Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/John J. Kerrigan


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. Given the consensus moving towards keep by the end, with little opposition from others, this discussion is being closed as a keep. (non-admin closure) Lourdes  14:21, 21 September 2018 (UTC)

John J. Kerrigan

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Similar to Articles for deletion/Kathleen Sullivan Alioto. Non-notable Boston School Committee chair. Quick search gave nothing useful; fails WP:GNG and WP:NPOL. Sources listed don't even appear to be sufficient. Redditaddict69 (talk) (contribs)  00:36, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Politicians-related deletion discussions. Redditaddict69 (talk)  (contribs)  00:37, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Massachusetts-related deletion discussions. Redditaddict69 (talk)  (contribs)  00:37, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Education-related deletion discussions. <b style="color:#3399FF">Redditaddict69</b> <sup style="color:#339900">(talk)  <sup style="color:#7F007F">(contribs)  00:37, 12 September 2018 (UTC)


 * Delete - fails WP:GNG and WP:NBIO per nom. Kirbanzo (talk) 00:38, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Delete fails WP:NPOL and WP:GNG. SportingFlyer  talk  01:07, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Delete How on earth could someone be notable when their sole claim to fame was being a school committee chair? As stated, fails WP:NPOL and WP:GNG with zero evidence of significant coverage. AusLondonder (talk) 02:29, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom. Does not meets the criteria set forth in either WP:GNG or WP:NPOL. MBlaze Lightning  03:50, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Switching to keep : as demonstrated below, significant coverage in reliable sources exists. MBlaze Lightning  10:24, 15 September 2018 (UTC)


 * Note that longstanding paragraph in article about Kerrigan's entry into politics and pre-politics career is sourced to J. Anthony Lukas' book Common Ground, the 1985 book that won the Pulitzer Prize, & the National Book Award, & the National Book Critics Circle Award. This article needs improvement, but WP:SIGCOV exists in powerful abundance.  The fact that he was a "mere" member of the School Committee is misleading.  He was notable.E.M.Gregory (talk) 01:07, 14 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Redirect to List of members of Boston City Council. As this NYT article points out, he was elected to Boston City Council after his school committee stint. In the interest of exploring alternatives to deletion, redirect to the Boston City Council list, with a particular target of 1970-1979 to prevent confusion with the earlier (unrelated) council member John E. Kerrigan. Given the minimal content and sourcing in the article, it probably would have been fine to just WP:ATD-R without AfD, so thanks to nominator for seeking community input. Bakazaka (talk) 04:45, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Comment In case others want to evaluate the New York Times coverage of the subject during the 1970s, here is a helpful search: [//www.google.com/search?q= "john j. kerrigan" nytimes] Bakazaka (talk) 04:59, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep - Has received significant coverage - Hirolovesswords (talk) 11:37, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
 * "Kerrigan pleases liberals except on racial issues". The Boston Globe. Van Dyne, Larry. November 9, 1969.
 * "Kerrigan re-emerges, pushes popular issues". The Boston Globe. October 24, 1971.
 * "Kerrigan to study for PhD in education". The Boston Globe. Cohen, Muriel. June 20, 1972.
 * "Kerrigan deserted by Boston conservatives". The Boston Globe. Robinson, Walter. November 10, 1977.
 * "Kerrigan takes up residence in Quincy:". The Boston Globe. Robinson, Walter. September 10, 1978.
 * "Antibusing crusader returns, unhorsed; A changed John Kerrigan seeks elective office". The Boston Globe. Rezendes, Michael. September 7, 1992.
 * "The New Kerrigan?". The Boston Globe. September 10, 1994.
 * In the 70s, the Globe was more focused locally (not entirely, however, that news story would not be covered today in the Globe if Kerrigan did those same things). That's as valuable as a minor local source, which, while that does count, it isn't sufficient for WP:SIGCOV. <b style="color:#3399FF">Redditaddict69</b> <sup style="color:#339900">(talk) <sup style="color:#7F007F">(contribs)  16:52, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
 * This assertion is wildly incorrect. In the 70s The Globe was the leading regional daily, with reporters covering and based in all of the 6 New England States, in addition to Globe journalists in Washington and a considerable number of foreign correspondents. Redditaddict69, Please stop making grand, sweeping, and false assertions about subjects with which you are not familiar and that you have obviously not researched.E.M.Gregory (talk) 18:14, 13 September 2018 (UTC)
 * The question of whether a source is "local" or "extralocal", for the purposes of nationalizing the wider notability of school board trustees, is not defined by the geographic range of the publication's readership — it's defined by the geographic location of the content's origination. Bearcat (talk) 15:59, 14 September 2018 (UTC)
 * What is your assessment of the 10 or so NYT stories involving Kerrigan, e.g. or ? Bakazaka (talk) 17:05, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
 * - The first article has solely passing mentions (e.g. "Kerrigan and his colleagues...", "Kerrigan, a father of two who professes...", "a lawyer who sits as chairman; John J. Kerrigan"). The second is a bit better, but that's one source. Again, this is a discussion to see what others think. One source, especially from the NYT, counts, but one source isn't sufficient. I tend to see that 3-4 major publications is sufficient for WP:SIGCOV. <b style="color:#3399FF">Redditaddict69</b> <sup style="color:#339900">(talk) <sup style="color:#7F007F">(contribs)  17:12, 12 September 2018 (UTC)


