peak years of the movement. In Chicago, social transformation on the scale of Birmingham was by no means achieved; the most King could accomplish was to dramatize and expose the fact of prejudice in the North. In the 1970s, one of the most rancorous battles over court-ordered busing to achieve public-school integration took place in New England, specifically the Roxbury section of Boston.
Adding to the rancor of Chicago and Boston was the ironic fact that Illinois and Massachusetts, unlike Alabama and Georgia, had no body of Jim Crow law, or de jure segregation, on the books that had to be overturned. But the force of social custom and practice, as well as housing patterns, was such that public accommodations and public schools (populated according to neighborhood proximity) were in fact--de facto--no less segregated. This, in the view of civil rights activists, constituted an injustice completely consistent with the injustices embedded into black-letter Jim Crow and Plessy, i.e., illegal and therefore subject to legal remedy. Supreme Court-mandated methods of integration that followed were resisted by opponents as an exercise in pernicious social engineering, on the theory that since no onerous racial-bias laws had been on the books, no law was either necessary or desirable to construct an artifi
...