Common Ground

by J. Anthony Lukas

  But Arnold didn’t care for what the man was saying. He’d never been that hot for non-violence. A few months before, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had been recruiting people to go down South for the sit-ins. Arnold had gone for an interview, but he’d been rejected because they didn’t think he was non-violent enough. And they were right. Arnold would prefer to be the person doing the crackin’ rather than the one taking the crackin’. He wouldn’t let people beat him with a hose, and prod him with sticks, and hit him over the head with a Georgia toothpick while he just sat there singing “We Shall Overcome.”

  But then King was a Christian preacher man, and Arnold had always had his doubts about them. His mother was a real Christian lady, a pillar of Union Methodist Church who went to church every chance she got, and so did his sister, Rachel. But Arnold’s father had regarded preachers as Father Divines who robbed their own people blind. Growing up in rural Georgia, he’d seen poor sharecroppers giving preachers the choice morsels off their tables while their own kids went hungry. When he married his pious Methodist wife in Boston, he’d laid down the law: He didn’t want no ministers with their feet under his table. And he wasn’t sticking his feet in any minister’s pew.

  Arnold respected his mother as he respected many Christians who used the church to get ahead in the white man’s world. But he saw how two-faced some of those Christians were—preaching piously about “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” then looking out for themselves at the expense of everybody else. The Christians had never done much for him. Gradually, he began slacking off in attendance at Union Methodist—hittin’ and missin’, as he put it, but doing more missin’ than hittin’.

  Instead, he began drifting over to Muhammad’s Temple #11 on Intervale Street for the Sunday-afternoon services. Although he could never quite bring himself to become a Muslim, he was getting a lot more out of temple in the afternoon than he got out of his mother’s church in the morning.

  After all, he knew the minister over there as well as he knew Mike Haynes. Louis X, or Louis Farrakhan as he was later known, was actually Gene Walcott, who had grown up on Sterling Street, right around the corner from the Walkers’. As early as Arnold could remember, Gene had been a star. People said he was prettier than Cassius Clay, a better singer than Harry Belafonte, a better actor than Sidney Poitier, a better talker than Martin Luther King.

  But then Gene went to Winston-Salem State Teachers College in North Carolina and two things happened. First, this slick, self-confident son of West Indian parents encountered Southern Jim Crow, which was unlike anything he’d experienced in Boston. He started fighting it, using the “white” toilets in Wool worth’s and drinking from the “white” fountains at the bus station, challenging any white man to say him nay. But all that might not have mattered so much had he not been turned down for Belafonte’s spot at a New York nightclub. When white folks rejected him for the New York gig, he quit Winston-Salem and joined the Black Muslims. Putting his talents to the service of his new faith, he composed its most popular song, “White Man’s Heaven Is Black Man’s Hell.”

  Soon he became a disciple of Malcolm X, who had also grown up on Boston’s streets. Malcolm “Red” Little had worked for a time as a rest-room attendant at the Roseland State Ballroom and a busboy at the Parker House before operating a burglary ring out of Harvard Square. Sentenced to the Massachusetts State Prison in Charlestown, he paced his cell for hours denouncing God so vehemently that he became known to fellow inmates as “Satan.” Then he met a veteran con who converted him to Islam. Staring out his barred window at “the white world” of Charlestown, which rose in bleak three-deckers up Bunker Hill, Red Little became Malcolm X.

  By 1958 Malcolm was Islam’s minister in New York and it was Gene Walcott—now Louis X—who founded the temple on Boston’s Intervale Street. When Arnold Walker heard what his old friend was up to, he came by the temple out of sheer curiosity; when he heard Gene preach, he was electrified. He took special pleasure in Gene’s gibes at Christianity as “the white man’s religion,” and at Christian preachers, symbolized by “the Right Reverend Bishop T. Chickenwing.” Through Gene, Arnold was drawn to Malcolm, regularly going to hear him whenever he was in Boston. He was at the Boston Arena on August 18, 1963, when Malcolm derided King’s forthcoming “March on Washington,” calling it “the Farce on Washington.” He applauded as Malcolm condemned “white liberals who denounce what the white man has done to us in the South while they do the same thing in the North—the Northern Fox is more vicious than the Southern Wolf because he poses as your friend.” He cheered three months later when Malcolm told the Ford Hall Forum, “We want no part of integration with the wicked race which enslaved us.” And when Malcolm was gunned down by three black assassins in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom in February 1965, Arnold remained convinced that whites had somehow contrived the death of the prophet of black pride and self-reliance.

