resigning on December 20, 1967, after winning the Boston mayoral election that November.
[
][
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Mayor of Boston
White successfully ran for the open mayoral office in 1967, winning his first election with a coalition of Italian, liberal and black voters.
He campaigned for
rent control
Rent regulation is a system of laws, administered by a court or a public authority, which aims to ensure the affordability of housing and tenancies on the rental market for dwellings. Generally, a system of rent regulation involves:
* Price con ...
; one of his slogans was "When landlords raise rents, Kevin White raises hell." This was implemented in Boston in 1970, after a Massachusetts enabling law for municipalities was enacted in 1970.
[
]
White succeeded mayor
John F. Collins, who stepped down after eight years that included urban renewal projects including the planning and building of
Boston City Hall
Boston City Hall is the seat of city government of Boston, Massachusetts. It includes the offices of the mayor of Boston and the Boston City Council. The current hall was built in 1968 to assume the functions of the Old City Hall.
It is a con ...
, thus paving the way for the future rebuilding and rehabilitation of the waterfront, financial and business districts of the city center that White later undertook.
Elections for Mayor
The
Boston mayoral election of 1967 had a primary and a general election. In a ten-candidate non-party primary election for the open office on September 26, 1967, White was second, drawing 19.83% of the vote with 30,789 votes, and Boston School Board member
Louise Day Hicks was first, with 28.16% of the vote and 43,722 votes. For the general election on November 7, 1967, only White and Hicks were on the ballot in a runoff contest. White narrowly defeated Hicks, who had taken a staunchly anti-busing (de facto anti-desegregation) position as a member of the Boston School Committee. Her slogan was the coded "You know where I stand."
Hicks's campaign against more progressive fellow Democrat Kevin White was so acrimonious that the ''
Boston Globe
''The Boston Globe'' is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes, and has a total circulation of close to 300,000 print and digital subscribers. ''The Boston Glob ...
'', under the editorship of Thomas Winship, broke a 75-year tradition of political neutrality to endorse White.
[Farrell, John A., ''Tip O'Neill and the Democratic Century'' (Boston: Little, Brown, 2001), p. 522]
White won the general election with 53.25 percent of the vote, (102,706, only 12,552 more than Hicks' 90,154).
Two years later, in 1969, Hicks was elected to the Boston City Council by large majorities, and then in 1970 to Congress, winning the open district formerly held by retiring U.S. House Speaker
John W. McCormack after defeating
Joseph Moakley by 10% in the multi-candidate Democratic primary.
In the
1971 mayoral election White won a second term, again defeating Hicks, this time by 40,000 votes. Hicks in 1972 would lose her congressional seat by two percentage points and 3,428 votes in a post-census revised district and a four-candidate general election that included a rematch with Moakley running as an Independent. Hicks was re-elected to the Boston City Council in 1973, remaining there until she retired from public office in 1981.
In the
1975 mayoral election, White barely defeated State Senator
Joe Timilty, the year after the start of court-ordered school desegregation and busing.
The
1979 mayoral election was also close, against the same opponent.
White did not run again in the
1983 mayoral election, which was won by then-city councilor
Raymond Flynn.
Administration
Mayor White’s early administrations were noteworthy for the racial and ethnic diversity of the senior aides and staff to the Mayor, with many staffers subsequently going on to influential positions and elected office.
White decentralized municipal government by establishing in the early years of his tenure in office a number of "Little City Halls" in local neighborhoods, giving more influence to local leadership and ethnic and racial minorities to access city hall bureaucracy, but following the narrowly won election in 1975 against
Joseph Timilty during the Boston school busing crisis, closed them, re-centralizing power in Boston City Hall and creating a political machine intentionally modeled on the one headed by Chicago Mayor
Richard J. Daley
Richard Joseph Daley (May 15, 1902 – December 20, 1976) was an American politician who served as the Mayor of Chicago from 1955 and the chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party Central Committee from 1953 until his death. He has been cal ...
, with ward lieutenants empowered to reward White supporters with city jobs and city contracts.
Peaceful city after death of Martin Luther King Jr.
In the fourth month of White's first term, on April 4, 1968,
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist, one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968 ...
was assassinated, touching off disturbances in the African-American Roxbury section of Boston that same evening which did not spread to other parts of the city.
On April 5, 5,000 people marched from
Boston Common
The Boston Common (also known as the Common) is a public park in downtown Boston, Massachusetts. It is the oldest city park in the United States. Boston Common consists of of land bounded by Tremont Street (139 Tremont St.), Park Street, Beac ...
to
Post Office Square in King's memory.
James Brown had a previously scheduled concert set for that same evening in
Boston Garden
The Boston Garden was an arena in Boston, Massachusetts. Designed by boxing promoter Tex Rickard, who also built the third iteration of New York's Madison Square Garden, it opened on November 17, 1928, as "Boston Madison Square Garden" (lat ...
.
White's chief of police was concerned about allowing 15,000 people to attend the concert so close to downtown, saying he didn't think he could keep the city safe.
White originally intended to cancel the concert entirely. However,
Tom Atkins, a local
NAACP leader who had been elected to the City Council from Roxbury in the same election as White 1967 warned of potential rioting if concertgoers arriving at the arena found it canceled. Atkins and members of White's staff persuaded White to allow the show to go on.