 * Keep Having read more carefully through the New York Times coverage, changing !vote to keep as a clear pass of WP:GNG. Editors may read the coverage differently. For example, in a "passing mention" from the first article cited above, here is the text immediately following: "The most outspoken committeeman is threeterm member Kerrigan, a father of two who professes to be so concerned about the future of education that he is pursuing a doctorate in education at the University of Massachusetts. He quits the meeting a little early to chat with a visitor. His office is cluttered with curios and he pointedly calls attention to his favorite, a plaster fist molded into an obscene gesture in front of a banquet‐table sign that reads “Reserved for the Press.” But he is relatively subdued and genial for this interview as he props his modish two‐tone high‐heel shoes on the desk. “Those who want to bus kids are out to bus your kids, not theirs,” he says, referring to those “friggin’ liberals in the suburbs” where there are almost no black people. “When they put their kids on the altar of social justice, then I'll put mine there, too.”" Bakazaka (talk) 17:33, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
 * KEEP  Absolutely keep.  This guy led the school committee opposition to Boston busing desegregation.  INDEPTH coverage of his role exists not merely in the media of the era, but in books and scholarly analysis of that era.  Nom, an enthusiastic new editor, has got to learn to SLOW DOWN when nominating articles related to topics about which he knows little and do a proper WP:BEFORE.  And note that this role gets revisited in more recent news coverage, readily found in searches, such as this WBUR article: 'It Was Like A War Zone': Busing In Boston: "Among those who took his child out of public school was the president of the Boston School Committee, John Kerrigan, an opponent of busing. He said the schools were unsafe." E.M.Gregory (talk) 20:46, 12 September 2018 (UTC)
 * I did WP:BEFORE searches as detailed as possible and only found passing mentions of his name in minor bus desegregation articles. I do support a Redirect or Merge to any article even remotely related to the Boston Bus Desegregation. I listened to your advice on my talk page, and read through WP:SIGCOV a thousand times. Kerrigan alone does not meet the requirements. It seems somewhat like WP:BLP1E, too (assuming that one event would mean the one thing he was notable for, though he led multiple protests). See my comments on Articles for deletion/Kathleen Sullivan Alioto for more info. Moreover, I seem to have noticed his role was really minor. Leading those oppositions against Desegregation in he did made little to no efforts, especially due to Boston having lots of support for desegregation. <b style="color:#3399FF">Redditaddict69</b> <sup style="color:#339900">(talk)  <sup style="color:#7F007F">(contribs)  02:23, 13 September 2018 (UTC)
 * omitting the middle initial helps, and using keywords. In this case, googling: john + kerrigan + busing + boston would have given you some idea of how much sourcing/notability exists.E.M.Gregory (talk) 10:24, 13 September 2018 (UTC)


