Racial Tensions Rise Over Boston Housing Plan : Desegregation: Residents express anger as minority families fill spots in the all-white projects. Emotions mirror those of busing riots in the 1970s.

In recent days, a two-year-old plan to desegregate South Boston’s all-white housing projects has evoked the emotions and angry rhetoric that ignited bloody riots during this racially tense city’s school desegregation crisis of the mid-1970s.

“The problem is, our kids who got screwed in the busing are getting screwed in housing,” Leo Keaney, chairman of the Old Colony housing project tenants group, complained Friday. “When the hell does it stop? They keep coming at this community.

“We took care of our own and everything. We’ll take care of our own again. We’ll do what we have to do,” Keaney said. Asked whether that could mean violence, he said: “The frustration is building up. You have all the things there for it.”

This tightly knit neighborhood’s anger came to the surface earlier this week, when several hundred whites jammed into a church hall for a community meeting ostensibly organized to discuss crime. There, before city and state officials representing the area, they complained that South Boston residents who had waited years for a spot in their own community’s projects are now being told they must move instead to public housing in minority neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, under a system that gives preference to families who were the victims of alleged racial discrimination in the past, about 180 minority families have moved to South Boston projects where no black had lived in a decade.

The city agreed to the desegregation plan in 1988 to avoid a lawsuit after a federal Housing and Urban Development Department investigation indicated that the Boston Housing Authority had illegally been directing people into projects on the basis of their color. As a result of an earlier lawsuit, the city also stands to lose millions in federal funds unless it integrates the housing.

Although South Boston whites had often had to wait years to get into public housing under the previous system, they and other public housing applicants could choose the project where they would live. Now, they are being put on a citywide list and assigned randomly, which is the process used in most big cities.

Whites in South Boston have suggested that crime has increased with the arrival of black families. Police statistics actually show a decrease, which may be attributable to a new substation in the area. Further, some whites contend that the police and housing authorities are treating minority lawbreakers more leniently than whites, a charge officials deny.

At one point during the meeting Tuesday night, white residents raised an Irish flag emblazoned with the acronym ROAR, which stands for Restore Our Alienated Rights, one of the prominent groups in the fight against the 1974 school desegregation order.

State Senate President William Bulger, a South Boston resident who had been an opponent of forced busing in the 1970s, quoted from a speech he had made then, in which he decried “the hypocritical bleatings and the barbed criticism of our suburban neighbors who ostensibly seek worthy social goals--not at the expense of their natural rights, but at ours.”

“Most of us have been here before,” Bulger told the group, referring to the crisis that marked one of the most bitter and turbulent periods in city history. “It is more of the same. Your protest is a protest against bureaucratic tyranny. It is a tyranny which is directed at the few. It is a deprivation of rights directed at people of modest means.”

Black leaders have since criticized Bulger and other white politicians who spoke at the meeting and accused them of fueling tensions.

“It’s almost as if they are in a time warp,” City Councilor Bruce Bolling said.

“They’re rattling the pot and turning up the heat,” added Louis Elisa, president of the local chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

Although the city faces problems with drugs, inadequate housing, education and crime, some South Boston politicians “are more concerned about who moves next door than whether there will be a next door to move to,” Elisa said, warning that inflammatory tactics could have “severe consequences.”

The Boston Globe also blasted the white officials in an editorial Friday, in which it wrote: “Politicians’ archaic rhetoric should not obscure the good news from South Boston. . . . Only mischief and political jealousy seek to demean South Boston’s achievements by evoking the tumult of the past.”

Racial tensions here have been heightened by a wave of violent crime, and by the highly publicized Charles Stuart case, in which a white man apparently murdered his wife and won the city’s sympathy by blaming the crime on a black assailant. It was only after Stuart committed suicide in January that the truth began to come out.

Keaney said the region’s economic slump, which has put many in South Boston out of work, has also added to the friction. “That builds on them,” he said. “They are hanging around. They have more time to think.”

The Boston Housing Authority hopes to revise the system, allowing residents some choice, but federal officials have not yet approved the changes.

Meanwhile, South Boston residents contend that a plan they had no part of threatens to tear apart the social fabric and strong family links in their community. Bulger noted in an interview that one 70-year-old man and his 79-year-old wife who had long roots in South Boston were told that the only housing available to them was in predominantly black Roxbury.

Although their life savings of $800 is rapidly dwindling, Bulger said, the couple plan to stay as long as they can in South Boston. “They want to remain here,” he said. “It means everything to them.”

Florence Young, who has lived in the Old Colony project for 36 years and raised her six children there, said she gets along well with the black family that has moved into her building. Nonetheless, she sees many parallels between the growing tensions and those that ignited riots 15 years ago.

“The whole idea of the whole game is like busing--poor against poor,” she said.