What is the main conflict in the novel, Gold Dust?

Autumn of 1974 is anything but pleasant for children returning from school after summer vacation. Forced busing means many children will leave their neighborhood school for ones in other areas of the city. Some parents accept this new system, but others resist it, particularly those in the working-class area of South Boston. Here, mobs of white parents screamed and threw objects at buses of black students arriving at schools that where full of nearly all white students the year before. In other areas of Boston, parents pulled their children out of public schools and put them into private schools, often subjecting them to long bus rides across the city. It is estimated that some 40,000 students left the public school system during this time, many of them entering schools like the fictional St. Colmcille's, an event that a few years earlier, Richard observes, would have been absurd because no one left their neighborhood school. Individuals tended to remain in their own neighborhoods, living and going to school among people most like them.

However, when the federal government stepped in, creating a plan to integrate the schools by busing students into other neighborhoods, already present racial tension intensified throughout the city, culminating in sporadic violence at some schools.