 * Books with INDEPTH discussion of Kerrigan include:
 * Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s, Ronald P. Formisano, Univ of North Carolina Press, 2012
 * Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families,By J. Anthony Lukas (this book that won the Pulitzer Prize)
 * Desegregation in Boston and Buffalo: The Influence of Local Leaders, Steven J. L. Taylor, SUNY Press, 1998
 * Reforming Boston Schools, 1930-2006: Overcoming Corruption and Racial Segregation, Joseph M. Cronin, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011 E.M.Gregory (talk) 23:22, 13 September 2018 (UTC)
 * I'm really concerned about the classification of SIGCOV in articles I don't have access to as the articles I do have access to don't show SIGCOV - the WBUR article, for instance, only mentions his name once. SportingFlyer  talk  02:03, 14 September 2018 (UTC)
 * User:SportingFlyer. I have access to paywalled news archives, and was gonna offer to copy paste some of the old Boston Globe articles for you.  Problem is, they are photo images of newsprint.  legible, but not easy to copy-paste.  Nevertheless, is there is a specific text, or type of coverage you want to see, I will try to get it for you. Meanwhile,
 * Here is the obit: John Kerrigan, combative foe of school busing, dead at 64: [City Edition] Long, Tom. Boston Globe (pre-1997 Fulltext); Boston, Mass. [Boston, Mass]15 Aug 1996: B.1.: " John J. Kerrigan, the former Boston School Committee member whose calculated public belligerence came to symbolize the most unyielding resistance to the court-mandated end to the city's segregated school system, died of cancer yesterday in his home in Quincy. He was 64.