[ Mel King is quoted in the article: "Very frankly, the problem he issue of government discrimination and segregation in schoolsdidn’t get solved until the courts made it happen."]
On such short notice, Atkins and White administrators persuaded Brown and Boston's public television station,
WGBH-TV
WGBH-TV (channel 2), branded on-air as GBH or GBH 2 since 2020, is the primary PBS member television station in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It is the flagship property of the WGBH Educational Foundation, which also owns Boston's se ...
, to broadcast the concert.
The White administration also appealed to community leaders to help keep the peace, and also encouraged people to stay home and watch the concert on television. White appeared on stage with James Brown to appeal to the audience, and to the entire city via television, to remember and maintain King's peaceful vision.
[ (With a link to video of Kevin White's statement on stage, and James Brown's introductory number of the performance.)][
]
WGBH immediately rebroadcast the concert twice more that night, and people apparently stayed inside to continue watching it.
While many cities, including Washington DC, New York, Chicago, Detroit and Oakland, were beset with
civil disturbances, rioting and fires after King's death, the city of Boston was spared from widespread disturbances.
White secured $60,000 from the Boston City Council to make up for the loss of ticket revenue to the performers resulting from his efforts to discourage attendance at the close-to-downtown arena at this volatile moment. Only 2,000 had attended the sold-out show, in a venue that had a capacity of 15,000.
Individuals with Brown's entourage state that only $10,000 made it to Brown's production company.
[ Interview of David Leaf and review of the documentary ''The Night James Brown Saved Boston'' by David Leaf][ Article contains links to the video "The Night James Brown Saved Boston, by David Leaf]
History of non-leadership by city elites on civil rights
Barney Frank
Barnett Frank (born March 31, 1940) is a former American politician. He served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts from 1981 to 2013. A Democrat, Frank served as chairman of the House Financial Services Committ ...
, who worked as White's chief of staff in City Hall during his first mayoral term, has described White's being dubbed "Mayor Black", because he was the first Boston mayor to admit there was a racial-discrimination problem.
White administration staff member, and subsequent Boston City Council President,
Bruce Bolling, describes a leadership vacuum on the issue of race, and that for many years "the established institutions — the City Council, the School Committee, the mayor, the business community, the philanthropic community, the religious community — no one weighed in in any responsible way to address this issue of school desegregation."
This elite leadership vacuum would leave Mayor White without the public community leadership and visible alliances and collaboration desirable to peacefully implement new policies necessary to comply with a later court order to desegregate the schools.
The
Boston School Committee was independently elected, and not under the control of Mayor White, and had put into place ''de jure'' segregation and discrimination policies in the operation and funding of schools in Boston, and this was a source of great frustration to Mayor White.
[ Interview with Micho Spring, appointed deputy mayor under White; and Peter Meade, who held several positions under White, including director of public safety during court-ordered busing.
]
The city administration did not move on the issue of unfair treatment of minorities in the school system, and compliance with anti-segregation laws and decisions, until the a federal court required the city to do so, via a court order.
School desegregation crisis
The state of Massachusetts had enacted in 1965 the "Racial Imbalance Act", the first of its kind in the United States. The law required school districts to desegregate, otherwise state funding for education would be withheld from the school district. The law was opposed by many in Boston, including the Boston School Committee, as well as many especially in working-class districts in Irish-American-majority South Boston.
On April 1, 1965, a special committee appointed by
Massachusetts Education Commissioner Owen Kiernan released its final report finding that more than half of black students enrolled in
Boston Public Schools (BPS) attended institutions with enrollments that were at least 80 percent black and that
housing segregation
Housing segregation in the United States is the practice of denying African Americans and other minority groups equal access to housing through the process of misinformation, denial of realty and financing services, and racial steering. Housing ...
in the city had caused the racial imbalance.
From its creation under the
National Housing Act of 1934
The National Housing Act of 1934, , , also called the Capehart Act and the Better Housing Program, was part of the New Deal passed during the Great Depression in order to make housing and home mortgages more affordable. It created the Federal ...
signed into law by President
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (; ; January 30, 1882April 12, 1945), often referred to by his initials FDR, was an American politician and attorney who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. As the ...
, the
Federal Housing Administration
The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), also known as the Office of Housing within the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), is a United States government agency founded by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, created in part by ...
used its official
mortgage insurance
Mortgage insurance (also known as mortgage guarantee and home-loan insurance) is an insurance policy which compensates lenders or investors in mortgage-backed securities for losses due to the default of a mortgage loan. Mortgage insurance can be ...
underwriting
Underwriting (UW) services are provided by some large financial institutions, such as banks, insurance companies and investment houses, whereby they guarantee payment in case of damage or financial loss and accept the financial risk for liabili ...
policy explicitly to prevent
school integration.
The
Boston Housing Authority
The Boston Housing Authority (BHA) is a public agency of the city of Boston, Massachusetts that provides subsidized public housing to low- and moderate-income families and individuals.