  So when Martin Luther King was assassinated three years later, Arnold Walker and his sister Rachel Twymon saw the event from different perspectives. To Arnold, King was a great man, but also a great temporizer, a timid reformer who had long kept his finger in the dike, restraining the torrent of black rage. His death, Arnold hoped, would free blacks to make a clean break with whites and achieve a substantial degree of autonomy. To Rachel, such hopes were misguided. Boston was a primarily white city, America a primarily white nation. Whether they liked it or not, blacks had to learn to live with whites. If King’s death served any useful purpose, she thought, perhaps it would persuade a guilt-ridden white America to grant a genuine measure of integration.

  3

  McGoff

  It was the moment she liked best, the vegetables spread out before her in voluptuous profusion: squeaky stalks of celery, damp lettuce, succulent tomatoes, chilled radishes. From the sink rose the earthy smells of wet roots and peels, and from all about her the clamor and fracas of a busy kitchen, gearing up for dinner only minutes away.

  Three nights a week, Alice McGoff served as salad chef at the Officers Club of the Charlestown Navy Yard, a break from her usual job as the club’s hatcheck girl. Taking coats and hats was more rewarding—tips could run nearly $200 a week—but Alice liked the sounds and smells and breezy camaraderie of the kitchen. That April night she was cheerfully tossing her greens when she noticed a commotion across the room. A black busboy was in tears. Eventually someone told her that Martin Luther King had been killed in a Southern city.

  Through her mind flashed a memory five years old, a solemn television announcer reporting the President’s assassination in another Southern city. She’d mourned that night as never before, an anguish so acute it might have been for her husband or brother.

  She didn’t feel that way about Martin Luther King. You had to admit he’d done one hell of a job for his people; if she were black, she would have been the first one in line behind him. And you had to support his crusade down South. No right-minded person wanted blacks to sit in the back of the bus, eat at separate lunch counters, or use different toilets. That sort of thing was just plain wrong. But when King turned northward, Alice had grown skeptical. When King held his big rally on the Boston Common, Alice had asked, “What the hell is he doing up here?” As far as she could see, Boston wasn’t prejudiced against blacks—nobody rode the back of the bus, nobody was kept out of restaurants; Boston wasn’t Birmingham or Selma. King was getting a bit above himself. So while his assassination was a terrible thing, she couldn’t bring herself to grieve for him.

  When dinner at the Officers Club was over and the kitchen had been scoured clean, Alice walked up Decatur Street to her apartment in the Bunker Hill housing project. Her husband, Danny, was still tending bar at the Point Tavern, but their seven children were home, huddled around the television set, watching the riots that had broken out in dozens of American cities. For more than an hour, Alice and her kids watched young blacks racing through the nation’s streets—burning, looting, battling the police. H
er daughters, Lisa and Robin, seemed terrified by the violent images flickering across the screen, but her sons, Danny Jr., Billy, Kevin, Tommy, and Bobby, sat openmouthed, absorbing the action as avidly as they did their weekly police dramas. Well past midnight, Billy took her outside and pointed toward the horizon, where the fires of Blue Hill Avenue cast a dull red glow.

  What did the blacks think they were doing? Alice wondered. They acted as though they were the only people who’d ever had it tough in this world. Poor was poor, hungry was hungry. The housing project where the McGoffs lived wasn’t any better than those across town in the ghetto. The widow upstairs who had to get by on social security and food stamps didn’t have any more than those black welfare mothers the newspapers were always writing about. The discrimination which blacks had confronted over the years was no worse than the arrogance and indifference which the Irish had faced when they came to this country.

