Кевин Уайт: Мэр Бостона в годы перемен и расследований.

American politician

Kevin Hagan White (September 25, 1929 – January 27, 2012) was an American politician best known for serving as the mayor of Boston for four terms from 1968 to 1984. He was first elected to the office at the age of 38. 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 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 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 and Vice President of the United States). 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.

Kevin H. White was born to Joseph and Patricia Hagan White in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston on September 25, 1929. Both White's father, Joseph and White's maternal grandfather, Henry E. Hagan, served as Boston City Council president. Joseph C. White had also been a state legislator. Kevin White married Kathryn Galvin in 1956, the daughter of William J. Galvin, a former Boston City Council president.

White successfully ran for the open mayoral office in 1967, winning his first election with a coalition of Italian, liberal and black voters. 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, 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. Hicks's campaign against more progressive fellow Democrat Kevin White was so acrimonious that the Boston Globe, under the editorship of Thomas Winship, broke a 75 year tradition of political neutrality to endorse White. White won the general election with 53.25 percent of the vote, (102,706, only 12,552 more than Hicks' 90,154).

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, with ward lieutenants empowered to reward White supporters with city jobs and city contracts. On such short notice, Atkins and White administrators persuaded Brown and Boston's public television station, WGBH TV, to broadcast the concert. blockquote|So all I ask you tonight is this: to let us look at each other, here in the Garden and back at home, and pledge that no matter what any other community might do, we in Boston will honor Dr. King in peace. — Kevin White from the stage of Boston Garden

Barney Frank, 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." 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. From its creation under the National Housing Act of 1934 signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Federal Housing Administration used its official mortgage insurance underwriting policy explicitly to prevent school integration. The Boston Housing Authority 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 or segregation in housing in 1950 and the issuance of Executive Order 11063 by President John F. Kennedy 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 John Volpe (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 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 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 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, Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Charles V. Willie, 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 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. 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. 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.

In 1972, White made news when the Rhode Island State Police arrested members of The Rolling Stones immediately prior to a concert appearance in the Boston Garden. 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.

In 1963, Boston Mayor John F. Collins (1960–1968) and Boston Redevelopment Authority executive Edward J. Logue organized a consortium of savings banks, cooperatives, and federal and state savings and loan associations in the city called the Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group (B BURG) that would provide $2.5 million in Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insured rehabilitation and home ownership loans at less than 5.25% interest in Washington Park around Dudley Square in Roxbury. In 1968, B BURG consisted of 22 institutions that collectively held $4 billion in assets or 90 percent of the region's thrift industry. On April 11, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1968 including Titles VIII and IX introduced by Massachusetts U. S. Senator Edward Brooke prohibiting discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. 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 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 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 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. From its creation under the National Housing Act of 1934 signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, official FHA property appraisal underwriting standards to qualify for mortgage insurance had a whites only requirement excluding all racially mixed neighborhoods or white neighborhoods in proximity to black neighborhoods, 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 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, 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 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 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. By the early 1990s, the overwhelming majority of Boston's 120,000 black residents lived in Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan.

In his 1970 campaign for governor of Massachusetts, 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 Frank Sargent. White's running mate was Michael Dukakis, 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. Presidential nominee Senator George McGovern decided to turn elsewhere and selected Senator Thomas Eagleton, who was later embroiled in a controversy over his failure to disclose having received electric shock therapy for depression. Ultimately, the vice presidential nominee was former Peace Corps head, Chicago School Board President, and later Ambassador Sargent Shriver, who had married into the Kennedy family. McGovern commented ten years later, in 1982: "Choosing White would have been much better than what happened [with Eagleton]. We probably should have overruled" Kennedy and the others.

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.