Thursday, 4:30 PM
From The Globe archives: James M. Kelly in 1995
The following is a story about long-time City Councilor James M. Kelly that ran in The Globe on March 5, 1995. Kelly died this morning at the age of 66 after a long bout with brain cancer.
The everlasting Hurrah
That Jimmy Kelly can be elected City Council president at a time when nearly half the city's residents are nonwhite says much about Boston politics
By Michael Rezendes, Globe Staff
On a gray morning in early January, 13 city councilors gather at City Hall to choose a council president. It is an annual rite, and it is a natural time to ponder Boston's slow change from a collection of urban villages dominated by the Irish to a contemporary American city of blacks, whites, Asians, and Hispanics, many of them from foreign lands.
Yet eight of the city councilors, one more than the required majority, choose to reelect as president the one city councilor who most actively personifies the past: James M. Kelly, the district representative from South Boston and a vocal opponent of school busing, affirmative action, and racial integration in the city's public housing.
Kelly -- short, stocky, and physically aggressive at 54 -- strides up to the dais the moment the vote is announced and lets his colleagues know that his primary mission will be to hold on to what remains of the city's dwindling middle class. "Boston clearly cannot continue in the direction it has been headed during the last 15 or 20 years," he says. "More people are leaving, because of the crime, the schools, and a number of other issues."
In front of the audience at the City Hall ceremony, Kelly addresses the concerns of all of Boston's middle-class residents, whatever their race. When, for example, he declaims on the need "to end the insanity of this slow-motion civil war we have going on in certain neighborhoods, kids killing kids over nothing," he is seeking to keep middle-class minorities in the city by fighting crime in their neighborhoods.
But during interviews, it's clear that Kelly's priority as City Council president is somewhat different. "My main objective is to stabilize the city, to maintain a white middle class," he says. It's also clear that Kelly is willing to help minority residents only as long as they are willing to remain in the neighborhoods where they currently reside. Asked if he considers himself a separatist, Kelly replies, "If people want to associate with people most like themselves, let them."
Throughout his 11 years on the council, and particularly during the 14 months since he was first elected president, Kelly has tried to moderate the combative image that has earned him notoriety as an implacable foe of school busing and one of the council's most ardent conservatives. Long gone is the brown leather jacket he often wore as a spokesman for the South Boston Information Center (his tastes now run to dark suits accented by the occasional Kelly-green tie). Gone, too, apparently, are the days when he and his council nemesis, Charles Yancey, would treat spectators to expletive-laden exchanges and threaten to come to blows, as they did after a 1991 Public Safety Committee hearing.
There is little doubt, however, that Kelly's views remain as they were 20 years ago, when he emerged as a streetwise antibusing leader to be reckoned with. "Jimmy has matured in public life -- extraordinarily -- but that's not to say he's changed his ideology," says Larry DiCara, a Boston attorney and former City Council president. "His modus operandi is different, but in many ways you're looking at the same guy."
Then again, in many ways, you're not. For in 1967, when school busing was unthinkable on the streets of South Boston, Kelly was serving a six-month sentence at the old Deer Island House of Correction for the illegal possession of a firearm. He was also a heavy drinker with a reputation on the street, a man who picked his friends from the ranks of organized crime.
Kelly's journey to sobriety and the right side of the law has been as transforming as the journey the city has made in the years since federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity ordered the buses to roll, in June of 1974. "Jimmy could have gone the other way. He could have ended up dead. But he didn't," says Bernard O'Donnell, a South Boston activist and a probation officer at Roxbury District Court.
The answer to how Kelly could be elected city council president at a time when nearly half of the city's residents are nonwhite is in part an exercise in ward and precinct politics. Nonwhites still comprise a minority of Boston voters, which makes it difficult for them to win one of the four citywide council seats. And they are scattered throughout the city in patterns that make it difficult for them to dominate a majority of the nine district positions. Hispanics, for example, are spread across at least three districts, in neighborhoods such as Jamaica Plain, the South End, and East Boston. Asians, meanwhile, are living in significant concentrations in at least four districts, in neighborhoods such as Allston, Chinatown, East Boston, and Dorchester. Blacks, by contrast, are more concentrated -- some might say segregated -- in Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan and, as a result, have elected the only two minority city councilors.
