Kevin Hagan White (September 25, 1929 – January 27, 2012) was an American politician best known for serving as the mayor of Boston for four terms from 1968 to 1984. He was first elected to the office at the age of 38. He presided as mayor during racially turbulent years in the late 1960s and 1970s, and the start of desegregation of schools via court-ordered busing of school children in Boston. White won the mayoral office in the 1967 general election in a hard-fought campaign opposing the anti-busing and anti-desegregation Boston School Committee member Louise Day Hicks. Earlier he had been elected Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth in 1960 at the age of 31, and he resigned from that office after his election as Mayor.
White was credited with revitalizing the waterfront, downtown and financial districts of Boston, and transforming Quincy Market into a metropolitan and tourist destination. In his first term, he implemented local neighborhood "Little City Halls" but ended them after narrowly winning the 1975 election during the Boston school desegregation busing crisis and subsequently constructed a classic and centralized city political machine. He was unsuccessful in his efforts to obtain higher office (Governor of Massachusetts and Vice President of the United States).
His mayoral administration was subject to decades-long federal investigations into corruption, which led to the conviction of more than 20 city hall employees and nearly as many businessmen; the investigations were influential in leading White to decline to seek reelection in 1983, allowing him to avoid public debate and criticism by other mayoral candidates on the topic. He himself was never indicted for wrongdoing.
Family and education Kevin H. White was born to Joseph and Patricia Hagan White in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston on September 25, 1929. Both White's father, Joseph and White's maternal grandfather, Henry E. Hagan, served as Boston City Council president. Joseph C. White had also been a state legislator.
Kevin White married Kathryn Galvin in 1956, the daughter of William J. Galvin, a former Boston City Council president.
White was educated at Tabor Academy, Williams College (A.B., 1952, where he was a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity), Boston College Law School (LL.B., 1955) and the Harvard Graduate School of Public Administration (now known as the John F. Kennedy School of Government).
Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
White was first elected to the open statewide office of Massachusetts secretary of the Commonwealth in 1960 at the age of 31. The incumbent secretary, Joseph D. Ward, decided to run for governor that year (and lost to John A. Volpe in the general election). White won the Democratic Party nomination at the state convention with the crucial assistance of his father and father-in-law, who called in political debts in order to obtain enough votes to win the nomination. He was nominated on the third ballot of the convention, thus becoming the Democratic candidate in the general election in November, in which he defeated a rising Republican, Edward W. Brooke (who in later years was elected U.S. Senator).
In 1962 and 1964, White was reelected to two additional two-year terms. In 1966 he was reelected to a four-year term. He served in office through 1967, resigning on December 20, 1967, after winning the Boston mayoral election that November.
Mayor of Boston
White successfully ran for the open mayoral office in 1967, winning his first election with a coalition of Italian, liberal and black voters. He campaigned for rent control; one of his slogans was "When landlords raise rents, Kevin White raises hell." This was implemented in Boston in 1970, after a Massachusetts enabling law for municipalities was enacted in 1970.
White succeeded mayor John F. Collins, who stepped down after eight years that included urban renewal projects including the planning and building of Boston City Hall, thus paving the way for the future rebuilding and rehabilitation of the waterfront, financial and business districts of the city center that White later undertook.
Elections for Mayor The Boston mayoral election of 1967 had a primary and a general election. In a ten-candidate non-party primary election for the open office on September 26, 1967, White was second, drawing 19.83% of the vote with 30,789 votes, and Boston School Board member Louise Day Hicks was first, with 28.16% of the vote and 43,722 votes. For the general election on November 7, 1967, only White and Hicks were on the ballot in a runoff contest. White narrowly defeated Hicks, who had taken a staunchly anti-busing (de facto anti-desegregation) position as a member of the Boston School Committee. Her slogan was the coded "You know where I stand."
Hicks's campaign against more progressive fellow Democrat Kevin White was so acrimonious that the Boston Globe, under the editorship of Thomas Winship, broke a 75-year tradition of political neutrality to endorse White.Farrell, John A., Tip O'Neill and the Democratic Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 2001), p. 522
White won the general election with 53.25 percent of the vote, (102,706, only 12,552 more than Hicks' 90,154). Two years later, in 1969, Hicks was elected to the Boston City Council by large majorities, and then in 1970 to Congress, winning the open district formerly held by retiring U.S. House Speaker John W. McCormack after defeating Joseph Moakley by 10% in the multi-candidate Democratic primary.
