Residents of Dorchester, Mattapan, Hyde Park and South Boston made history last week by casting their votes for Linda Dorcena Forry in the 1st Suffolk District primary for state Senate. Even as the Forry campaign’s victory celebration was in full swing on Tuesday night, the AP and other media outlets had called the race for Nick Collins. But Linda’s win was more than just a surprise for those media outlets. Her win symbolizes how Boston, and its political power centers, are changing.
The final results reflect a dramatic shift in the political landscape. Linda is positioned to become the first woman of color and the first Senator from outside South Boston to hold the 1st Suffolk District seat. If elected, Linda will also be the first state Senator from this district who champions women’s health and comprehensive sexuality education. Based on last November’s elections, it’s clear women’s health is a defining issue for voters, and 1st Suffolk District voters are no exception.
Leading up to the primary, Planned Parenthood Action Fund ran a robust volunteer-driven voter education program to turn out South Boston and Dorchester voters who supported Linda’s agenda for women’s health and economic security. Our volunteers knocked on 1,300 doors and made 13,000 calls in support of Linda.
Unlike her predecessors, Linda Dorcena Forry will be a strong voice for comprehensive sexuality education and access to health care. With apologies to Bob Dylan, she is proof that times really are changing. And that’s a good thing.
Marty Walz
Planned Parenthood Action Fund
* The Planned Parenthood Action Fund is the advocacy and political arm of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
I believe that this is in part, what Bob Dylan meant within the larger scope of things and his song.
I meant:
Stupid qwerty keyboard.
And I say this as an Irish Catholic, but I’ve had black friends turn down job offers in Boston since they still think its a white only kind of town. This will help change that, and beyond color its great to see ideology with the seat as well. It’s not just social issues, though it’s good to see 1950s Dublin is not the standard South Boston sets for itself anymore, but economic ones as well. The old pols were some of the most regressive on the budget issues we care about, and now we will get public transit investment, education investment, and healthcare investment that will help the whole state and Southie too
…how it came to pass that MA is the bluest of states yet its capital and largest city has developed a reputation for being decidedly unprogressive and unenlightened when it comes to basic things like racial attitudes. Yes, I’m familiar with the busing controversy, but is this a matter of the rest of the state picking up the slack?
For instance, many suburbs are still overwhelmingly white while several inner-city Boston neighborhoods still overwhelmingly black and hispanic. The city of Boston itself is far more diverse than your typical suburb (naturally) and segregation by neighborhood is not nearly as bad as it was in the 1970’s (for instance, places like Roslindale, Hyde Park, and East Boston are much more diverse now). Boston got a reputation for being racist because of the violent response to busing– unfortunately, Massachusetts as a whole is still pretty segregated geographically, along both racial and class lines. This accounts for a lot of the educational segregation we still see in Massachusetts. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if Garrity had ordered inter-district busing, such as between Lincoln and Roxbury and vice-versa, as well as Southie and Weston and vice-versa, in an attempt to achieve full socioeconomic and racial integration in the public schools. Would there have been more protests, or simply a more widespread abandonment of public schools in favor of private ones? Or would many suburban parents of means idealistically agreed to have their children participate in this idealistic social experiment? We will probably never know.
The trick is to create equity throughout the state in terms of per pupil spending and other relevant metrics. In other words rather than Roxbury and Lincoln embarking on a student exchange program we should be making sure that you can get just as good an education in Roxbury as you can in Lincoln. That was a bit of a tangent here though. What I’m trying to figure out basically is how the political math works. If Boston isn’t progressive, how in the world does the state get the reputation?
I was speaking with someone recently who said that Boston (or at least its nay-buh-hoods) and other cities in Mass. have lousy race relations and the rest of the state ignores the issue entirely by living in 95% plus white communities. Such that the whole state is not sufficiently “progressive” on racial issues.
There’s some truth to that. The fact is that the Supreme Court, in a case out of Michigan, took busing schemes that included suburban districts off the table. When the busing problems unfolded here, a lot of liberals in the suburbs were horrified at Southie and Charlestown as their kids went to overwhelmingly white schools in overwhelmingly white towns.
This post shows that things are changing in Boston. They have been for a while. But as we all know from what we see here every day, the “bluest of blue” stuff is not always an accurate picture of Massachusetts.
Though when she visited my Chicagoan fiancee asked where all the blue collar people are? Her point is somewhat valid, Chicago is probably the only major city I’ve been to that still has a strong manufacturing sector (though not nearly as strong as it once was). But the night and day kind of segregation I got used to when visiting the South is very strong in Chicago, there is not the kind of house to house integration that Cambridge has (which is actually a lot rarer than I thought nationwide) but most Boston neighborhoods have block by block integration which you can’t say about Chicago.
Cambridge has done a good job overcoming racial issues but we still have very strong class issues. In many ways Cambridge is what America will be in 20 years. Relatively a-religious, multicultural, strongly LGBT friendly, but with a hallowed out middle class. I hope we can avoid that locally and nationally, and hopefully the fight to save the middle class can rally the races in every city. It’s going to be hard though. In Chicago the bigger barrier is between blacks and Latinos, which is rather unfortunate.
I think it was on Melissa Harris-Perry’s MSNBC show awhile back that an African-American woman who grew up in Boston said that she wishes she had not been bussed to a white school because her neighborhood school happened to be better than the one to which she was bussed. Personally, I think that was an overplayed solution not intended by the Brown v. Board of Ed. case resulting from states and districts not addressing the problem of inequality in a more comprehensive manner. There are sound arguments for wishing to stay local which have nothing to do with race.