The willingness of city councilors to name Kelly as their leader is also an exercise in Realpolitik, an acknowledgment that Kelly now finds himself in an enviable political constellation. He is, after all, a close ally of Mayor Tom Menino, a former district city councilor from Hyde Park; a comrade in arms of Senate president William Bulger, a South Boston neighbor and fellow busing foe; and a friend of Peter Berlandi, a former South Boston neighbor and the chief political fund-raiser for Gov. William Weld.
In the world of Boston politics, that's about as connected as most people ever get. Yet support for Kelly on the council may run deeper still, to a fear of the future, a reluctance to relinquish the mores and traditions of a way of life that is by now quickly fading. It is a way of life in which the general view is inward -- not upward or outward -- but it is also a way of life in which the preeminent values revolve around family, friends, and allegiance to a sense of place.
From the beachfront homes of City Point to the Broadway barrooms of the gritty Lower End, South Boston has a sense of place like no other neighborhood in the city. It's got its own anthem ("Southie's My Home Town"), its own hallowed traditions (like the St. Patrick's Day Parade), and its own mythic cast of sinners and saints.
In South Boston, organized-crime leader James (Whitey) Bulger is revered by many as a native son, even though his reign over neighborhood rackets has coincided with a rise in drug trafficking. Meanwhile, Bulger's brother, the Senate president, is hailed as a patriarch and protector, the intellectual apologist for the excesses of a community that has fought tooth, nail, and then some to control its schools and its housing. As Kelly says, "Whitey is a gentleman, and Billy is the most honest man I have ever met."
Although South Boston has acquired a reputation for being inhospitable to outsiders, the neighborhood today provides the qualities of life that seem so lacking in too many of America's urban communities: safe streets, lifelong friendships, and the knowledge that in times of trouble, the local safety net is not only a government program but also an extended network of neighbors and acquaintances who won't allow one of their own to go down.
"I look at South Boston as a place where people really care for one another, really protect one another," Kelly says. "People from other areas who criticize the parochialism of the neighborhood would do well to emulate some of the very positive things we do."
Kelly, more than anyone, is in charge of preserving the South Boston way for the 30,000 people who live there, most of them descendants of Irish, Italian, Polish, and Lithuanian immigrants. While the Bulgers are the stuff of local legend, appearing only occasionally on the streets of "the town," Kelly is the day-to-day keeper of the flame, the go-to guy when a street light goes out, a park needs to be cleaned, or the beer-drinking teen-agers down on the corner are getting out of hand.
"The one person every community leader in South Boston works with is Jim Kelly," says longtime neighborhood activist Gerard Vierbickas. "When people in South Boston have a problem, it's almost always with city services. They really don't have much contact with state government."
Lucky them. During more than a decade at City Hall, Kelly has built a\ reputation as Boston's most effective city councilor, mostly through unstinting attention to the mundane responsibilities associated with providing constituent services. He is frequently the first of the councilors to arrive at City Hall in the morning, the last to leave in the evening, and the only one to appear on weekends. "I don't agree with all of his political views," says Councilor at Large Richard Iannella, "but he's truly one of the hardest- working councilors to work City Hall in many years."
It was Kelly's penchant for long hours and his dedication to the routine chores of a district city councilor that led to his friendship with then-district councilor Menino. Throughout most of the 1980s, Kelly and Menino tended their respective precincts with the same block-by-block attention to detail and a similar commitment to personal relationships.