In the federal government model of the United States Depart ...
actively segregated the city's
public housing developments since at least 1941 and continued to do so despite the passage of legislation by the
156th Massachusetts General Court prohibiting
racial discrimination
Racial discrimination is any discrimination against any individual on the basis of their skin color, race or ethnic origin.Individuals can discriminate by refusing to do business with, socialize with, or share resources with people of a certain g ...
or segregation in housing in 1950 and the issuance of
Executive Order 11063 Executive Order 11063 was signed by President John F. Kennedy on November 20, 1962. This Order "prohibits discrimination in the sale, leasing, rental, or other disposition of properties and facilities owned or operated by the federal government or ...
by President
John F. Kennedy
John Fitzgerald Kennedy (May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963), often referred to by his initials JFK and the nickname Jack, was an American politician who served as the 35th president of the United States from 1961 until his assassination ...
in 1962 that required all federal agencies to prevent racial discrimination in federally-funded subsidized housing in the United States.
In response to the report, on April 20, 1965, the Boston
NAACP filed a lawsuit in federal district court against the city seeking the desegregation of the city's public schools.
Massachusetts Governor
The governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is the chief executive officer of the government of Massachusetts. The governor is the head of the state cabinet and the commander-in-chief of the commonwealth's military forces.
Massachuset ...
John Volpe
John Anthony Volpe (; December 8, 1908November 11, 1994) was an American businessman, diplomat, and politician from Massachusetts. A son of Italian immigrants, he founded and owned a large construction firm. Politically, he was a Republican in ...
(1961–1963 & 1965–1969) filed a request for legislation from the state legislature that defined schools with nonwhite enrollments greater than 50 percent to be imbalanced and granted the State Board of Education the power to withhold state funds from any
school district in the state that was found to have racial imbalance, which Volpe would sign into law the following August.
Pursuant to the Racial Imbalance Act, the state conducted a racial census and found 55 imbalanced schools in the state with 46 in Boston, and in October 1965, the State Board required the School Committee to submit a desegregation plan, which the School Committee did the following December.
In April 1966, the State Board found the School Committee's plan to desegregate the Boston Public Schools in accordance with the law inadequate and voted to rescind state aid to the district, and in response, the School Committee filed a lawsuit against the State Board challenging both the decision and the constitutionality of the Racial Imbalance Act the following August. In January 1967, the
Massachusetts Superior Court
The Massachusetts Superior Court (also known as the Superior Court Department of the Trial Court) is a trial court department in Massachusetts.
The Superior Court has original jurisdiction in civil actions over $50,000, and in matters where equit ...
overturned a Suffolk Superior Court ruling that the State Board had improperly withdrawn the funds and ordered the School Committee to submit an acceptable plan to the State Board within 90 days or else permanently lose funding, which the School Committee did shortly thereafter and the State Board accepted. In June 1967, the
Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld the constitutionality of the Racial Imbalance Act and the
U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren (1953–1969) declined to hear the School Committee's appeal in January 1968. On May 25, 1971, the Massachusetts State Board of Education voted unanimously to withhold state aid from the Boston Public Schools due to the School Committee's refusal to use the district's open enrollment policy to relieve the city's racial imbalance in enrollments, instead routinely granting white students transfers while doing nothing to assist black students attempting to transfer.
On March 15, 1972, the Boston NAACP filed a lawsuit, later named ''
Morgan v. Hennigan'', against the Boston School Committee in federal district court. After being randomly assigned to the case, on June 21, 1974, Judge
W. Arthur Garrity Jr. ruled that the open enrollment and controlled transfer policies that the School Committee created in 1961 and 1971 respectively were being used to effectively discriminate on the basis of race, and that the School Committee had maintained segregation in the Boston Public Schools by adding portable classrooms to overcrowded white schools instead of assigning white students to nearby underutilized black schools, while simultaneously purchasing closed white schools and busing black students past open white schools with vacant seats. In accordance with the Racial Imbalance Act, the School Committee would be required to
bus
A bus (contracted from omnibus, with variants multibus, motorbus, autobus, etc.) is a road vehicle that carries significantly more passengers than an average car or van. It is most commonly used in public transport, but is also in use for cha ...
17,000 to 18,000 students the following September (Phase I) and to formulate a desegregation plan for the 1975–1976 school year by December 16 (Phase II).
On September 12, 1974, 79 of 80 schools were bused without incident (with
South Boston High School being the lone exception).
Twenty minutes after Judge Garrity's deadline for submitting the Phase II plan expired on December 16, 1974, the School Committee voted to reject the desegregation plan proposed by the department's Educational Planning Center.
On December 18, Garrity
summoned all five Boston School Committee members to court, held three of the members to be in
contempt of court on December 27, and told the members on December 30 that he would purge their contempt holdings if they voted to authorize submission of a Phase II plan by January 7. On January 7, 1975, the School Committee directed school department planners to file a voluntary-only busing proposal with the court.
On May 10, 1975, the
Massachusetts U.S. District Court announced a Phase II plan requiring 24,000 students to be bused that was formulated by a four-member committee consisting of former
Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Justice Jacob Spiegel, former
U.S. Education Commissioner Francis Keppel
Francis Keppel (April 16, 1916 – February 19, 1990) was an American educator. As U.S. Commissioner of Education (1962–1965) he was instrumental in developing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and in overseeing enforcement of ...
,
Harvard Graduate School of Education professor
Charles V. Willie
Charles Vert Willie (October 8, 1927 – January 11, 2022) was an American sociologist who was the Charles William Eliot Professor of Education, Emeritus at Harvard University. His areas of research included desegregation, higher education, publi ...