The whole busing thing in northern cities like Boston was a very knotty problem. On the one hand, you don’t want segregation maintained (and the evidence was that it was maintained deliberately, at least in part). On the other hand, it’s a huge disruption taking kids away from the local school and putting them in lotteries and shipping them halfway across the city.
Here in Newton, if you live in X zone, you know what your elementary school is. And I had family in South Boston that wanted the same for their kids, like they always had. I remember one uncle talking about Mike Dukakis 20 years later, saying “HE got to walk his kid to school two blocks away in Brookline.” Still bitter.
I don’t know what the solution should have been. If you left neighborhood schools intact, the residential segregation would have left the schools segregated. But as it was done, it was a mess with enormous ramifications for settlement patterns and our politics. Not much accident south of Boston has been pretty conservative since then.
If residential segregation was enforced by covenants or other laws deliberately segregating races those should be tossed. (I assume they have been by now.) If people just happen to self-segregate the de facto segregation of schools that result is less an issue for me, as long as again all schools are treated equally by their states and districts. Brown was about NOT busing Linda Brown across town to a black school.
just self-segregation, there would have been no court order. Boston had segregation that was largely due to segregated residential patterns, but also intentional discrimination by school authorities shown after a lengthy trial. This was a strange position to be in, because under the Constitution this violation required for redress, but how do you integrate in a residentially segregated city without busing people out of their neighborhoods?
It was a mess and I don’t know what the right answer would have been. Equitable funding only gets you partway there. Boston and other cities already spend more per pupil than many suburban districts with good reputations, but they have to. There are so many problems to overcome, so many students who don’t believe education will get them anywhere. Constant teacher turnover from burnout, etc.
Were there laws saying that whites must live in one neighborhood and blacks in another? Were lenders, realtors, and landlords discriminating on the basis of race? If so those were the issues that really needed addressing. Otherwise we can bus till we’re blue in the face and we’d still have kids of whichever race in ending up in lower-quality schools.
Redlining, blockbusting, all that. But the court found the public school authorities also were drawing district lines deliberately so as to reflect racial patterns.
you’re simply not talking about equality of education. Yes you’re trying to make Boston proper a bit more equitable, but do we really think that gives most of those kids the same quality of education that students are getting in Concord, Weston and Newton?
The dirty secret of “equal education” is that if a house in Framingham was instead located in a neighboring town like Sudbury or Wayland — everything else being equal — it would be worth quite a bit more. Why is that do you think? Is it that Sudbury and Wayland have better trash pickup? Street plowing? Libraries? Considerably lower taxes? Lower average crime rate in the town to a degree, although I’d wager there’s little difference between neighborhoods immediately on either side of the town line.
No, as far as I can see, living in Sudbury and Wayland means “good schools.” But what exactly does that mean? As far as I can tell, it means you get to send your kids to school with mostly other middle or upper class kids instead of having your kids mix with some of the poor, minority and immigrant students in Framingham.
What if the student populations in all the schools were instead the same, and some of the poor, minority and immigrant kids were bused to Sudbury and Wayland randomly so that the student populations in all the area towns were similar? 1) I’d wager that test scores in the schools would look much more similar than they do now. 2) I’d wager that housing prices would look much more similar than they do now. That probably means the value of a home in Framingham would rise some while the premium value of living in Sudbury and Wayland would decline.
How many powerful politicians who live in wealthier communities are going to want to voluntarily reduce the housing prices of their own homes and those of their friends and neighbors and largest donors? Isn’t that what equal education quality in every town would do?
I don’t see how we can address equal educational opportunity without at least talking about this.
Separately what about this issue: Framingham is being dinged by the state because a couple of its schools have significantly lower test scores than others. because Framingham decided that it was more efficient to center some bilingual ed programs in a couple of schools instead of having staff in all the schools. And the new immigrant students tend to test lower than American-born students. Is the desired result really to force Framingham to hire many more bilingual staff to have bilingual ed in every school? This seems to me to be a completely different issue than racial balance, because non-English speakers require special services that might be more efficiently provided in a couple of locations. Reasonable or not? Is equality of test score always the desired outcome as opposed to a rational, efficient and effective delivery of services? I don’t know.
The town I teach in is more diverse than when I was a student in the same town growing up, but the quality of education seems about the same – neither wonderful nor horrible. I wish we would delink education funding from local property taxes and try to get more equity statewide, but bussing all over the place costs money I think can be better spent in other ways like improving the schools themselves. People like the idea of staying close to home and we should facilitate that.
However, unless you fix the disadvantages that some students have, you are not going to get equality of outcome when all else (spending, teacher talent) remains constant. Yet that’s how schools are being judged, on outcome. Not rational.
Busing within the city lines of Boston makes little sense to me. Either you favor trying to equalize and standardize the student bodies and resources – and that means region-wide — or you don’t. Why do homogenous suburbs get neighborhood schools but urban kids don’t? Fair question. But what happens when you group the most challenging and disadvantaged students in just a few schools? Also a fair question.
What do you do when residential socioeconomic patterns are showing more divergence? I don’t know, but IMO this needs to be talked about as part of the equal access to education debate. I have several relatives who are or were teachers of young kids in the NY metro area, and from what they tell me, family circumstances were a huge predictor of how those kids would do. I’m not talking about “diverse” ethnically and/or racially but diverse in terms of family income, language skills and parental education and involvement.
…is some high-profile athletes who have complained that Boston is a racially divisive and divided city. Robert Parrish of the Boston Celtics comes to mind, and I’m pretty sure there are others. There complaints are high-profile and often get a lot of play.
had a poor relationship with Boston for quite a while. People in Reading behaved abominably toward him in the 60s.
Barry Bonds repeated this stuff in 2008 when the Giants visited, citing things he’d heard about the 70s. Dude, the 70s was thirty or forty years ago.