Today, Kelly and Menino are likely to disagree on a wide assortment of issues. Menino, for instance, believes gays and lesbians should be permitted to march in South Boston's St. Patrick's Day Parade. Kelly -- need it be said? -- does not. Yet, their relationship seems stronger than ever. "Jimmy and I are very close," Menino says. "Very often we agree to disagree, but we talk almost daily."
As his friendship with Menino shows, Kelly, a self-described Reagan Democrat, has been able to tiptoe through Boston's political minefields, forging alliances that cross party and ideological lines with virtual impunity. In large measure, that's because he consistently upholds what may be the preeminent value of his hometown: loyalty. "It's the single most important thing to him in the political life," says Mike McCormack, a Boston attorney and former councilor at large. "And loyalty for Jim Kelly isn't necessarily paying obeisance. It's more a matter of not turning your back when a guy needs your help."
Jim Kelly would be the first to say he's lucky to be in politics, lucky to have a job, lucky to be alive. "Of the 70 or 80 people in the crowd that I grew up with," he says, "only about 15 of us are left."
Certainly, Kelly never imagined a career in politics back in 1967, when he was a 26-year-old father of three looking out at the world from a cell on Deer Island. At the time of his arrest, Kelly was an occasional construction worker who had graduated from South Boston High School and served an apprenticeship as a sheet-metal worker at the Jim Did It Sign Co., in Allston.
But construction work couldn't compete with living fast, hitting the bars, packing a piece, and hanging out with friends in the Mullins gang, a violent South Boston criminal organization involved in gambling and loan sharking. "I was a rogue," Kelly recalls. "I was a barroom brawler. I was, I guess, feared."
Kelly rarely discusses his associations with South Boston criminals of the late 1960s. But he admits that as a young man he was swept up in the gangland culture that dominated many of Boston's Irish and Italian neighborhoods. ''There was a gang war going on at the time, and a number of my friends had gotten killed," he says, when asked to explain why he carried a gun. "I probably had a feeling that I could protect myself if I had a reputation for carrying a firearm."
Those were the days when the Killeen brothers held sway over organized criminal activity in South Boston, collecting tribute from bookmakers and loan sharks with the assistance of Whitey Bulger. By the early 1970s, however, Bulger had switched his allegiance to the Mullins crew -- Kelly's gang -- which was vying for control of South Boston's underworld. Kelly says that he was never a member of the Mullins organization but that his friendships with members of the enterprise led to a belief that he was. "I was very fond of some of the people who were in it," he says, "so I guess I was perceived to be part of the gang."
In 1974, when resistance to busing exploded in violence on the streets of South Boston, police and ranking members of the administration of Mayor Kevin White feared that antibusing activists were taking their cues from organized- crime leaders. The fear was due in part to Kelly and the perception that he was part of the Mullins crowd.
In September of that year, for example, John Doyle, Boston's deputy superintendent of police, told a Globe reporter that two members of the Mullins gang, one of them Kelly, had helped organize and lead an antibusing rally at which 22 protesters were arrested after scuffling with police. The Mullins gang had "assumed a very active role in calling people up and telling them to get over to the scene -- or else," Doyle was quoted as saying.
But Kelly scoffs at the notion that organized criminals ever played a substantive role in antibusing protests. "Parents in South Boston didn't need any lessons in how to stand up for their children," he says. "It was all very instinctive." Furthermore, Kelly says, by the time the buses were rolling, he had given up "the life."
Kelly traces his metamorphosis from barroom brawler to community leader to March 24, 1971, the day he took his last drink. "I could see the heartbreak I was causing in the people who were near and dear to me," he explains. "My mother, my sisters, my ex-wife, my friends, were all very fond of me. And my children were getting older. I didn't want them to see that their father was a crazy guy who did crazy kinds of things. So I just woke up and said, 'That's it. I'm done.'"
But the transition wasn't as easy as it may sound. Sporadically employed, Kelly moved into an apartment in the Old Colony housing project rented by his former wife, Nancy. Then, when he was working on a construction job in downtown Boston, a piece of an air-conditioning unit fell on his right arm and severed a tendon, ending his years in the building trades.