, and former Massachusetts Attorney General
Edward J. McCormack that was formed by Judge Garrity the previous February. On June 14, the
U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Warren E. Burger (1969–1986) unanimously declined to review the School Committee's appeal of the Phase II plan. In December 1975, Judge Garrity ordered
South Boston High School put under federal
receivership
In law, receivership is a situation in which an institution or enterprise is held by a receiver—a person "placed in the custodial responsibility for the property of others, including tangible and intangible assets and rights"—especially in c ...
.
In December 1982, Judge Garrity transferred responsibility for monitoring of compliance to the State Board for the subsequent two years, and in September 1985, Judge Garrity issued his final orders returning jurisdiction of the schools to the School Committee. In May 1990, Judge Garrity delivered his final judgment in ''Morgan v. Hennigan'', formally closing the original case. From September 1974 through the fall of 1976, at least
40 riots occurred in the city (including many interracial riots),
and incidents of interracial violence in Boston would continue from November 1977 through at least 1993.
On June 21, 1974, Judge
W. Arthur Garrity issued a decision in
Morgan v. Hennigan that found that the
Boston School Committee had followed an intentional policy of segregating the city's public schools by race, including building new schools and school annexes in overcrowded white-majority districts, instead of making use of empty seats and classrooms in districts with large minority populations. As a remedy, Garrity ordered the city's schools desegregated, leading to a system of
desegregation busing
Race-integration busing in the United States (also known simply as busing, Integrated busing or by its critics as forced busing) was the practice of assigning and transporting students to schools within or outside their local school districts in ...
.
[
]
In Phase I of the plan, Judge Garrity followed a busing plan previously drawn up by Charles Glenn, the director of the Bureau of Equal Educational Opportunity within the Massachusetts Board of Education, that required schools with a population greater than 50% white to be balanced by other races; the initial Phase I plan included only 80 schools, amounting to 40 percent of the Boston Public School system.
[
(Page 3 and following web pages)
]
The Glenn plan had been originally constructed in response to an earlier Massachusetts state lawsuit between the Massachusetts Board of Education and the Boston School Committee. In that earlier lawsuit, the Boston School Committee had sued the Massachusetts Board of Education for the Board's withholding state funds for the Committee's refusal to conform to the requirements of the Massachusetts Racial Imbalance Act.
[
]
Ultimately, among the Boston districts most affected were West Roxbury, Roslindale, Hyde Park, the North End, Charlestown, South Boston and Dorchester.
The desegregation plan in general, and busing in particular, was met with an onslaught of protest. The integration plan provoked fierce criticism and led to months of racially motivated violence, with attacks at City Hall and South Boston and other city high schools, with dozens injured. In some white neighborhoods, protesters threw stones at arriving school buses arriving with black children from other parts of the city. White directed that police escort buses, and also coordinated with state officials to bring in several hundred state police to keep order.
On October 15, 1974, the Massachusetts National Guard was deployed by Republican Governor
Frank Sargent to Boston to keep order in schools.
One famous incident in 1976 was documented in a news photograph entitled ''
The Soiling of Old Glory
''The Soiling of Old Glory'' is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph taken by Stanley Forman during the Boston busing crisis in 1976. It depicts a white teenager, Joseph Rakes, assaulting a black man—lawyer and civil rights activist Ted Landsma ...
''. During one demonstration outside
Boston City Hall
Boston City Hall is the seat of city government of Boston, Massachusetts. It includes the offices of the mayor of Boston and the Boston City Council. The current hall was built in 1968 to assume the functions of the Old City Hall.
It is a con ...
, black lawyer and businessman
Ted Landsmark was attacked with an American flag by a white teenager.
[
Interview with Bruce Bolling, former White staffer and subsequently Boston City Council President.
][
]
Rolling Stones
In 1972, White made news when the
Rhode Island State Police
The Rhode Island State Police (RISP) is an agency of the US state of Rhode Island responsible for statewide law enforcement and regulation, especially in areas underserved by local police agencies and on the state's limited-access highways. Its h ...
arrested members of
The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones are an English Rock music, rock band formed in London in 1962. Active for six decades, they are one of the most popular and enduring bands of the album era, rock era. In the early 1960s, the Rolling Stones pioneered the g ...
immediately prior to a concert appearance in the
Boston Garden
The Boston Garden was an arena in Boston, Massachusetts. Designed by boxing promoter Tex Rickard, who also built the third iteration of New York's Madison Square Garden, it opened on November 17, 1928, as "Boston Madison Square Garden" (lat ...
. That evening, a riot was underway in the South End and White needed to move police officers from the Garden to address the disturbance. Fearing unrest among the 15,000 concertgoers if the Stones were not permitted to perform, White persuaded the Rhode Island authorities to release the band members into his personal custody, enabling them to make their scheduled concert appearance in Boston. He then appeared on stage before the waiting fans to urge them to keep the peace.
[
]
White's actions won him favor among young first-time voters and parents of teens in his re-election.
Boston downtown revitalization
White worked for the revitalization of Boston's downtown districts, opening the waterfront to public access, and presiding over a downtown financial district building boom. His administration was instrumental in the renovation and renewal of
Quincy Market
Quincy Market is a historic building near Faneuil Hall in downtown Boston, Massachusetts. It was constructed between 1824 and 1826 and named in honor of mayor Josiah Quincy, who organized its construction without any tax or debt. The market is ...
which reopened in 1976, transforming an eyesore and run-down series of warehouses and open stalls into a "festival marketplace" that was subsequently copied by other cities.
