pathetic observer from outside, Anthony Lukas, not an indigenous analysis of the issue. Leaders of the antibusing movement never resorted to this argument. They seldom rose above the level of resentment, self-righteousness, and self-pity. "We are poor people locked into an economically miserable situation," said Pixie Palladino of ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights). "All we want is to be mothers to the children God gave us. We are not opposed to anyone's skin. We are opposed to forced busing."

In default of indigenous leadership, it was left to an occasional outsider or to an ambivalent insider like lone Malloy to grapple with the difficult question of how to reconcile ethnic solidarity with racial equality. Like other moderates in South Boston—the few who remained by the mid‐ seventies—Malloy supported integration but shared the local resentment of Garrity's judge-made law. "A great injustice has been done to the people of South Boston by forcing on them a desegregation plan that didn't consider the needs of the students or the working-class background of the community." She admired the community pride she discovered when she attended a meeting of ROAR, but she regretted the community's effort to make the high school a political battleground. She agreed with a statement passed by the faculty senate that if the black and white communities stayed out, refraining from "agitation in the communities with the students," the atmosphere in the school would improve.

An Irish Catholic who grew up in Boston and longed for an "Irish cultural renaissance in South Boston," Malloy nevertheless understood that the Southie's creed, "We take care of our own," represented an "inadequate ideal." She hoped to "change the self-image of the South Boston youth by giving him a sense of his cultural roots so he could stand strong." She did not expect to accomplish this, however, by concealing Irish shortcomings or failures, still less by appealing to a precarious sense of racial superiority. Nor did she propose to strengthen Irish solidarity by sealing off South Boston from the outside world. "I would hear, over and over, 'We just want to be left alone.' " She rejected this simpleminded solution, just as she rejected simpleminded solutions proposed by the other side. ^* As a teacher, she could not accept either of the competing

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*	She listened with some amusement to a wistful appeal broadcast over WGBH—"not exactly the workingman's station"—in which Elma Lewis, founder of the School of

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