Although the white boycott has been building strength here — school attendance Sept. 20 was 71 percent, down from a high point of 76 percent earlier this week — and attracting racist scum from other parts of the country, including Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan, a protest rally is slated for Sept. 26 to galvanize opposition to the racist offensive.
In predominantly white South Boston, several hundred whites gathered along the street to taunt and jeer the buses as they arrived carrying Blacks from nearby Roxbury to attend South Boston High School. The racists yelled: "Niggers go Home."
Inside the schools teachers did not greet Black students with the usual enthusiasm of opening school days. Instead, students were pushed and ordered around.
Then, as students boarded buses to go home, racists screamed, "Niggers aren't human," and "Niggers are animals," and heaved rocks at the buses.
Violence against Black students was not confined to South Boston, but spread to other parts of the city. Black students were injured and buses were stoned in Roslindale, Hyde Park, Matapan, and Dorchester.
Maceo Dixon, cochairman of the Socialist Workers 1974 National Campaign Committee, has been touring the area for the Massachusetts socialist campaign. He has urged support for the rally Sept. 26 to protest the racist offensive.
The socialist candidates urged the broadest support for the right of Black students to attend any schools they choose. They hailed efforts by residents of the Columbia Point housing projects to halt the racist attacks on their community.
Truman's announcement that "an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR" has shattered the illusion that the next war would spill its frightfulness everywhere in the world but the United States. No longer can the scoundrels and madmen who rule this country offer the lure that American imperialism, through its monopoly of the atomic bomb, can destroy the Soviet Union and conquer the world through a "quick, cheap war."
Truman's announcement heralds not a greater hope for peace but an intensification of the atomic arms race: greater and greater stockpiling of instruments of mass slaughter; total militarization of American and Western Europe; an all-out witch-hunt against free speech and free thought; repression of organized labor. These are the realties being hatched under cover of the palaver about "international control of atomic energy through the UN."
And what a timely pretext Truman's "calm" announcement offers for further blows against organized labor. How quickly the Big Business press has picked up the cue. "To what degree can the development in Russia be expected to bring about a mood in industrial relations that will assure continuance of the peak functioning of our industrial machine?" asks Arthur Krock, N. Y. Times columnist. "Has not the baleful potential of great strikes been even clearer?" His colleague, business commentator C.F. Hughes, opines: "Public opinion is not likely to condone industrial bickering in the face of this new threat."
Thus Washington plans to use the Russian atomic bomb in order to blast the rights, liberties and standard of living of the American working class.
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