[
Chris Lovett is News Director of Neighborhood Network News in Boston]
Urban renewal and redlining
In 1963,
Boston Mayor
The mayor of Boston is the head of the municipal government in Boston, Massachusetts. Boston has a mayor–council government. Boston's mayoral elections are nonpartisan (as are all municipal elections in Boston), and elect a mayor to a four-y ...
John F. Collins (1960–1968) and
Boston Redevelopment Authority
The Boston Planning & Development Agency (BPDA), formerly the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA), is a Massachusetts public agency that serves as the municipal planning and development agency for Boston, working on both housing and commercial de ...
executive
Edward J. Logue
Edward Joseph Logue (February 7, 1921 – January 27, 2000) was an American urban planner and public administrator who worked in New Haven, Boston, and New York State.
Commentators often compare Logue with Robert Moses - both were advocates of l ...
organized a consortium of
savings bank
A savings bank is a financial institution whose primary purpose is accepting savings deposits and paying interest on those deposits.
They originated in Europe during the 18th century with the aim of providing access to savings products to al ...
s,
cooperatives
A cooperative (also known as co-operative, co-op, or coop) is "an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically-control ...
, and federal and state
savings and loan association
A savings and loan association (S&L), or thrift institution, is a financial institution that specializes in accepting savings deposits and making mortgage and other loans. The terms "S&L" or "thrift" are mainly used in the United States; simi ...
s in the city called the Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group (B-BURG) that would provide $2.5 million in
Federal Housing Administration
The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), also known as the Office of Housing within the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), is a United States government agency founded by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, created in part by ...
(FHA)
insured
Insurance is a means of protection from financial loss in which, in exchange for a fee, a party agrees to compensate another party in the event of a certain loss, damage, or injury. It is a form of risk management, primarily used to hedge ...
rehabilitation and
home-ownership loans
In finance, a loan is the lending of money by one or more individuals, organizations, or other entities to other individuals, organizations, etc. The recipient (i.e., the borrower) incurs a debt and is usually liable to pay interest on that de ...
at less than 5.25%
interest
In finance and economics, interest is payment from a borrower or deposit-taking financial institution to a lender or depositor of an amount above repayment of the principal sum (that is, the amount borrowed), at a particular rate. It is distin ...
in Washington Park around
Dudley Square
Nubian Square (formerly Dudley Square) is the primary commercial center of the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, located at the intersection of Dudley Street and Washington Street. It has long been the center of African American cult ...
in Roxbury. In 1968, B-BURG consisted of 22 institutions that collectively held $4 billion in
asset
In financial accounting, an asset is any resource owned or controlled by a business or an economic entity. It is anything (tangible or intangible) that can be used to produce positive economic value. Assets represent value of ownership that can ...
s or 90 percent of the region's
thrift industry.
On May 13, 1968, White announced a $50 million
loan commitment program with B-BURG.
On July 31, B-BURG opened a headquarters on Warren Street near Dudley Square. In July and August, B-BURG executives held meetings to
define the geographic scope of a $29 million loan program within a
Model Cities area, with Suffolk Franklin Vice President Carl Ericson proposing areas of
Mattapan
Mattapan () is a neighborhood in Boston, Massachusetts. Historically a section of neighboring Dorchester, Mattapan became a part of Boston when Dorchester was annexed in 1870. Mattapan is the original Native American name for the Dorchester ar ...
and Roxbury along
Blue Hill Avenue.
Over the summer and fall of 1968, real estate advertising by mail and telephone using
blockbusting tactics began to be circulated in Mattapan. According to a Model Cities study, 65 percent of the houses purchased under the B-BURG program from 1968 to 1970 needed major repairs at the time of purchase, and a later 1971 survey found that 65 percent of the houses sold under the B-BURG program needed major repairs within two years of purchase, and Joseph Kenealy, head appraiser for the FHA in Boston, received a lawsuit in 1971 from the
U.S. Justice Department
The United States Department of Justice (DOJ), also known as the Justice Department, is a federal executive department of the United States government tasked with the enforcement of federal law and administration of justice in the United States ...
alleging that he used the office to enrich himself and family members by $350,000. By March 31, 1970, more than 1,300 minority families bought homes with B-BURG mortgages with the vast majority being
steered into the
Jewish
Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...
neighborhoods of Mattapan (where the black population increased from 473 in 1960 to 19,107 in 1970), while approximately 15,000 people in total found new residences during the first 20 months of the program. With the first immigrants arriving in the 1920s,
Dorchester,
Roxbury, and Mattapan would become home to a population of as many as 90,000 Jews.
By 1957, 40,000 Jews remained in Dorchester alone with an additional 10,000 Jews in Mattapan, but within the two years from 1968 to 1970, more than five decades of Jewish settlement in all three neighborhoods would be overturned by its inclusion in the B-BURG loan area by Suffolk Franklin Vice President Carl Ericson.