  The difference between the blacks and the Irish, she thought, was that the blacks had tried to advance through the civil rights movement—sit-ins, marches, demonstrations, ultimately riots—while the Irish had used politics. Alice believed in politics—it was the American way of getting ahead. And for a long while it had paid off. No district in the country had produced a more potent roster of pols than the storied “Old Eleventh,” of which Charlestown was part.

  As early as 1894, in a race marked by bogus “mattress” voters, street brawls, and bully-boy raids on polling places, a tough little mick named John Francis Fitzgerald had won election to Congress from the Eleventh. “Honey Fitz” promptly repaid Charlestown’s support by getting the Navy Yard reopened, bringing hundreds of jobs back to town. But his stock in trade was an appeal to Irish rage against the “blue-nosed Yankee bigots.” In 1905, he rode that anger into the Mayor’s office.

  Eventually, Fitzgerald’s old congressional seat passed to an even more aggressive young Irishman, James Michael Curley, who also exploited Irish resentments against the Yankee nabobs. The very term “codfish aristocracy,” he once said, was “an insult to the fish.” His style was flamboyant, even demagogic, but both as congressman and later as Boston’s mayor he appealed less to narrow Irish ethnocentrism than to the poor of all races. Nowhere was he more popular than in Charlestown and no neighborhood received more of his largesse. One of the most consistently Democratic wards in the nation—Democrats routinely defeated Republicans there by margins of five or six to one—Charlestown did well under the New Deal, receiving one of the country’s first public housing projects (the very one where the McGoffs now lived), relief assistance for 1,200 of its 30,000 residents, and a staggering 400 federal jobs.

  As late as 1942, at age sixty-eight, Jim Curley was returned to Congress from the Eleventh District. Even his subsequent indictment by a federal grand jury for mail fraud didn’t dampen Charlestown’s enthusiasm for the old scoundrel. Reelected in 1944, he withdrew only after winning his fourth term as mayor. That left his congressional seat to be filled by special election in 1946. One of the candidates was Honey Fitz’s grandson—John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

  At first, the notion seemed preposterous. Kennedy was virtually a stranger to Boston, having spent the best part of his twenty-nine years in New York, Hyannis Port, and the South Pacific. His “residence” in the district was the Bellevue Hotel on Beacon Hill. “You’re a carpetbagger,” one politician in the district told him bitterly. “You don’t belong here.” Moreover, his patrician gloss, the elegant ease acquired at Choate and Harvard and cultivated in London and Palm Beach, was not calculated to go down well in the waterfront saloons of Charlestown, the clammy tenements of the North End, or the bleak three-deckers of East Boston, Brighton, Somerville, and Cambridge. True, his family’s roots went deep in the district: not only had Honey Fitz represented it in Congress for six years, but Jack’s paternal grandfather, Patrick J. Kennedy, had been born and raised in East Boston and served as its Democratic ward leader for many years. But those roots could be as much a hindrance as an asset. Boston’s Irish were notoriously resentful of the “two toilet” Irish who had betrayed their heritage by moving to the suburbs and sending their sons to Harvard.

  One who shared those feelings was Alice McGoff’s father, Bernie Kirk. A second-generation Irish-American, Bernie had worked for decades at a South End ink factory, where he served as a union shop steward. “The little man has to unite to get anyplace,” he would tell his daughter Alice, and that turn of mind was reflected in his stalwart Democratic politics, his unwavering support for Al Smith, David I. Walsh, and Franklin Roosevelt. But he had no use whatsoever for Joe Kennedy, the patriarch of the Kennedy clan, whom he regarded as a womanizer, a high liver, an incurable conniver. “That man’s forgotten where he came from,” he’d tell Alice, “he’s no longer one of us.” Moreover, Kennedy was simply too close to Richard Cardinal Cushing, Boston’s venerable archbishop. There was a touch of the anticlerical in Bernie; priests were okay when they stuck to the Church’s business, he thought, but their writ didn’t extend to public life. Cushing and Kennedy were both overreachers, too eager to steal a march on their countrymen. There was an old Charlestown saying, “Up to me, up to me, but never above me.” No son of Joe Kennedy’s was going to clamber over Bernie’s head.

