Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 September 2018
The people have a long history of being hostile to outsiders, wrote Louis Jaffe, Harvard law professor, about the inhabitants of Boston's South End. As a consultant to the Massachusetts Department of Education Jaffe urged that the impending federal court desegregation ruling exempt “Southie” from any busing plan. Jaffe's warnings went unheeded, and the buses rolled between the overwhelming black Roxbury ghetto and the neighboring, predominantly Irish South End, sparking an onslaught of racial violence one journalist described as “unparalleled in modern Boston history, a day of hatred against outsiders not witnessed here in decades.”