 * Mr. Kerrigan was one of the most prominent page-turners in perhaps the most divisive chapter in Boston's history, and by any standard -- including his own -- a political rogue whose antics were often designed, he admitted, to inflame his opponents.
 * The cocky and caustic Mr. Kerrigan was a member of the School Committee from 1968 to 1976. It was during much of that period, a federal judge concluded after voluminous testimony, that the committee systematically discriminated against black children, relegating them to inferior schools with fewer resources than those it provided for white children.
 * In 1969, when antibusing leader Louise Day Hicks vacated her seat on the committee to become a city councilor, Mr. Kerrigan replaced her as the the city's most vocal, if not most visible, symbol of opposition to a school desegregation plan sought by the state and ordered by the federal court.
 * With his virulent rhetoric and his prominent scapegoats -- including The Boston Globe -- Mr. Kerrigan topped the School Committee ticket in three successive elections, promising voters that they would keep their neighborhood schools.
 * To his opponents, he was a demagogue. But he had the votes. "I'm not worried," he told an interviewer in 1969. "If you've got what the people want, you could rob a bank and still get elected. And I've got what the people want."
 * When he was elevated to the committee chairmanship during his second term, the combative Mr. Kerrigan boldly voiced his repugnance to the state's Racial Imbalance Act. "I am the type of fellow who has a desire for combat," he said.
 * When the state's new commissioner of education, Neil V. Sullivan, who had integrated the schools in Berkeley, Calif., arrived in town, Mr. Kerrigan suggested he "should have gone to Disneyland."
 * In another notorious episode, Mr. Kerrigan went out of his way to mimic a chimpanzee as he described the ABC-TV correspondent Lem Tucker, a black man. "He's one generation from swinging in the trees," said Mr. Kerrigan. "I bet he loves bananas." Years later, in a 1992 Globe interview, Kerrigan remained unapologetic about the slur, saying Tucker incited him by describing him as a redneck.
 * After the Globe reported that Mr. Kerrigan bypassed legal requirements for awarding School Committee contracts for repair work and directed them to his friends, he launched an antimedia campaign. "The maggots of the press" was an epithet that he often used to criticize the media and incite his followers.
 * Mr. Kerrigan's often profane and always pungent denunciation of liberals and the press -- especially the Globe -- made him such a lightning rod that his political tenure seemed to some much longer than it actually was.
 * He spent only a decade in elected office -- eight years on the Boston School Committee and two on the Boston City Council. His campaign for re-election to the council in 1977 was dogged by disclosures in the Globe that he had a "no-show" aide on his payroll. In that election, even voters in the predominantly white wards who had sustained his career deserted him as he lost badly in his bid to retain his seat. He was 45.
 * A year later, he moved to Quincy. By 1992, when he tried without success to make a political comeback by running for the Governor's Council, Mr. Kerrigan, like his allies in their long-running battle against desegregation, claimed that he had been right all along.
 * "We were right," he said in an interview with the Globe. "You mix poor white kids on welfare with poor black kids and you say that's going to be a cure-all? It was absolutely crazy."
 * A colleague from his years on the School Committee, Elvira (Pixie) Palladino, another ardent busing foe, said of him in 1992, "John Kerrigan was one of the first to point out that the busing of school children was going to be an impossible task that would not enhance the quality of education one single bit. And I'd have to say that John has been proven correct on all counts."
 * In 1974, when he tried unsuccessfully to unseat Garrett H. Byrne as Suffolk County district attorney, Mr. Kerrigan labelled himself, "The fighter."
 * There was no doubting that slogan: For Mr. Kerrigan, there was seldom middle ground to be explored. But whether he came across as a bully seeking a brawl or a principled defender of his constituents, depended on whether you supported or opposed the 1974 Boston school desegregation order issued by US District Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr.
 * In the 1992 article, mayoral aide Theodore Landsmark said that Mr. Kerrigan "was thought of as one of the most racist leaders in the antibusing movement and the person most likely to incite antiblack feelings."
 * Mr. Kerrigan was born in the Neponset section of Dorchester. After high school, he took a job as a machine operator in a Dorchester industrial plant, then worked as an orderly at New England Medical Center. At the hospital he met John Collins, then the Suffolk County Register of Probate and a polio victim who would later become mayor of Boston. The future mayor encouraged him to go back to school.
 * Mr. Kerrigan did, graduating from Northeastern University and New England School of Law and earning a doctorate in education at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He served as secretary to Collins in 1956 and 1957, then as associate corporation counsel for the Collins mayoral administration from 1960 to 1967.
 * In a 1992 interview in the Globe, Mr. Kerrigan said that while he remained convinced of the rightness of his stance on busing, he had mellowed over the years, particularly after undergoing painful treatment for a cancerous tumor on his eustachian tube.
 * He leaves his wife, Helen E. (Alisio); two daughters, Cynthia A. Kerrigan-Donovan and Krista C. Kerrigan, both of Quincy; and a sister, Patricia A. Kearney of Braintree. A funeral Mass will be said at 10 a.m. Saturday in St. Brendan's Church in Dorchester. Burial will be in Cedar Grove Cemetery in Dorchester." E.M.Gregory (talk) 12:06, 14 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep Gonna have to agree there is significant coverage for this man, even if the highest office he held was city council. ~ EDDY  ( talk / contribs )~ 15:38, 14 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep. Boston is an internationally prominent global city, which means that it is one of the cities where city councillors are granted a pass of WP:NPOL #2 as long as they're properly sourced, written like encyclopedia articles rather than campaign brochures, and contain more substance than just "John Kerrigan is a person who exists, the end." All three of those things are true here. Serving on the school board wouldn't be enough all by itself, it's true, but he didn't just serve on the school board — he did serve at a level of office that we do accept as notable as long as the article is written properly. Bearcat (talk) 16:03, 14 September 2018 (UTC)
 * I know it's consensus, but I want to point out again here's nothing regarding population size in WP:NPOL apart from the fact larger cities are more likely to pass WP:GNG due to a larger number of sources to draw from. SportingFlyer  talk  00:39, 16 September 2018 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. <b style="color:red">Please do not modify it.</b> Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.