In March 1969,
Boston City Council
The Boston City Council is the legislative branch of government for the city of Boston, Massachusetts. It is made up of 13 members: 9 district representatives and 4 at-large members. Councillors are elected to two-year terms and there is no ...
or
Thomas Atkins met with Robert Morgan, President of the Boston Five Cents Savings Bank (a B-BURG member institution), about the B-BURG loan area. From its creation under the
National Housing Act of 1934
The National Housing Act of 1934, , , also called the Capehart Act and the Better Housing Program, was part of the New Deal passed during the Great Depression in order to make housing and home mortgages more affordable. It created the Federal ...
signed into law by President
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (; ; January 30, 1882April 12, 1945), often referred to by his initials FDR, was an American politician and attorney who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. As the ...
, official FHA property appraisal
underwriting
Underwriting (UW) services are provided by some large financial institutions, such as banks, insurance companies and investment houses, whereby they guarantee payment in case of damage or financial loss and accept the financial risk for liabili ...
standards to qualify for mortgage insurance had a whites-only requirement excluding all racially mixed neighborhoods or white neighborhoods in proximity to black neighborhoods,
and this produced a
self-fulfilling effect on property values within
redlined areas. However, instead of denying mortgages to minority homebuyers in white neighborhoods, B-BURG would only approve mortgages within specific neighborhoods of Roxbury and Mattapan causing an
artificial restriction to the
housing supply available for
loanable funds In economics, the loanable funds doctrine is a theory of the market interest rate. According to this approach, the interest rate is determined by the demand for and supply of loanable funds. The term ''loanable funds'' includes all forms of credit, ...
to minorities and increasing the interest rates of the B-BURG loan pool from a range of 4.5 to 5.0% up to 8.5%.
Within blockbusted neighborhoods, many minority homebuyers ended up in
default as a consequence of making
mortgage payments far in excess of a
property's worth, and in 1968, the FHA announced that it would begin guaranteeing loans in the
inner city
The term ''inner city'' has been used, especially in the United States, as a euphemism for majority-minority lower-income residential districts that often refer to rundown neighborhoods, in a downtown or city centre area. Sociologists some ...
, reducing a market disincentive against lending in blockbusted neighborhoods.
From September 13 through September 16, 1971, the
U.S. Senate Judiciary Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee chaired by
Michigan U.S. Senator Philip Hart
Philip Aloysius Hart (December 10, 1912December 26, 1976) was an American lawyer and politician. A Democrat, he served as a United States Senator from Michigan from 1959 until his death from cancer in Washington, D.C. in 1976. He was known as ...
held hearings at the
John F. Kennedy Federal Building in Boston that established the creation and location of the B-BURG loan area following a
written statement from Boston Redevelopment Authority executive Hale Champion and
testimony
In law and in religion, testimony is a solemn attestation as to the truth of a matter.
Etymology
The words "testimony" and "testify" both derive from the Latin word ''testis'', referring to the notion of a disinterested third-party witness.
...
from B-BURG member institution executives and a BRA executive staff member. On the final day of the hearings, a statement received from White's office praised the B-BURG institutions for their rehabilitation and home ownership expansion efforts, but established that White's office was not involved in the drawing of the loan area. From July 1977 through June 1978, 91 percent of the government-insured
foreclosures in Boston were in Dorchester, Mattapan, and Roxbury, with 53 percent of the city's foreclosures in South Dorchester and Mattapan alone, and 84 percent of the 93 foreclosures in Dorchester were concentrated in the B-BURG program census tracts.
Despite the passage of the
Community Reinvestment Act
The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA, P.L. 95-128, 91 Stat. 1147, title VIII of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1977, ''et seq.'') is a United States federal law designed to encourage commercial banks and savings associations to hel ...
signed into law by President
Jimmy Carter
James Earl Carter Jr. (born October 1, 1924) is an American politician who served as the 39th president of the United States from 1977 to 1981. A member of the Democratic Party, he previously served as the 76th governor of Georgia from 1 ...
in 1977 banning redlining, the legislation was not seriously enforced by the
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the 1980s during the
Reagan Administration
Ronald Reagan's tenure as the 40th president of the United States began with his first inauguration on January 20, 1981, and ended on January 20, 1989. Reagan, a Republican from California, took office following a landslide victory over ...
while the Department itself was embroiled in corruption scandals.
By the early 1990s, the overwhelming majority of Boston's 120,000 black residents lived in Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan.
Corruption investigations
Prior to White's final term in office, Suffolk County and federal prosecutors were investigating a few mid-level city officials. It became known in March 1981 that city employees had been asked to donate to a birthday celebration in honor of the mayor’s wife; the requested donations were not political, but personal gifts, and had amounted to $122,000 by the time White cancelled the event after public outrage official inquiries were conducted.
In July 1981, President
Ronald Reagan appointed
William F. Weld as US District Attorney for Massachusetts. Weld expanded the previously ongoing investigative probes, further examining the White administration and the Whites' personal finances. The resulting indictments, guilty pleas, and convictions were subsequently one of Weld’s credentials when campaigning for governor in 1990. Weld's office issued charges of fraudulent disability pensions, bribery, extortion, and perjury that were the downfall of more than 20 city employees, including a number of key individuals in White’s political machine, and nearly as many businessmen.
The
United States Department of Housing and Urban Development
The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is one of the executive departments of the U.S. federal government. It administers federal housing and urban development laws. It is headed by the Secretary of Housing and Ur ...
in 1982 also released a report stating that the city had misappropriated $1.9 million worth of community grants. Federal auditors accused the White administration of improperly using the funds to pay the salaries of city employees that were not working on federally funded projects.
