But it was one thing to threaten force against the South, long regarded as the country’s most benighted region, and quite another to marshal it against the North, home of the nation’s leading banks and corporations, its most powerful media, and the very liberals who most passionately supported the civil rights movement. For more than a decade, the federal government’s legal guns were locked into place, facing south. Only in the late sixties and early seventies did they begin to swivel and train their barrels on the hitherto exempt cities of the North.
J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground
(And apparently it is yet another thing to incorporate the problems of civil rights in the North into its history education. This whole book is news to me.)
Did you know Ted Kennedy was once chased (~2:00) in Government Center by protestors, throwing tomatoes and breaking windows, for supporting forced busing? The announcer reports with wonderful accent: “The crowd surged toward this once-favored son. It was a strange crowd to surround a Kennedy.” This was one of the moments that inspired Lukas to write his book. He says in an interview:
I remember asking myself, “What in the world is going on when Ted Kennedy is driven to shelter by his ‘own people,’ Boston’s Irish Catholics?” When a reporter asks himself, “What in the world is going on?” that’s generally a pretty good starting place for a story — or a book. In fact, absent that kind of obsessive curiosity, I can’t produce a successful book.
N.B., in the video, tea-bagger at 1:00.