In the 1971 mayoral election White won a second term, again defeating Hicks, this time by 40,000 votes. Hicks in 1972 would lose her congressional seat by two percentage points and 3,428 votes in a post-census revised district and a four-candidate general election that included a rematch with Moakley running as an Independent. Hicks was re-elected to the Boston City Council in 1973, remaining there until she retired from public office in 1981.
In the 1975 mayoral election, White barely defeated State Senator Joe Timilty, the year after the start of court-ordered school desegregation and busing. The 1979 mayoral election was also close, against the same opponent. White did not run again in the 1983 mayoral election, which was won by then-city councilor Raymond Flynn.
Administration Mayor White's early administrations were noteworthy for the racial and ethnic diversity of the senior aides and staff to the Mayor, with many staffers subsequently going on to influential positions and elected office.
White decentralized municipal government by establishing in the early years of his tenure in office a number of "Little City Halls" in local neighborhoods, giving more influence to local leadership and ethnic and racial minorities to access city hall bureaucracy, but following the narrowly won election in 1975 against Joseph Timilty during the Boston school busing crisis, closed them, re-centralizing power in Boston City Hall and creating a political machine intentionally modeled on the one headed by Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, with ward lieutenants empowered to reward White supporters with city jobs and city contracts.
Peaceful city after death of Martin Luther King Jr. In the fourth month of White's first term, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, touching off disturbances in the African-American Roxbury section of Boston that same evening which did not spread to other parts of the city. On April 5, 5,000 people marched from Boston Common to Post Office Square in King's memory. James Brown had a previously scheduled concert set for that same evening in Boston Garden. White's chief of police was concerned about allowing 15,000 people to attend the concert so close to downtown, saying he didn't think he could keep the city safe. White originally intended to cancel the concert entirely. However, Tom Atkins, a local NAACP leader who had been elected to the City Council from Roxbury in the same election as White 1967 warned of potential rioting if concertgoers arriving at the arena found it canceled. Atkins and members of White's staff persuaded White to allow the show to go on. Mel King is quoted in the article: "Very frankly, the problem [the issue of government discrimination and segregation in schools] didn’t get solved until the courts made it happen."
On such short notice, Atkins and White administrators persuaded Brown and Boston's public television station, WGBH-TV, to broadcast the concert. The White administration also appealed to community leaders to help keep the peace, and also encouraged people to stay home and watch the concert on television. White appeared on stage with James Brown to appeal to the audience, and to the entire city via television, to remember and maintain King's peaceful vision. (With a link to video of Kevin White's statement on stage, and James Brown's introductory number of the performance.)
WGBH immediately rebroadcast the concert twice more that night, and people apparently stayed inside to continue watching it. While many cities, including Washington DC, New York, Chicago, Detroit and Oakland, were beset with civil disturbances, rioting and fires after King's death, the city of Boston was spared from widespread disturbances.
White secured $60,000 from the Boston City Council to make up for the loss of ticket revenue to the performers resulting from his efforts to discourage attendance at the close-to-downtown arena at this volatile moment. Only 2,000 had attended the sold-out show, in a venue that had a capacity of 15,000. Individuals with Brown's entourage state that only $10,000 made it to Brown's production company. Interview of David Leaf and review of the documentary The Night James Brown Saved Boston by David Leaf Article contains links to the video "The Night James Brown Saved Boston, by David Leaf
History of non-leadership by city elites on civil rights Barney Frank, who worked as White's chief of staff in City Hall during his first mayoral term, has described White's being dubbed "Mayor Black", because he was the first Boston mayor to admit there was a racial-discrimination problem. White administration staff member, and subsequent Boston City Council President, Bruce Bolling, describes a leadership vacuum on the issue of race, and that for many years "the established institutions—the City Council, the School Committee, the mayor, the business community, the philanthropic community, the religious community—no one weighed in in any responsible way to address this issue of school desegregation."
This elite leadership vacuum would leave Mayor White without the public community leadership and visible alliances and collaboration desirable to peacefully implement new policies necessary to comply with a later court order to desegregate the schools. The Boston School Committee was independently elected, and not under the control of Mayor White, and had put into place de jure segregation and discrimination policies in the operation and funding of schools in Boston, and this was a source of great frustration to Mayor White. Interview with Micho Spring, appointed deputy mayor under White; and Peter Meade, who held several positions under White, including director of public safety during court-ordered busing.
The city administration did not move on the issue of unfair treatment of minorities in the school system, and compliance with anti-segregation laws and decisions, until the a federal court required the city to do so, via a court order.
School desegregation crisis