Nor was the road that eventually led to Kelly's political career ever a clear-cut path. Shortly after he quit drinking, for instance, Kelly agreed to play an active role in the affairs of the sheet-metal workers' union, Local 17. But when he rose to ask a question at a union meeting, this onetime associate of the Mullins gang found himself struck dumb by an unexpected foe: fear of public speaking. "I would have preferred to face a firing squad," Kelly says. "I was absolutely terrified of getting up in front of a group of guys and speaking, even if it was only to ask a question."
To his Irish brethren, many of whom take pride in their oratorical skills, Kelly's most startling act probably was his enrollment in a Dale Carnegie course. But it was a wise move. He soon learned what did not come naturally and went on to campaign successfully as a trustee of Local 17, gaining public speaking experience and valuable organizational skills along the way.
When forced busing shattered South Boston's cherished insularity, Kelly shared the anguish of his neighbors. "When the busing began, there were tens of thousands of people adamantly opposed, and no one more opposed than I," he recalls. "In my heart, I felt that busing children beyond their neighborhood school because of their race was racist in itself. In my very being, I believed it was immoral, un-American, counterproductive, and outrageously wrong. I felt that way in 1974. I feel that way in 1995. I will feel that way forever."
Despite his passion, Kelly moved tentatively among the town's antibusing leaders, content to play a subservient role, never believing that one day he would develop a political following of his own. And, contrary to popular belief, his role model in those years was not state Sen. Bill Bulger, who one day would become Senate president. Nor was it state Rep. Raymond Flynn, who would become mayor of the city. It was City Councilor Louise Day Hicks, the first lady of South Boston and the soul of the antibusing crusade. "Louise and I developed a very close bond that exists to this day," Kelly says. "I was her driver, and she considered me her protector. I regard her as a woman of tremendous compassion and integrity."
By the early 1980s, the antibusing movement had lost much of its fervor. Working-class white families, outmatched by the power of the federal judiciary, were deserting the schools and the city. Yet Boston remained deeply troubled by busing, and by additional federal actions designed to integrate the city's public housing stock and its police and fire departments. Across the city, racial violence erupted with frightening frequency -- in white neighborhoods, in black neighborhoods, even in supposedly neutral downtown locations such as City Hall Plaza and Boston Common, where blacks were attacked by angry bands of white teen-agers.
It was during this uncertain time that Kelly launched his political career with a campaign for a seat on the old nine-member, at-large City Council. Without doubt, Kelly was a South Boston product. But he believed that voters in his home base, combined with those in the antibusing precincts of East Boston, Charlestown, Hyde Park, and Dorchester, would be sufficient to send him to City Hall.
He was probably right. In a field of 40 candidates, Kelly survived the 1981 preliminary council race, and polls showed him among the top nine contenders going into the stretch for the final election. But with less than a week remaining before election day, a television station ran a news spot about Kelly's time at Deer Island, and support for his candidacy seemed to fade. When it was all over, Kelly placed 10th, just out of the running and behind Bruce Bolling, who became the first black Boston city councilor in a decade.
In that same election, voters also approved a new form of local government, replacing the nine-member at-large council with a 13-member body made up of nine district representatives and four councilors at large, to be elected two years hence. Kelly quickly reentered the fray and won a 1983 bid to represent District 2, which includes Bay Village, Chinatown, a slice of Dorchester, a generous portion of the South End, and all of South Boston.
"Representing the people you grew up with is as good as it gets," Kelly says, brushing aside the idea that he might regret having lost his race for an at-large seat. "I guess what I'm trying to do, in my own way, is to repay all of the people who stood by me when I was acting really punky."
These days, Kelly lives with his mother, Helen, in a modest condominium in South Boston's City Point section. He is on good terms with his former wife. Two of his three children, Sandra and Jamie, are raising families in the suburbs, while the third, Tommy, lives in South Boston. He has seven grandchildren.
