Roxbury, Sept 10--This predominantly black neighborhood of Boston came to life peacefully and uneventfully in this, the third day of the third year under the city's court-ordered desegregation plan. As the familiar and unattractive yellow vehicles marked "School Bus" and the occasional roving police cars bounced along the hilly, pot-holed streets, black children gathered, chatting, to be picked up on designated corners.

The children were for the most part unaccompanied--an obvious change from last year and the year before, when anxious mothers, fathers, older brothers and sisters held their hands and told them to try not to be afraid if the white folks over where they were headed, in South Boston, Charlestown and Hyde Park, called them names, tried to barricade their buses, or, as grown adults did often and shamelessly in 1974 and 1975, heckled and threw rocks through bus windows at defenseless and orderly children.

"No, everything around here is pretty calm," a middle-aged black man leaning against the steep cement stairwell to his wooden apartment house said, sipping from a carton of Tropicana and taking in some of the already intense morning sun. "You see, we already had busing here, so it ain't nothing new to us. Yeh," he said again, nodding thoughtfully, "It's pretty calm, all right."

Around the corner from the subway stop at Dudley Station, at the District 2 city police headquarters, cops and secretaries lounged around, jingling the keys on their belt loops and shooting the bull. After joining state and federal police in what amounted to a war-time-like occupation of the troubled schools and streets last fall, they now have orders to keep a low profile, to "keep the lid on," from Robert J. DiGrazia, Boston's respected, reform-minded and very high profile police commissioner.

"You lookin' for violence? I got lots of guys in the dock who can give you violence," one of the sargeants responded when I asked if reports of any "incidents" had come in. "No, son," he said, shaking his head, "There ain't going to be much violence this year."

Not much violence, yet--and it seems that after two years of tinkering, the unwieldy components of the desegregation plan have fallen workably, if not neatly, into place. The troopers, the new administrators, the shuffled administrators, the elected parent and student councils, all have had a full summer to prepare. Still, imposing this "blanket" program citywide has been somewhat like pulling an actual blanket over the sheets to make a bed. Straighten a section and a wrinkle appears there; soothe a ten mile-square district here and a minor outburts erupts there. Wednesday, in Charlestown, white youths pelted troopers and new, bussed arrivals, then boycotted classes all day. Thursday night a Charlestown woman who sent her children past the boycott received a dreaded phone-call--beware of fire-bombs. Friday night, right here in Roxbury, police arrested a black youth, Henry Alexander Jr., at his home on Dudley St., and charged him with having been a "disorderly person" at school that morning. He attended historically black-dominated English High, and, as whites arrived in larger and larger numbers during the week, he landed in the headmaster's office and started to throw around "disorderly" threats.

But these ripples hardly rouse the water, or muss the bed, compared with the incidents of last year--the knifings, vigilante marches and the partially obliterated signs of "gger go home" painted on the walls of traditionally Irish and all-white South Boston High School. A picture of an overturned car in Charlestown made the national papers, and all three networks sent cameras and sound equipment to record fist-waving parents as they shouted "Never, never, never" along South Boston's streets. Over 900 citizens, mostly white and anti-busing, rode the paddy wagons to the local jails in the first two years after the court order took shape. Over 400 were prosecuted. And, as Commissioner DiGrazia so unproudly points out, none received sentences from mostly neighborhood courts. This show of laxness and reactionary unity in the city's neighborhoods, along with the angry words and deeds that it compounded, turned Boston into an object of fascination and irony as media and communities, both North and South, watched Boston sacrifice its civic-minded, Yankee reputation to racial hatred, or so it seemed, and over the practical answer of a mild-mannered judge to a 14-word mandate.

The judge in question is a blonde, unassuming and fearlessly literal-minded man named W. Arthur Garrity Jr., one of the five magistrates who handles cases before the United States District Court of the District of Massachusetts. The 14 words that impelled his forced busing mandate lie at the tail of the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, passed three years after the 13th amendment freed black and all other slaves. This vague and pivotal half-sentence, dubbed "The Equal Protection Clause," requires that "no State shall...deny to any person in its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

In March of 1972, a black mother, Mrs. Tallulah Morgan, her kids and co-defendents, acting under legal counsel from Boston's assertive National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, charged the state, and specifically the Boston School Committee, with doing just that--denying her "Equal protection of the laws"--by willfully and deviously maintaining a segregated school system. (Over half the city's blacks attended almost all-black schools at the time; 84 per cent of the whites went to even more exclusively white institutions.) Two legal precedents, and the quarter century of struggle for civil rights enlightment behind them, were working in Morgan's favor.

One, the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, finally served the death warrant to "separate but equal" facilities for black people, coming to the reasonable conclusion that separation is intrinsically unequal because it "generated a feeling of inferiority (among blacks) as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone."

In practical terms, that meant simply, desegregate, and quickly. Then, in 1972, the Court told the School Committee in Denver that even though it had never officially enacted any Jim Crow laws, blacks, whites and hispanics had drifted unacceptably to separate school districts anyway, and that, as they say in the courts, mandated redress. Garrity documented a similar situation in Boston, where, to boot, an in-state Racial Imbalance Act had ordered the city to clean up its act as far back as 1965. The School Committee had disobeyed that act. Garrity, in June 1973, said, briefly, obey it.

On paper, the city statutes charge the School Committee with making appointments, distributing students, ordering new construction and insuring quality education. In practice, the committee members do carry out at least the first three directives, but the job often is either a stepping stone to a higher, paid office, or, as one sometime-friend, sometime enemy of the board put it, "a nice something to do for a housewife who's bored and wouldn't mind riding around in taxis on an expense account all day." The members receive no salary, which excludes citizens without sufficient support elsewhere, while the committee is elected city-wide, preventing the city's 17 per cent black population from winning political strength equal to their 34 per cent representation among Boston students.

Largely in the interest of attaining one of the next stones in the local political pond, candidates for the School Committee have generally run against busing since 1965, because, as the past two years have made clear, nobody really likes to seek their kids bussed. So Garrity, one could say, accused the School Committee members with carrying out their campaign promises, and all too rigorously, too thoroughly, too well. Specifically, the court found that the committee had not capitalized on several chances to redistrict for greater racial balance in the schools, had insisted on building new schools at the center of heavily mono-ethnic areas, and had allowed students at least two bogus "options" set up in name for the sake of integration, but to which exception after exception was then made.

The committee, in appeal, claimed it had done its best, but that Boston has always been a city of neighborhoods that desired and cultivated a neighborhood school system--the "ethnic purity" argument, if you will. Given the board's past efforts, however, this claim sounded like Prime Minister Vorster of South Africa explaining today that, after segregating blacks in undersized, underdeveloped "tribal homelands" ten years ago, he simply could not eliminate apartheid because the blacks demanded and thrived on homelands.

Now as far as using the School Committee as a soap-box and the busing issue as a political whipping boy, former committeewoman and current City Council President Louise Day Hicks is a case in point. For a decade the slogan of this shrill, shrewd, triple-chinned rhetoritician--"The people of Boston know where I stand"--has served as a code-word for one idea and one idea only: no blacks in our schools. Hicks talks a great deal about our children and our schools for a woman who sent all her charges to private and parochial schools, and you will hear more, and more, from her. If the upcoming elections leave an opening, Hicks will probably run again for the School Committee, her first home and the home of her issue.