I remember that photo as well and I am old enough to remember the busing fight in South Boston also (it played on the evening news).
I served with several guys from Southie when I was in the Marines. That's sort of what guys from Southie do when they graduate high school, they join the USMC. They were great guys and though we never fired a shot in anger, I'd have gone to war with confidence knowing I had them on my side. These were hard scrabble cats and they H-A-T-E-D blacks. They weren't a bunch of Good Will Huntings, I'll tell you that.
My parents, among others, were sucked into a voluntary busing scheme in the Texas town where I grew up in the late 1960s. On the north side of our city, across Interstate 10, was a small black area with an elementary school that was 100 percent black and needed to be desegregated. The school district decided to close our neighborhood school and offered the parents of our neighborhood and two others that bordered it a chance to go to the black school. To sweeten the pot, they dangled all sorts of newfangled teaching concepts like "open classrooms" and "new math" instruction. My parents and a few more went for it and we were bussed to a shiney new school that sat in the middle of a tumbledown ghetto. For awhile there was a truce as the two tribes (about 90 percent black and 10 percent white) checked each other out, but then the dam broke and we had to fight black kids just about every day. Several of the black teachers were outright hostile to us, particularly the black P.E. teacher who was truly a bastard.
Although I used to think that I wasted my 3rd-5th grade years there, I'm sort of glad that I went through it. Not only did I learn about black culture but I learned how to fight pretty well, too (violence is an endemic part of black life) and I saw blacks from the inside. They are no mystery to me and I don't harbor illusions that we can learn anything of value from them either. I also very early on realized that we have nothing to fear from them because they don't have the mental capacity to build anything that rivals what we can build. I also am immune to all the white guilt crap that people throw at us because I know how a white minority will be treated by a non-white majority.
Gee, and my teachers wondered why I boosted South Africa and Rhodesia in class!