[
]
Other political campaigns
In his 1970 campaign for
governor of Massachusetts
The governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is the chief executive officer of the government of Massachusetts. The governor is the head of the state cabinet and the commander-in-chief of the commonwealth's military forces.
Massachuset ...
, White won a hard-fought multi-candidate Democratic primary election on September 15, 1970, with only 34.33 percent of the vote and by fewer than two percentage points more than his nearest opponent,
Massachusetts Senate President Maurice A. Donahue. White lost the
November 3 general election against
Republican
Republican can refer to:
Political ideology
* An advocate of a republic, a type of government that is not a monarchy or dictatorship, and is usually associated with the rule of law.
** Republicanism, the ideology in support of republics or agains ...
Frank Sargent. White's running mate was
Michael Dukakis
Michael Stanley Dukakis (; born November 3, 1933) is an American retired lawyer and politician who served as governor of Massachusetts from 1975 to 1979 and again from 1983 to 1991. He is the longest-serving governor in Massachusetts history a ...
, who challenged and defeated Sargent for the governor's office four years later in 1974. White failed to win more votes than Sargent in the city of Boston in the 1970 general election. White's campaign for governor was interrupted for several days when he underwent emergency stomach surgery for an ulcer.
In 1972, during the Democratic National Convention, White was on the verge of becoming the
Democratic Party Democratic Party most often refers to:
*Democratic Party (United States)
Democratic Party and similar terms may also refer to:
Active parties Africa
*Botswana Democratic Party
*Democratic Party of Equatorial Guinea
*Gabonese Democratic Party
*Demo ...
's vice-presidential nominee.
After a number of better-known politicians, including Senators
Ted Kennedy
Edward Moore Kennedy (February 22, 1932 – August 25, 2009) was an American lawyer and politician who served as a United States senator from Massachusetts for almost 47 years, from 1962 until his death in 2009. A member of the Democratic ...
and
Gaylord Nelson
Gaylord Anton Nelson (June 4, 1916July 3, 2005) was an American politician and environmentalist from Wisconsin who served as a United States senator and governor. He was a member of the Democratic Party and the founder of Earth Day, which launche ...
, and Governor
Reubin Askew
Reubin O'Donovan Askew (September 11, 1928 – March 13, 2014) was an American politician, who served as the 37th governor of Florida from 1971 to 1979. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as the 7th U.S. Trade representative from 1979 ...
, turned down the position, White briefly became the front-runner for the post.
Ted Kennedy
Edward Moore Kennedy (February 22, 1932 – August 25, 2009) was an American lawyer and politician who served as a United States senator from Massachusetts for almost 47 years, from 1962 until his death in 2009. A member of the Democratic ...
, economist
John Kenneth Galbraith
John Kenneth Galbraith (October 15, 1908 – April 29, 2006), also known as Ken Galbraith, was a Canadian-American economist, diplomat, public official, and intellectual. His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through t ...
and others in the Massachusetts delegation opposed White's potential nomination, because White had supported
Maine
Maine () is a state in the New England and Northeastern regions of the United States. It borders New Hampshire to the west, the Gulf of Maine to the southeast, and the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Quebec to the northeast and north ...
Senator
Edmund Muskie
Edmund Sixtus Muskie (March 28, 1914March 26, 1996) was an American statesman and political leader who served as the 58th United States Secretary of State under President Jimmy Carter, a United States Senator from Maine from 1959 to 1980, the 6 ...
during the presidential primaries.
[ (alternative article link: via Highbeam: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-33795406.html)]
Presidential nominee Senator
George McGovern
George Stanley McGovern (July 19, 1922 – October 21, 2012) was an American historian and South Dakota politician who was a U.S. representative and three-term U.S. senator, and the Democratic Party presidential nominee in the 1972 pres ...
decided to turn elsewhere and selected Senator
Thomas Eagleton
Thomas Francis Eagleton (September 4, 1929 – March 4, 2007) was an American lawyer serving as a United States senator from Missouri, from 1968 to 1987. He was briefly the Democratic vice presidential nominee under George McGovern in 1972. He ...
, who was later embroiled in a
controversy
Controversy is a state of prolonged public dispute or debate, usually concerning a matter of conflicting opinion or point of view. The word was coined from the Latin ''controversia'', as a composite of ''controversus'' – "turned in an opposite d ...
over his failure to disclose having received electric shock therapy for depression. Ultimately, the vice presidential nominee was former
Peace Corps
The Peace Corps is an independent agency and program of the United States government that trains and deploys volunteers to provide international development assistance. It was established in March 1961 by an executive order of President John F. ...
head, Chicago School Board President, and later Ambassador
Sargent Shriver
Robert Sargent Shriver Jr. (November 9, 1915 – January 18, 2011) was an American diplomat, politician, and activist. As the husband of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, he was part of the Kennedy family. Shriver was the driving force behind the creation ...
, who had married into the Kennedy family. McGovern commented ten years later, in 1982: "Choosing White would have been much better than what happened
ith Eagleton We probably should have overruled" Kennedy and the others.
Later life
After departing from the mayor's office in 1984, White served as director of the Institute for Political Communication at Boston University from 1984 to 2002, and as a professor of communications and public management.
