I suppose the Southies in Boston welcomed all those black children with open arms and hugs and kisses. Why must Yankee do-gooders always ride such lofty steeds?
Problem is this in a nutshell. You Yankees and all your wonderful altruism is so shallow and ignorant. Most of you guys know very little about race. You rarely have to confront the issue. Folks in the deep South deal with it daily and have since the cotton gin was invented. Unless you are black (can't remember) or live in the South Bronx or the like, you are simply breast beating swelling with all that virtue garbage that sort of goes back to X's comments about Yankee puritan stock.
My daughters (by my ex)live in Sudbury Mass. The only blacks they EVER see in person are when they go into Boston proper(Newberry st) to shop or the handful they see at their school who are bused in if they qualify grade-wise. In such a sterile environment like most Yankees live in race-wise, it's easy for them to make blanket judgment and think they know it all.
I lived in Manhattan for 6 years as my home base. The poor blacks there did not seem to me to have it any better than poor blacks down home and they were a lot more pissed off at whitey. Fix your own mess first and then buzz me.
I was born and raised in an integrated blue-collar neighborhood, had black friends and playmates from my earliest memories, went to school with them from 1st grade on, played ball with them, went through scouts with them, have black neighbors in my suburban neighborhood from the day the plan was built, work with them every day and even hang out in a local bar that has black regulars --- so take your stereotype of us damnyankees, mix it with some grits and put it on the shelf with your “South will rise again” myths.
BTW. I don’t have a damn altruistic bone in my body. I do have a deep and abiding respect for the Constitution of the United States, and what the south did to blacks through the Jim Crow century was inexcusable. It doesn’t matter one iota if you, I, or those folks in Boston love, hate, or or totally indifferent to blacks. Those are private decisions, which have no impact on other people as long as the law is respected. But no government, Federal, state or local, has the Constitution right to discriminate against citizens because of race and that is precisely what Jim Crow was --- legally mandated segregation and it was rightly ruled to be Unconstitutional. That politicians in the south usurped the honorable title of “Conservative” while pandering to racial fear and hatred is the reason that blacks vote 90% Rat today. Government discrimination against any citizen is not a states rights issue. Even though the segregationists like Fullbright and Gore of the 50s and 60s were all big-government socialist Democrats, the conservative label they usurped by invoking “states rights” costs real conservatives the support we deserve from black Americans. On most issues, blacks will agree with us, most of the time. But the “Conservative” label makes the run away, and I can’t really blame them.
But talk of the Boston busing conflict has a musty air not so far different from Civil War and nullification chatter. It must have made a major impression in the 1970s on those who'd lived through the civil rights battles of the 1950s and 1960s, but it produces more of an "of course" or a "ho hum" reaction today. I don't know if the Richmond and Charlotte busing conflicts of the same era produced violence, but they certainly produced ill-feeling. Today, we see those conflicts more in a national light.
Is there any popular perception that racial tensions and hostility are less in the North than in the South? I'd say now that the popular perception is the opposite. The feeling is that Blacks have more of a stake and have taken more of a role or a place in the South than in the polyglot, impersonal North. This perception doesn't translate into a tolerance for slaveowners and segregationists, though. The idea of some seems to be that we have to keep discovering Northern vices in order to excuse Southern ones, but most Americans today see them as different aspects of the same American problems.
It does seem to be the case that in a city like Boston or Philadelphia the races are more separated, but are contemporary residential patterns in metropolitan Atlanta or Houston or Charlotte or Richmond really so different from those in the North? I don't know. My guess, though is that what gets attacked as "Northern" patterns of racial distribution is more like the modern suburban norm. One can certainly deplore that pattern if one wishes, but I get the feeling that the differences between the modern or post-modern, industrial or post-industrial North and South are more marginal than significant.
I suppose one can say that Boston or Detroit or Philadelphia are colder and more hostile than Southern cities if one wishes, but this perception will be tested and strained by current developments: the growth of sunbelt cities, gated communites and immigrant populations in the South.