THURSDAY, JULY 11, 2002 — A story headlined DIVERSITY CONCERN VOICED ON CONVENTION in yesterday’s Boston Globe reinforced some of the worst notions outsiders have about race relations in Boston. The Globe reported that some of the Democratic activists, specifically African-American members of the Democratic National Convention selection committee, complained that during their tour of the Hub last month, they were surrounded by an army of white faces. Today, in a piece headlined DNC OFFICIAL DOWNPLAYS CONCERN OVER BOSTON’S DIVERSITY, the Globe backtracked from some of the assertions made in the earlier story, quoting DNC site-selection-committee co-chair Alice Huffman, an African-American, as minimizing the committee’s level of concern.

Nevertheless, this is an important story because it involves both what kind of city Boston is and what kind of city it’s becoming. And there is more — and less — to the underlying substance of the concern, i.e., that Boston is still segregated, than meets the eye.

There’s no question that Boston has a terrible history of racism and segregation, as exemplified by the busing crisis in the mid-1970s. (That same tumultuous period about which Republican gubernatorial candidate Mitt Romney refrained from commenting). Who, after all, can forget Boston Herald-American photographer Stanley Forman’s 1977 Pulitzer Prize–winning photo of a white man using an American flag to assault Ted Landsmark, an African-American man, on City Hall Plaza?

But there’s also no question about the extent to which the city has changed, even during the past 15 years. The best piece on race relations in Boston was penned by Boston Globe national editor Kenneth Cooper, who returned to the city after an absence of a decade and a half. In the September 9, 2001, Globe article, Cooper described how the news that he was leaving a job in Washington, DC, to come back to Boston was met with shock by his African-American friends and colleagues. "Are you crazy or stupid or something?" Cooper’s friends asked him. "Why would you go back up there, with those racist white folks?" When Cooper returned to Boston, however, he discovered that his friends were wrong. He felt free routinely to traverse South Boston, something he would have been reluctant to do back in the 1980s. Indeed, many of Boston’s neighborhoods are more integrated now than they were for most of the 20th century.

All that said, Boston does have qualities that make it different from other American cities — qualities with which the Democratic activists are familiar. For one thing, Boston’s African-Americans are more or less locked out of the city’s power structure. Only two out of the 13 city-council members are African-American. As of the last election for the House of Representatives, Boston’s delegation counted only four people of color out of 16. The most powerful legislator in the state, House Speaker Tom Finneran, comes from a majority-minority district. Boston is a tribal city where political power counts, and minorities don’t have it. That’s something that outsiders have a right to feel queasy about.

But Boston also differs demographically from many major American cities: it is whiter. According to 2000 census figures, the Hub is 54 percent white and 25 percent black. Detroit, by contrast, is 12 percent white and 81 percent black. Baltimore, which has a white mayor (of Irish descent), is 31 percent white and 64 percent black. Los Angeles, which also has a white mayor, is 11 percent black, 46 percent white.

Given this background, it’s easy to see why an African-American Democratic activist might not view Boston as an ideal setting for a convention. The city lacks even a series of posh gathering spots for upscale African-Americans, which are a staple of urban life elsewhere. Boston has made progress on racial issues, but work still remains to be done here.