Questions about White’s political finances continued to plague him. In 1993, without admitting guilt, White agreed to return to the state nearly $25,000 in surplus campaign funds that he had used for personal expenses.
On November 1, 2006, a
statue of White was unveiled at Boston's
Faneuil Hall
Faneuil Hall ( or ; previously ) is a marketplace and meeting hall located near the waterfront and today's Government Center, in Boston, Massachusetts. Opened in 1742, it was the site of several speeches by Samuel Adams, James Otis, and others ...
.
The bronze statue, created by sculptor
Pablo Eduardo, portrays White walking down the sidewalk. Behind the statue are several metal footprints along the sidewalk. With these are several quotes from White which were made during his mayoral inauguration speeches.
Health
In 1970, during his campaign for governor, White underwent surgery that removed two-thirds of his stomach. In 2001, the since-retired White suffered a heart attack that left him with a pacemaker. In his advanced age, he lost hearing in his right ear and suffered from
Alzheimer's disease
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegeneration, neurodegenerative disease that usually starts slowly and progressively worsens. It is the cause of 60–70% of cases of dementia. The most common early symptom is difficulty in short-term me ...
.
See also
*
Timeline of Boston
This article is a timeline of the history of the city of Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
17th century
* 1625 – William Blaxton arrives.
* 1630 - When Boston was founded
** English Puritans arrive.
** First Church in Boston established.
** Septe ...
, 1960s-1980s
References
Further reading
* Harvard Center for Law and Education - A Study of the Massachusetts Racial Imbalance Act" (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1972)
School Desegregation in Boston U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Washington, DC. June, 1975.
Fulfilling the Letter and the Spirit of the Law: Desegregation of the Nation's Public Schools - a Report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Washington, D.C. . August, 1976.
* Emmett H. Buell and Richard A. Brisbin, Jr. - School Desegregation and Defended Neighborhoods: The Boston Controversy (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1982)
* Eaton, Susan E. - ''The other Boston busing story: what's won and lost across the boundary line'' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001)
* Ronald Formisano - ''Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s'' (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 1991)
*
Gerald Gamm - ''Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed'' (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999)
* Lily D. Geismer -
''Don’t Blame Us: Grassroots Liberalism in Massachusetts, 1960-1990'' (University of Michigan, 2010) Dissertation for Doctor of Philosophy in History
* George V. Higgins, Style Versus Substance: Boston, Kevin White and the Politics of Illusion (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1984)
* Jon Hillson - ''Battle of Boston: busing and the struggle for school desegregation'' (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1977)
* Jonathan H. Kozol - ''Death at an Early Age'' (Plume, 1995) (Originally published in 1967)
* Frank Levy - ''Northern Schools and Civil Rights: The Racial Imbalance Act of Massachusetts'' (Chicago: Markham Publishing, 1971)
* Alan Lupo - ''Liberty’s Chosen Home: The Politics of Violence in Boston'' (Boston: Beacon Press, 1977)
* J. Anthony Lukas - ''Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families'' (Vintage, 1986)
* John McGreevy - ''Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)
* Adam R. Nelson - ''
The Elusive Ideal: Equal Educational Opportunity and the Federal Role in Boston's Public Schools, 1950-1985''. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005)
* J. Michael Ross and William M. Berg - ''“I Respectfully Disagree with The Judge’s Order”: The Boston School Desegregation Controversy'' (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1981)
*
* Jeanne Theoharis - ''"I'd Rather go to School in the South": How Boston's Desegregation Struggle Complicates the Civil Rights Paradigm'' Chapter Five, pages 125 - 152. of ''Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940-1980'' - Edited by Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
* Joshua Zeitz - ''White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of Postwar Politics'' (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007)
External links
Garrity Decision Research Guide Moakley Archive and Institute at Suffolk University. Finding aids and guide.
*
Audio interview and conversation (28 minutes), with former Massachusetts Governor
Michael Dukakis
Michael Stanley Dukakis (; born November 3, 1933) is an American retired lawyer and politician who served as governor of Massachusetts from 1975 to 1979 and again from 1983 to 1991. He is the longest-serving governor in Massachusetts history a ...
; former Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation
Fred Salvucci; and
Ted Landsmark, a lawyer and activist, and as of 2012, head of the
Boston Architectural College
Boston Architectural College, also known as The BAC, is New England's largest private college of spatial design. It offers first-professional bachelor's and master's degrees in architecture, interior architecture, landscape architecture, and ...
, describing the successful effort to avoid violence in Boston after
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist, one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968 ...
was assassinated in 1968, and Boston Federal Court Orders to desegregate the schools in 1974.
*
"White speaks to residents about the opening of schools"(1975) on the WGBH series
Ten O'clock News In a video clip broadcast in 1975, Mayor Kevin White calls for a safe opening of Boston public schools.
*
Analytical obituary in ''The Boston Phoenix''*Guide to th
Mayor Kevin White recordsat the Boston City Archives
An International and Domestic Response to Boston Busing directed at Mayor Kevin White
, -
, -
{{DEFAULTSORT:White, Kevin
1929 births
2012 deaths
Boston College Law School alumni
Catholics from Massachusetts
Harvard Kennedy School alumni
Massachusetts Democrats
Mayors of Boston
People from Jamaica Plain
People from West Roxbury, Boston
Secretaries of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Tabor Academy (Massachusetts) alumni
Williams College alumni