Kevin H. White, Boston mayor during racial strife of 1970s, dies at 82

Kevin H. White, a four-term mayor of Boston who dominated the city’s political landscape during a turbulent period of court-ordered school desegregation in the 1970s, died Jan. 27 at his home in Boston, family spokesman George Regan said in a statement. He was 82 and had Alzheimer’s disease.

Mr. White, who was first elected in 1967 and served until 1984, presided over an ambitious commercial rebirth in Boston, but his tenure was shadowed by the city’s in­trac­table problems with race relations.

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He entered office as a reform-minded Democrat who had grown up among Boston’s Irish-American political elite. His father, maternal grandfather and father-in-law had all served as president of the Boston City Council.

After serving as secretary of state of Massachusetts, Mr. White was elected mayor at age 38, defeating an avowed opponent of integration. Barely three months after Mr. White took office, other cities erupted in violence after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968.

Mr. White helped prevent a potential disturbance by encouraging singer James Brown to go forward with a scheduled concert the next night at the Boston Garden. The mayor arranged to have the concert broadcast on television in Boston, which kept many young people at home.

Onstage, Brown called Mr. White “a swingin’ cat,” the concert was deemed a triumph of good will and wide-scale violence was averted in Boston.

In his early years in office, Mr. White established “little city halls” throughout Boston, where local residents could voice their grievances. He brought large numbers of women, minorities and young people — including future congressman Barney Frank — into government and was considered a rising political star.

Mr. White lost a race for governor in 1970 but was reelected mayor the next year. In 1972, Democratic presidential candidate George S. McGovern briefly considered him as his running mate before reportedly being dissuaded by U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).

Mr. White’s political fortunes seemed to stall in 1974, when federal judge W. Arthur Garrity ordered the Boston public schools to be desegregated. Thousands of children, both black and white, were bused to schools outside their neighborhoods, pleasing almost no one.

Ugly episodes of racial violence broke out in a city once celebrated as the birthplace of abolitionism in the 19th century and known as the nation’s “cradle of liberty.” Brawls were commonplace in school hallways, buses were pelted with rocks and brutal racial attacks occurred in the city’s ethnically entrenched neighborhoods. Within eight years, the percentage of white students in Boston’s public schools fell from 70 percent to 30 percent.

Mr. White was caught in the middle.

“I am for integration and against forced busing,” he told U.S. News & World Report in 1975. “Eighty per cent of the people in Boston are against busing. If Boston were a sovereign state, busing would be cause for revolution.”

He was upset that the Justice Department, under President Gerald R. Ford, turned down his request for federal marshals to enforce the court order of a federal judge.