Thursday, 4:30 PM
James M. Kelly, long-time city councilor and South Boston icon, dies at 66
(AP File photo)
James M. Kelly, shown above on Dec. 9, 1975, discussing court-ordered busing, died this morning after a long fight with brain cancer.
By Brian MacQuarrie, Globe Staff, and Andrew Ryan, Globe Correspondent
James M. Kelly, the powerful city councilor from South Boston who was considered a hero by his supporters as he battled court-ordered busing but a symbol of intolerance by others, died today at 4:19 a.m. after a long battle with cancer. He was 66.
Mr. Kelly, a polarizing symbol of South Boston's defiant resistance to change over the last quarter-century who served seven terms as City Council President, had a cancerous mass removed from his brain in November 2005. In 2003, a 2-inch tumor was removed from his colon.
Kelly's son, James M. Kelly Jr., said his father died surrounded by family and close friends after five days of hospice care. He last attended a city council meeting on Dec. 6, 2006.
"As he struggled with this disease for the last few years, my father was enormously grateful for the outpouring of love and affection from his friends and neighbors," James M. Kelly Jr. said in a statement. "My father gave his life to public service. He and our whole family were deeply thankful for the countless expressions of prayer and support that we received.
Mayor Thomas Menino said in a statement: "My thoughts and prayers at this time go out to the family and friends of councilor James Kelly. He was a true gentlemen, a man of his word whose convictions always came from the heart. Jimmy Kelly was a friend of mine and will be greatly missed by all."
Mr. Kelly used his 23 years on the City Council, including an unprecedented seven consecutive terms as president, as a bully pulpit from which he fought integration of South Boston's public housing, battled the inclusion of gay and lesbian marchers in the St. Patrick's Day parade, and negotiated a controversial financial bonanza for the neighborhood in exchange for waterfront development.
A lifelong resident of South Boston, Mr. Kelly earned a reputation among friend and foe alike as doggedly attentive to constituent services, often personally responding to complaints about minor nuisances such as potholes, abandoned cars, and rowdy teenagers.
But Mr. Kelly was better known outside his district as an unapologetic champion for a white constituency that he considered embattled and belittled by a liberal elite, a view that colored his public persona since the violent anti-busing demonstrations that rocked South Boston in the mid-1970s.
During much of his political career, Mr. Kelly railed against affirmative-action programs and the mandated integration of schools and housing as government discrimination against whites. He also said that an influx of minority residents into South Boston would lead to an increase in crime.
To many, Mr. Kelly became the most-visible face of post-busing South Boston, a symbol of what much of the public perceived as an angry, isolated enclave that bitterly resisted change. But within the neighborhood, Mr. Kelly continued to be idolized by many of the long-time, Irish-American families that gave South Boston a national reputation for tough-minded, community-oriented, politically savvy cohesion.
In the end, Mr. Kelly proved to be a tenacious political survivor, holding the council presidency from 1994 to 2000 and wielding influence afterward even as the city's demographics changed, the council became more diverse, and his district became more gentrified.
Mr. Kelly was born before the United States entered World War II to a father who worked as a laborer for the Boston Housing Authority and a mother who ironed for a laundry service. Like many of his generation in South Boston, Mr. Kelly had a passion for sports and played fullback and linebacker for South Boston High School.
After graduating from high school in 1958, Mr. Kelly married in 1959 and worked as a sheet-metal apprentice, eventually joining Local 7 and helping construct signs that appeared on buildings around the city. He had three children. Off the job, Mr. Kelly pursued a fast, hard-drinking life in which he fraternized with members of the notorious Mullins Gang from South Boston and often carried a gun.
The drinking took a terrible toll on his personal life, Mr. Kelly once recalled. In March 1971, after a week-long binge following St. Patrick's Day, he entered Alcoholics Anonymous.
In 1974, divorced and disabled by an industrial accident the previous year that had severed the tendons in his right hand, Mr. Kelly found an all-consuming focus in the federal order to integrate the Boston schools. A tough, stocky man with a penchant for brown leather jackets, Mr. Kelly clashed with police sent to South Boston to protect black students from white protesters, and also with black demonstrators at nearby Carson Beach.
Mr. Kelly first tested the political waters in 1981, when he ran for City Council, whose nine members were selected in citywide voting. Polls showed Mr. Kelly to be among the top nine in a crowded field of 40 candidates until, late in the campaign, a television station broadcast a report on his criminal record. Mr. Kelly finished 10th, but the seeds of his future success were apparent when he outpolled Raymond L. Flynn, the successful mayoral candidate, in their native South Boston.
In 1983, the City Council expanded to 13 members and offered neighborhoods more clout with nine seats dedicated to individual districts. Mr. Kelly won the District 2 seat -- which also included Chinatown, Bay Village, much of the South End and a slice of Dorchester -- and was never seriously threatened afterward. During that first successful campaign, Mr. Kelly acknowledged that "we have legitimate concerns about a large influx of blacks moving to South Boston."
Mr. Kelly said at the time that those "concerns" revolved around fears of increased crime. Later, in 1988, his legal challenge to the federally mandated integration of public housing in South Boston was grounded in what he described as reverse discrimination against the white residents of his district, who previously had received preference for vacancies in their neighborhood.
Mr. Kelly repeatedly insisted that his motives were misunderstood, that he was not a bigot, and that he supported equal opportunity for all races. But he nearly came to blows with City Councilor Charles C. Yancey, a black representative for Mattapan and North Dorchester, after an expletive-laden shouting match in 1991. However, in 2001, Mr. Kelly engineered Yancey's election as council president when he realized he could not win an eighth term.
The criticism from outside South Boston never seemed to bother Mr. Kelly, who routinely spent more hours at his office than other councilors and made constituent service his calling card. He also became close to another district councilor, Thomas M. Menino of Hyde Park, and supported Menino's election as council president in 1993. That move proved to be a launching pad for Menino, who automatically became acting mayor that year when Flynn was appointed ambassador to the Vatican.
Mr. Kelly worked closely with his friend, but was not afraid to buck the mayor when South Boston's interests diverged from those of the entire city. Mr. Kelly helped frustrate plans to move the New England Patriots to South Boston, opposed the relocation of the Boston Red Sox there, and leveraged an unprecedented financial package for the neighborhood in 1998 in exchange for approval for the mammoth waterfront development project.
The deal received intense criticism from other neighborhoods and politicians, and Mr. Kelly and other South Boston politicians were pressured to accept far less generous benefits.
"We worked together for better neighborhoods and yes we often strongly disagreed on issues. But he was my friend," Former Mayor Raymond L. Flynn said in a statement. "Jim Kelly was one of a kind. He will be missed."