If you ask, Kelly will tell you he learned a long time ago that carrying a gun isn't much protection if someone is dead set on killing you. He will also tell you that young men who carry firearms to appear manly have it all wrong. ''In hindsight, there's nothing macho about it, nothing attractive about it at all," he says. "I guess the older we get, the more we see that being manly is providing for your family, getting involved in your neighborhood, trying to help people."
But Kelly isn't pushing any of his hard-earned wisdom on the young toughs trying to make their mark on the street today. It's not his style. "I'd just as soon tell kids to knock off the bull," he says.
That no-nonsense attitude is on display, week in and week out, as Kelly leads the fight against racial integration in the city's housing projects, an issue that has replaced school busing as a cause celebre in South Boston. ''People born and raised in the neighborhood are being denied public housing in the neighborhood," Kelly says. "They're being told that, if they want to live in public housing, they have to go over to Orchard Park, or to Mission Hill, or to Bromley Heath. That's wrong. People should not be denied the opportunity to live in public housing in their own neighborhood because of their race."
Because Boston has a so-called strong mayor form of government, it might be tempting to dismiss Kelly's views. The council, after all, is a legislative body with little in the way of statutory power. Councilors, for example, may reject but cannot propose municipal spending measures. And the mayor is legally authorized to conduct most of the city's day-to-day business through his department heads, without City Council consent.
But Kelly has grown adept at using the council as the proverbial bully pulpit. And his record of providing constituent services -- to residents in Chinatown and the South End as well as those in South Boston -- has allowed him to build an impressive base of political support. Moreover, Kelly's close ties to Menino and to Senate president Bulger usually mean that his opinions, at the very least, will be heard.
According to Kelly, his views on race amount to support for choice, for equal rights and equal opportunities for residents of every neighborhood in the city, whatever their race. And numerous minority residents in Kelly's district -- Asians in Chinatown, blacks and Hispanics in the South End -- will back him up on that. "I've never heard of him discriminating in any way against anyone when it comes to providing city services," says Byron Rushing, a black state representative from the South End. "He's a very good district city councilor."
Kelly's detractors, however, say that his views on race amount to a ''separate but equal" policy, the specific intent of which is to prevent blacks and other minorities from moving into South Boston. "Choice, for Jim Kelly," says one city official, "means keeping others out."
In South Boston, where the number of minority families living in three public housing projects has surged from a mere handful in 1988 to more than 800 today (about a third of the public apartments in the neighborhood), the debate over the right to live in public housing is played out daily -- often in crowded courtyards where racial tension routinely approaches the breaking point.
In the seven years since the US Department of Housing and Urban Development cited Boston for maintaining racially segregated public housing developments, the Boston Housing Authority has required prospective tenants to accept the first available public housing apartment, wherever it is located. To offset the effects of its previous policies, the agency also makes exceptions for those tenants who are willing to live in a project where their race does not predominate.
Kelly says he opposes the procedure because he believes that all low-income Boston residents should be able to live in a project of their choice and wait for an opening in that project while passing up other vacancies if that is their desire. But housing specialists say that, because minorities make up about 85 percent of the BHA's waiting list, it's only a matter of time before minorities dominate South Boston's projects. Against that backdrop, they add, Kelly's views merely serve to provide false hope to those who would keep South Boston white.
"For better or worse, the concept of ethnic enclaves is disappearing throughout this country," says one city official. "South Boston, without question, will change. It's changing right now. Jim is trying to hold back the inevitable tide."
Kelly agrees with the notion that he stands firmly between the changes sweeping South Boston's public housing projects and the remainder of his community. He would also agree that he's doing what he can, as City Council president, to halt the changes overtaking the rest of Boston. But he'd be the last to say that change is inevitable. "The people of South Boston are not moving out," he says. "We're staying right where we are."