  Moreover, Bernie was committed to Charlestown’s own candidate for Congress. John F. “Spring” Cotter, a popular figure who had served as secretary to Curley and before that to Congressman John P. Higgins. When Higgins resigned his congressional seat, Cotter had been appointed to fill out his unexpired term. During his years in Washington, he had dispensed countless favors to his fellow “Townies.” The Kirks had received more than a few of them, and now Bernie Kirk was determined to return the favor.

  Among the Townies who had committed themselves to Spring Cotter was a young Air Force veteran named Dave Powers. One night in January 1946 there was a knock at the door of the three-decker that Dave shared with his widowed sister and her eight children. When he opened it, there stood a gangly fellow who stuck out his hand and said, “My name’s Jack Kennedy. I’m a candidate for Congress.” Sitting at the kitchen table, Powers explained that he was working for one of Kennedy’s opponents. But he liked his young visitor, and when Kennedy mentioned that he was speaking the next week to Gold Star Mothers at Charlestown’s American Legion Hall, Powers agreed to go with him.

  The next Tuesday, Dave stood at the back of the hall as Kennedy gave what seemed like “the world’s worst speech”—halting, awkward, clumsily worded. But then the candidate looked out across the phalanx of women, all of whom had lost sons in the war, and said, “I think I know how you feel, because my mother is a Gold Star Mother too.” (Jack’s older brother, Joe, had been shot down over Germany.) In the back of the room, Powers could hear some women weeping and others turn to their neighbors and say, “He reminds me of my boy.” When the speech was over, the young aristocrat was mobbed by dozens of working-class women, ardently promising him their support. Powers was convinced.

  A few denounced him for deserting Cotter, but working with other veteran operatives, Dave mounted a crisply efficient campaign. On a routine day in Charlestown, Kennedy started at 7:00 a.m., shaking hands outside the Navy Yard, then rang doorbells at every three-decker along Bunker Hill Street. In the afternoon he dropped into grocery stores and barbershops, ending up back at the Navy Yard, where he shook the hands he’d missed that morning. In the evening there’d be a rally at the American Legion Hall or a get-together in somebody’s parlor.

  Meanwhile, Jack set out to acquire the more formal badges of Irish Catholic orthodoxy, starting with membership in the Knights of Columbus. Shrewdly, his aides directed him to the Bunker Hill Council, oldest in the state, much honored among Boston’s Celts. Appropriately enough, induction in the Third Degree took place on St. Patrick’s Day. The ceremony began with fifty “candidates” marching through Charlestown’s streets to the Knights Hall, each with a “relic”—an oversized key, cross, or candle—to lug along the three-mile route. Jack w
as assigned a special burden—a live, frisky billy goat which the future President hauled on a leash past hundreds of amused spectators. A powerful symbol in Knights ritual, the goat was intended to teach humility: the candidate might think he was leading it, but as would eventually become clear, the goat was leading him. After the initiation, Jack adjourned with his fellow Knights to Sully’s Cafe on Union Street for the traditional hoisting of the brew. It was a moment that would remain sacred to all those who stood that night at Sully’s beer-stained bar.

  But the climax of the Charlestown campaign was the annual Bunker Hill Day parade on June 17. The night before, Townies and their guests celebrated at a half dozen banquets and balls. Jack addressed no fewer than five, then went on with Powers to an after-hours joint called the Stork Club, where he stayed until 2:00 a.m.

  Hours later, he was back in town for the traditional round of house calls before the afternoon parade. With the primary only hours away, each candidate sought to make a final splash. Seeking to exploit his image as a war hero, Kennedy marched that day under the glittering new banners of the Lieutenant Joseph P. Kennedy Post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, named after Jack’s late brother. Hatless, dressed in a dark gray flannel suit, he strode up Bunker Hill Street with more than a hundred supporters marching three abreast behind him. Every few steps, someone broke from the crowd to pump his hand or ask for an autograph.

  The Kirks watched the parade from a friend’s stoop on Monument Square. As Kennedy went by, Bernie stood stonily with arms folded; he was sticking with Cotter. But his wife, Gertrude, and his three daughters had long since succumbed to Jack’s charms. Alice, then only nine, was desolate that she couldn’t cast a vote for the dashing young candidate.