Neal Gabler - Against the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Rise of Conservatism, 1976-2009

In that tense school year that ran from the fall of 1974 to the spring of 1975, Boston seethed as Federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity, Jr., tried to enforce a plan to desegregate the citys schools, and scores of white parents resisted the attemptresisted it angrily, forcefully, resentfully, and even violently, until the seething erupted into explosion. Among the angriest, most forceful, resentful, and even violent of those parents was forty-three-year-old Elvira Palladino, or Pixie, as she was known. But Palladino was no pixie. Though small of stature, she was loud, tough, coarse, vulgar, unfiltered, impolitic, and impoliteshe once gave a monsignor who supported busing the Sicilian kiss of deathmore a hellion than a sprite. Some called her Garbage Mouth. The daughter of immigrants from the South of Italy, her father had worked in a shoe factory, and she sewed stitches in a clothing factory herself, which was where she met her future husband. Even after she became a civic leader, helping rouse those furious white parents against the establishment, she preferred to think of herself as a mothershe had two school-age childrenand it was her children who had brought her to the forefront of the antibusing movement that year as the head of the East Boston chapter of Restore Our Alienated Rights, or ROAR, a perfect acronym for an organization that shouted down proponents of busing.

Palladino was blunt. She did not want her children bused out of East Boston, nor did she want Black children bused in. Races shouldnt mingle, she said. She had led a contingent at the antibusing rally on Bostons City Hall Plaza on September 9, 1974, three days before the opening of the schools and at the beginning of implementation of the desegregation plana rally at which Senator Edward Kennedy, who supported the court desegregation order, had foolishly waded into the restive crowd hoping to calm them and instead incited them, so that he was forced to retreat and race into the federal office building named for his brother John, under a torrent of vitriol and a hail of missiles, including a raw egg. And Palladino had led another contingent the following spring as tensions over busing were still thick, this one in front of South Atlantic High School in Quincy, where Ted had made a speech and where angry protesters, massing outside, deflated the tires of his car, rubbed dog feces onto the cars door handles, and chased him down the street when he exited the building, screaming at him, until he raced into a subway station, leaped through the doors of an incoming train, and survived. (A photo of another rally showed Palladino being forcibly carried away by two policemen.) All that year and into the next, at speeches and hearings and meetings, Palladino, sometimes wearing a tam-o-shanter over her curly black hair, sometimes wearing a stop forced busing T-shirt, showed up to harass Ted Kennedy, harass him for forsaking the white working class of Boston and favoring Black people, whom she called pickaninnies and jungle bunnies. First among his tormentors, the political scientist Ronald Formisano, who wrote a book about the Boston busing acrimony, would call Pixie Palladino due to her hostility to Ted Kennedy. Ted agreed, saying that she seemed to pop up wherever he was, shouting at him at the top of her lungs. She came. She never stopped coming. She was even accused of punching him in the stomach during the fracas at the City Hall rally.