Liberals were predisposed to see nothing but racial prejudice in the antibusing movement, but the movement itself did very little to correct this misunderstanding. Antibusing agitators sometimes appealed to the example of the civil rights movement, but they had no understanding of its moral self-discipline. They deplored violence but subtly encouraged it by dwelling on the duty to repel the outside "invasion" of their communities. They protested that "although we're opposed to forced busing, we're not racists," in the words of Dennis Kearney, a South Boston politician; but antibusing mobs undermined such claims with their favorite slogan, "Bus the niggers back to Africa!" "We are racists," said a white senior at South Boston High School. "Let's face it. That's how we feel about it." Ione Malloy, the English teacher who recorded this defiance in her diary of the busing conflict, tried to persuade her students that South Boston's position was more complicated than that. When students complained that "blacks get everything," she challenged them to change places. When they threatened to "start trouble so the plan won't work," she predicted, quite accurately, that the authorities would close the school. She urged them to avoid violence and provocation, to no avail. As the situation deteriorated, she confessed to a feeling of "futility." "We seem to be going to a dead end."

The best argument against busing was that an "ethnically or racially homogeneous neighborhood respected another community's integrity more easily than a weak, threatened neighborhood did." According to this way of thinking, "strong neighborhoods were the solid building blocks of a healthily diverse city." The "preservation of community," accordingly, should have been recognized as a "value competitive with - yet ironically essential to - equality." But these were the words of a sympathetic observer from outside, Anthony Lukas, not an indigenous analysis of the issue. Leaders of the antibusing movement never resorted to this argument. They seldom rose above the level of resentment, self-righteousness, and self-pity. "We are poor people locked into an economically miserable situation," said Pixie Palladino of ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights). "All we want is to be mothers to the children God gave us. We are not opposed to anyone's skin. We are opposed to forced busing." (my emphasis)

The left has changed and matured; and our adversaries on the right haven't even begun to reckon with that change. They still think we're all John Lindsay and Abbie Hoffman (who is, truth be told, probably treated as harshly in my pages as Richard Nixon).

Known for being anti-communist, anti-Equal Rights Amendment and anti-busing, Yorty was a gravely-voiced maverick [!!] who lost more campaigns than he won, and he ran in about 20 different political races over 45 years.

His biggest splash came in 1961, when he became mayor of Los Angeles. Political consultant Joe Cerrell described him as "the last of the big city conservative Democrats."

... "He knew how to play the unity that represented Los Angles, and also the divisiveness that existed in Los Angeles, and let me be very blunt, I'm talking about cultural and racial differences that existed at that time, in such events as the Watts riots in 1965," Fishman said.

It was under Yorty's reign that racial tension caused Los Angeles' Watts area to erupt in flames.

In 1969, Yorty would use race to win his re-election against Tom Bradley. Los Angeles Times reporter and columnist Kenneth Reich said, "It was almost as if Yorty had mugged the city ... The only way he felt that he would win, would be to exacerbate tensions and claim that Bradley was going to be elected by a 'black block vote,' which was silly because the black population in Los Angeles back then, was only about 18 percent."

It backfired in 1973. Voters made Bradley the city's first African-American mayor, toppling Yorty. (my emphasis)

At a New Year's Eve party at the Greenwich Village apartment of Abbie Hoffman, he along with Jerry Rubin and other self-styled revolutionaries talked of how they would confront the establishment, and the war, in the year ahead. Hoffman later, to a federal investigator, described the birth of the Yippie Party this way: "There we were, all stoned, rolling around the floor ... Yippie! Somebody says 'Oink,' and that's it, pig [the Yippie label for police]. ... And so Yippie was born, the Youth International Party. What about if we create a myth, program it into the media. .. When that myth goes in, it's always connected to [the] Chicago [Democratic convention}. ... Come and do your thing - excitement, bullshit, everything, anything ... commitment, engagement, Democrats, pigs, the whole thing. All you do is change the H in Hippie for a Y in Yippie, and you got it. ... New phenomena [sic], a new thing on the American scene. ... You know as long as we can make up a story about it that's exciting, full of shit, mystical, magical, you have to accuse us of going to Chicago to perform magic."