Bus-ted

Kevin H. White, the Boston mayor who launched the most successful PBS pledge drive ever, has died at the age of 82. A four-term mayor of Boston from 1968 to 1984, the Democrat was among the last of the big-city liberal mayors, and helped beat back at times violent public outrage over court-ordered busing to desegregate schools by stepping up police protection to restore order. When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, White pressed the local PBS affiliate to televise a James Brown concert scheduled that evening in Boston Garden. While riots ripped through many inner cities, Boston remained quiet as the populace tuned in to hear Brown call White “a swinging cat.” White could have been a concert promoter, securing the release of The Rolling Stones from the Rhode Island State Police so they could make a gig in Boston before the crowd turned violent. White gave generations of college students a place to take their visiting families by reopening Quincy Market as part of his economic revitalization efforts that prompted the comment “[Boston’s] not Camelot, but it’s not Cleveland either.” He nearly had the 1972 VP nomination, but his support for Ed Muskie came back to bite him, as it did so many others, and the nod briefly went to Crazy Tom Eagleton, and then Sargent Shriver. Corruption allegations dogged many in his administration, but nothing was ever directly tied to White, who emerged largely unscathed to become the director of the Institute for Political Communication at Boston University.